Chapter 26 - Mahler and Death

Mahler’s “lifelong romance with death” (Stuart Feder) was one of his central preoccupations, both in his creative work and in his day-to-day existence. Death is ubiquitous in Mahler’s music, from his first major work, Das klagende Lied, which concerns fratricide and its consequences, to the unfinished Tenth Symphony, in which the final movement reproduces the sound of funeral drums. Privately, it was not only something to be feared but an experience to be desired; the lines “sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben” (I will die, in order to live), the first line of the final strophe of Mahler’s Second Symphony, encapsulate a worldview that he renewed wholeheartedly in the Eighth. The various influences on this orientation are surveyed here, with special attention to poets (Goethe, Klopstock, Rückert) and philosophers (Fechner, Hartmann) who intensified what seems to have been a natural predilection.