Last Sunday saw the premiere of ‘Mahler’s Letters’ performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir under conductor Ellie Slorach, in a concert programme alongside Mahler’s 5th Symphony under Vasily Petrenko. The work was originally commissioned to be premiered in 2020 in Petrenko’s Mahler series within his final year as principal conductor but, alongside so much during that year, it had to be postponed. It was therefore so wonderful to hear the piece brought to life now, almost two years later.
As ‘Mahler’s Letters’ was commissioned to be performed alongside the work of Mahler, this extended piece of almost 20 minutes duration for unaccompanied choir was to be based on texts or poets associated to him. This is when I came across Mahler’s many letters and I was immediately struck by just how poetic they were and so they then became the inspiration for the piece.
Mahler’s Letters
‘Mahler’s Letters’ (2020) for choir is inspired by the letters of the composer, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Often portraying romantic figures for music as a form of nature, his dramatic descriptions of the scenery that inspired him and his life at large, Mahler’s letters are strikingly poetic and revealing. His letters have had an important impact upon the reception of his music and our understanding of him personally; he exclusively wrote music and letters and, therefore, there are no essays, memoirs, or manifestos to call upon. Mahler’s correspondence is prolific and has been released, published and translated into multiple volumes, which is unusual as many other composers have often benefitted from a uniform edition.
‘Mahler’s Letters’ is a setting of four poems that I have written for this work, which act as fictitious letters constructed from and inspired by the ideas, thoughts and language in Mahler’s correspondence. The poems deal with significant themes in art and particularly pertinent topics within Mahler’s music, life and his letters themselves. The poems that make up the four movements of ‘Mahler’s Letters’ are each addressed to a nameless addressee, ‘Dear You’, as they utilise a myriad of the letters that Mahler wrote to many different recipients including his wife, Alma, as well as his friends, colleagues, and critics. ‘Mahler’s Letters’ is, therefore, a reflective choral work concerned with some of the universal aspects of art and life itself; Nature, Love, Music, and, alongside religion, Death.
The Letters Behind the Words
After reading many of his letters, I began to write the poems that form the libretto for the piece. Each poem begins with ‘Dear You’ to indicate that the recipient of the letter is not to one specific person, but is meant to be based on universal themes, and to a universal reader. The first poem, titled ‘Nature’, includes ideas from his letters, and the many translations of them, that I came across repeatedly, such as his descriptions of his joy at breathing in ‘that other air’ - the air he found on mountains that he so cherished. He described streams as ‘streaks of silver’ (this imagery caught my heart in particular), and the view from the window from which he composed of the nature around him. The penultimate line of ‘Nature’ reads ‘On a summer morning’s dream the flowers tell me’ - I decided to include this as a nod to the supposed working title of his third symphony' ‘A Summer-Morning’s Dream’ along with the title of the second movement of his third symphony ‘What the Wild Flowers Tell Me’, which was also arranged by Britten. The poem then ends with a line in Latin ‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi’, meaning ‘thus passes the glory of this world’, which Mahler had used specifically in one of his letters.
The second movement, ‘Love’, is based on his letters to his wife, Alma, whom he wrote to every day that he was away from her, which was frequently. The language he used in them is often overwhelmingly sentimental as he proclaims his feelings and ‘how lovely it is to love’, as well as his feelings in climatic moments of crisis, such as during her affair with Walter Gropius in 1910. In the poem, I imagined Mahler writing to her throughout the day and night and wishing for a letter from her in return, which he often requested in his letters ‘If only I had a letter from you with me, here.’ The way in which he writes to her in his letters was beseeching from even the very beginning of their relationship; a letter from before their marriage, for example, includes lines to her such as ‘for someone I love the way I would love you if you were to become my wife, I can forfeit all my life and all my happiness. ..Almschi, my beloved,.. for this is a moment of great importance, these are decisions that will weld two people together for eternity. I bless you, my dearest, my love..’. ‘A thousand kisses..’ The final line of the poem ‘Nature’ I included in German, as the final line from each movement is a direct quotation in either German or Latin. The line reads ‘Holdeste, Liebste, und mein Sturmlied!’ meaning ‘Fairest, dearest one, my storm-song!’ as Mahler wrote this in verse form in a letter to Alma that was seemingly in response to her reassuring him that she wouldn’t leave him.
‘Music’, the focus on the third movement of ‘Mahler’s Letters’, details Mahler’s ‘afflictions of the pioneer’ including his nature as an artist and the battle to bring a work to life as the ‘path is long and strewn with thorns thrown.’ I included some of his lines comparing music with nature, such as ‘this foaming, roaring, this raging sea of sound’, which he wrote in a letter to Alma in 1904, after the first rehearsal of his Fifth Symphony. In ‘Mahler’s Letters’ therefore, I also chose to musically refer back to the first movement of the work ‘Nature’, since both music and nature are so well connected in both Mahler’s music and his daily writings. This is summarised towards the end of the poem in the line ‘Music is the sound of nature at length’, before the final lines, paraphrased from Mahler’s correspondence, read ‘Die zeit ist da, die Feder ist zur Hand, Auf die fünf Linien blick ich unverwandt’ meaning that the time has come, the pen is in his hand, and he is focused on the five lines of the music stave before him.
For the final movement, ‘Death’, I used a bit of an Artistic License and derived a lot of the ideas from a letter that Mahler wrote not in old age, but from one of his early letters in which he compares himself to a ‘hunted stag’ and describes the ‘untiring effort to live and to be’ as well as his yearning for death that ‘consumes [his] heart.’ Alongside death, the poem also incorporates God and aspects of religion with exclamations of ‘Death! Oh, God!’ and questioning ‘have we sustained existence or empty dreaming?’ The poem also includes a reference to the last words of Jesus on the cross ‘why hast thou forsaken me?’, which Mahler also incorporates into his final, tenth symphony. The final lines, ‘Oh earth, my beloved earth, most holy stillness’ fade out into the very last line in Latin, quoted directly in Mahler’s correspondence, ‘sub specie aetatis et aeternitatis’ alluding to eternity. The piece then ends by repeating the final line creating an atmospheric wash of colour to suggest everlasting life.
A big thank you to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir, Ellie Slorach and Ian Tracey for bringing this very large choir piece to life!
