Man and Nature in Beethoven and Mahler
by Peter Davison
‘How can people forever think that Nature lies on the surface? Of course, it does, in its most superficial aspect. But those, who in the face of Nature are not overwhelmed with its awe and its infinite mystery, its divinity – these people have not come close to it.’ Gustav Mahler in Natalie Bauer Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler
Click here to see the three-part discussion between Kenneth Woods and Peter Davison that uses this essay as a launching point.
Mahler often told his biographer Natalie Bauer-Lechner that most people lack any true sense of Nature. But what did he mean by this? His complaint was against those who treated Nature as merely picturesque. Nature, he believed, in its deepest aspect is something sublime, which offers us a glimpse of the divine mind. Mahler felt that the cult of the picturesque made Nature subservient to human values. If we only look at its pretty surface, we lose the profound sense of its creative abundance and unpredictable wildness. Mahler believed that if we become one with Nature, we can transcend the banality of ordinary living and petty human concerns. His outlook chimes with what we hear in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony which he greatly admired. By imitating Nature Beethoven did not wish to convey the picturesque, but something of inner essence.
Beethoven and Mahler were both avid walkers in the Austrian countryside and found inspiration for their music in that landscape. Mahler could easily have retraced Beethoven’s footsteps around Heiligenstadt near Vienna, where the Pastoral Symphony was first drafted. So, it should be no surprise to find that both the Pastoral Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde – The Song of the Earth express awe and wonder for Creation. Such a religious response was common among the romantic composers, poets and painters of the nineteenth century. William Wordsworth was 2 a prime example. For him Nature was evidence of the world’s soul, an essentially feminine and maternal entity. It was a view shared by Goethe, whose telling of the Faust myth explored Man’s diabolical pact with power which brings him into opposition with Nature. Only erotic love, the redeeming influence of the Eternal Feminine, can ultimately save Faust from damnation. Undoubtedly such ideas were a reaction against the urbanisation and industrialisation beginning in Europe at that time as a consequence of the new rationalism associated with The Enlightenment. As people’s lives drifted further from the everyday experience of wild Nature, so artists were inclined to worship at its pagan altar to compensate for an increasingly rational age. The romantics found inspiration communing with Nature, which for them was the dwelling place of the muse.
Beethoven and Mahler, standing at either end of the romantic period in music, reveal changing attitudes to Nature as the century progressed. Since the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, progress in science allowed the curious to observe the incredible patterns and interdependent systems of Nature. For a pre-Darwinian and less sceptical age than our own, this was evidence of a divine plan, but it was also an objectification of Nature which risked disenchanting life and destroying religious feeling altogether. The romantic response to science and claims of social progress was to idealise the irrational and the primitive, especially Nature. An artist such as Beethoven, who was a child of The Enlightenment, as much as he was any kind of romantic, reflected a something of both attitudes. The poet Schiller summarised this tension in his famous tract of 1795, ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’. A poet could either be at one with Nature in a state of naïve, child-like wonder, or he could be sentimental towards it, seeking it as something lost. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony belongs more to the naïve way of relating to Nature, and only in the work’s powerful storm scene is the idyllic atmosphere interrupted. Beethoven responded with innocent delight to the natural world, but he also felt the wonder of the rational idealist, sensing a reassuring objective order in Creation which was then mirrored in the classical design and internal logic of his symphony.
In Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the dissenting and subjectively human voice falls largely silent and Nature appears to go its own way. The Vienna of 1800 was not the sprawling, multi-ethnic, industrial city of Mahler’s time, so Beethoven could afford to be naïve about Nature in this way. He lived in a pre-technological era, when most of the population were still peasants. His picture of Nature, to our mind, suggests a timeless Arcadia; a delightful landscape, free from the troubles of everyday urban interactions, even if the storm scene reveals Nature’s more threatening side. Compared to this, Mahler’s view of Nature is more ambivalent. He lived in less confident times, and his music is often ‘sentimental’ according to Schiller’s terminology. In Mahler, Nature is presented both as an Arcadia recalled or longed for, but also as an inhuman, terrifying presence. The Pastoral Symphony might even represent the lost paradise for which Mahler’s Song of the Earth grieves and which it yearns to restore. Prior to the work’s composition, Mahler’s ailing health meant he had to curtail his ambitious hikes in the mountains. He had to turn inside himself to find the spiritual solace which his walks had previously provided. In The Song of the Earth, Mahler’s relationship with Nature becomes deeply personal, even mystical. The composer enters 3 into dialogue with Nature as a living intelligence, filled with meaningful symbols and messages from the beyond. Nature is a state of subjective otherness which lacks any connection to the ordinary human world.
Mahler and the Pastoral Symphony
Mahler had much to say about the Pastoral Symphony. He was struck by the objectivity of Beethoven s Nature-painting. He noted only two places in the work where Beethoven’s inner emotion overflows with passionate tenderness. Mahler believed that the whole work hinged upon moving towards these moments, while the rest, he claimed, is ‘Nature speaking alone.’ Mahler often conducted the work and complained about performances by other conductors. He told Natalie Bauer Lechner, ‘to understand the Pastoral Symphony you need a feeling for Nature, which most people lack. From the very first movement, one needs to know how naively Beethoven meant this picture: to know what he felt when he breathed the fresh air, saw the sun and the open sky.’ Without a feeling for Nature, Mahler felt that any interpretation of the symphony would simply fail. As a composer too, Mahler adored the Pastoral Symphony. It was a template for him. Unusually, the Beethoven is in five movements; a model which Mahler adopted for his 2nd, 5th, 7th and 10th symphonies. (The 1st would also have had five movements in its original form.) More importantly, Beethoven’s combination of unfolding narrative and the formal symphonic design was a model for all of Mahler’s symphonies. The Pastoral’s Nature-painting also influenced Mahler. Birdsong, brooks, rustic peasant dances, the tread of a country walk, all bound by an almost religious awe; these belong to the music of both composers. Less obviously, Mahler found a lot of humour in the symphony, considering Beethoven the father of humour in music. (By comparison, he thought Haydn was merely witty.) In the second movement of the Pastoral, the birds play hide and seek, while in the scherzo a knees-up worthy of a belly laugh breaks out. The opening movement of Mahler’s First Symphony has many of these humorous qualities and a good deal of pastoral music. But it is probably the first movement of the Fourth which is closest in atmosphere to the Beethoven with its depiction of forest animals and birds in a state of playful and noisy agitation.
But what can Beethoven and Mahler possibly teach us about our relationship with Nature? Nature now appears to threaten us. We live in a society faced by global warming, over-population and potential environmental catastrophe. Only science appears to offer any answers. In this context, playing the music of the past might seem like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Of course, we can treat these works as if they are picturesque; a pleasant saunter in a country park. But, if we approach them with the same reverence and sensitivity which Beethoven and Mahler felt, engrossed as they were in the inner reality of Nature, the music reveals its secrets. We find in both works a paradigm for harmonious unity with Nature which recognises the invisible connections and interdependency between all things. In our modern lives, we are too busy and too cut off from Nature’s wildness to relate to it with true understanding. We are lucky if we live close to wild places that can provide an escape from our noisy and busy lives. But do we treat these wild places as picturesque or experience them with religious awe? As the bird tells the drunkard in The Song of the Earth…
‘Yes! Spring is here, it came overnight’,
but the drunkard responds,
‘Why does spring matter to me? Let me be drunk!’
Mahler suggests that we are all drunk; drunk on consumption and easy pleasure, on human ingenuity and self-importance. We have stopped listening to the bird’s message and pay the price in thoughtless disregard for Nature and the environment.
Issues of pollution and conservation, the exploitation of natural resources and climate-change are today on everyone’s mind. We feel powerless, and we are reminded that Nature has the upper hand. Great music surely has a role to play in changing hearts and minds because, like Mahler’s bird, it tells us who we are and where we belong. We can take some comfort, for Nature does not lose its sublime qualities, just because we ignore them. At some moment, we have all been overwhelmed by the blueness of the sky on a beautiful spring day, as we imagine what may lie beyond the shimmering horizon. That is to experience the sublime, some sense of the infinite possibilities within us and, above all, to have a profound sense that we belong on this Earth. Furthermore, images of the Earth seen from outer space have shown us its captivating beauty amidst the vast darkness of the cosmos, compelling us to see our planet as fragile and finite. For all that science can teach us, the Earth’s existence and ability to sustain life remain unfathomable mysteries. This is what Beethoven and Mahler wished through their music to convey, but which so much of our consumption-driven society seeks to deny.
©Peter Davison 2010, rev. 2020
Peter Davison lives in West Kirby, Wirral in the UK but grew up in the NorthEast of England, before studying musicology at Cambridge University. In 1994 he created Helios Associates; an arts management consultancy whose work has included acting as a grant assessor for the Arts Council of England. Employed initially in 1994 to advise on the business and artistic model for Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, he went on to act as the venue’s Artistic Consultant until 2018. Peter Davison is an external assessor for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and artistic adviser to the George Lloyd Society in Kendal. Since last year, he has written a music and arts column for the Catholic Herald, contributed regular pieces to the Corymbus classical music blog and broadcast a series of extended conversations about music on Ave Maria Radio in South Michigan. He has twice been a guest-speaker at Colorado Mahlerfest in 2016 and 2019.
