Leap years have a certain mystique and even a mythology
to them: they are seen as special, and often have of way of becoming
just that, somehow living up to the expectations that people have of
them. Certainly the year that has just started will mark many significant
anniversaries.
It is the centenary year for many events that have either shaped subsequent
history or simply got embedded into our collective consciousness: the
construction of New Delhi as the capital city of Imperial India; the
maiden – and final - voyage of the ''unsinkable'' Titanic, the ship
that famously struck an iceberg and sank in mid-April; the announcement
of the formation of the Chinese republic by Sun Yat Sen and the abdication
of the last Q'ing Emperor; the ''discovery'' of the South Pole in Antartica;
the end of the Meiji era in Japan upon the death of the last Meiji Emperor.
In Europe too, a century ago was a time of ferment – perhaps even more
so than today. Vienna, Austria at the turn of the century (the fin de
siècle) epitomized the cultural churning that reflected the political,
economic and social changes that people were trying to absorb and come
to grips with. Writers like Robert Musil and painters like Egon Schiele
and Gustav Klimt captured the sense of decadence of the dying order
and the search for new meanings and structures to organise life. The
social and cultural mood – which obviously was also to be soon reflected
in the politics that led up to the First World War – was brittle, volatile
and slightly ominous.
Perhaps this sense of portent was most potently expressed in the music
of the time. The non-verbal nature of music often makes it the best
way of expressing ambiguity and emotions that cannot be easily crystallised
into words. The pre-eminent example of this may come from the composer-conductor
Gustav Mahler. His Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna – a year after
its composer died in May 2011 without ever having heard it performed.
In fact he was superstitious about writing it all. He feared (correctly,
as it turned out) that, just as had been the case for Beethoven and
Bruckner before him, it would turn out to be his last symphony and indeed
his last major work.
Certainly this is music written in the shadow of death. Two years before,
Mahler and his wife Alma had lost a beloved child, a young daughter.
Then he lost his job conducting at the Vienna court opera. And then,
in the course of a routine medical examination, he was diagnosed with
a serious heart condition. All of these events must have underlined
the ephemeral nature of life and the inevitability of mortality.
But by the time Mahler was working full time on the symphony, his frame
of mind was happier than it had been for some time. His health was much
better, as he worked in the serenity of a summer retreat in the hills,
he had just returned from two very successful seasons conducting orchestras
in New York and looked forward to a professional tour of the United
States. In fact, he is known to have been anticipating a time when he
could accumulate enough to retire from conducting and devote himself
full time to composition.
So the Ninth Symphony contains so much more, and is so brilliantly complex
even at its most shattering, that it cannot be seen in simple terms
as a harbinger of death. Indeed, fellow composers saw it as immensely
life-affirming even in its acceptance of the certainty of death. Alban
Berg wrote to his wife: ''The first movement is the most glorious he
ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, for Nature;
the longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very
heart of one's being - before death comes, as it does, irresistibly.''
Much later, the physicist-philosopher Lewis Thomas, in his famous essay
''Late night thoughts on listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony'', described
how his own response to this music evolved with time. He heard the music
not as an ultimately peaceful affirmation of death but a clanging nightmare
of destruction, emanating from the growing possibility of nuclear war.
''I cannot listen to Mahler's Ninth Symphony with anything like the
old melancholy mixed with the high pleasure I used to take from this
music. There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially
in the final movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the
same time a quiet celebration of the tranquility connected to the process.
I took this music as a metaphor for reassurance, confirming my own strong
hunch that the dying of every living creature, the most natural of all
experiences, has to be a peaceful experience. I rely on nature. The
long passages on all the strings at the end, as close as music can come
to expressing silence itself, I used to hear as Mahler's idea of leave-taking
at its best. But always, I have heard this music as a solitary, private
listener, thinking about death.
Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the
Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a huge new thought:
death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity.''
However one chooses to interpret this extraordinary and powerful work
of music, what is also evident is that it expresses forcefully the instability
and yearning of those times. Musically it is not on firm tonal ground:
despite being formally structured in major and minor tonalities, it
is marked by the use of chromatic harmonies and even dissonance. Thematically,
it is marked by contrast, with often conflicting themes vying for supremacy.
Emotionally, it moves from tranquillity to aggression to irony to reflection.
There are several false climaxes or anticipations of them, and so the
actual climax, even at its most reverberating, is but a part of the
transition to quietude. For the symphony closes very slowly, softly,
with long hushed phrases only on string instruments, fading away almost
imperceptibly into silence.
So this is music for uncertain times, even though it contains within
it certainties of different kinds. No wonder it appeals so strongly
to us a century later. Europe, and indeed the whole world, is now faced
with another period of political and economic volatility. As old and
not so old orders collapse under the weight of their own contradictions,
there is social yearning for some security even with the knowledge that
much of what exists is neither just nor tolerable.
In Europe, the events that unfolded later as a result of what occurred
in 1912 turned out to be significant. For example, the first Balkan
war in southeastern Europe (in which, incidentally, Greece was involved)
led to a chain of events that culminated in a world war. The eventual
official collapse of the Gold Standard (by which major currencies were
linked to a precise weight of gold) was presaged by the growing tendency
of the major powers to ''cheat'' the system and print more money than
was justified by their gold reserves. Across Europe, there was social
and political ferment as workers marched for their rights and protested
against the inequality and injustice of the economic system.
Does any of this sound contemporary? But then, that need not be only
something to be feared. As Leonard Bernstein said of the final movement
of Mahler's Ninth Symphony: ''It is terrifying, and paralysing, as the
strands of sound disintegrate ... in ceasing, we lose it all. But in
letting go, we have gained everything.''