History is filled with music of protest, defiance, confrontation, even calls for revolution: from Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia, with its stance against Russian control of Finland, to Fred Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! with its anti-fascist sentiment. These works often grow from personal loss: John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 (“Of Rage and Remembrance”) is both a lament for lost friends and a condemnation of the Reagan administration’s disastrous response to the AIDS crisis.
Jake Heggie’s Songs for Murdered Sisters, likewise, is at once a cry of sorrow and a call for social and political action. It grew from a real-life tragedy that took place in 2015 at the hands of a Canadian assassin who, in a single morning, took the lives of three of his ex-partners: Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk, and Nathalie Warmerdam.
This brutal act shocked the world and focused attention on the global femicide epidemic. It became known that Warmerdam was the sister of world-renowned Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins, who resolved to use his grief to challenge men worldwide to take the White Ribbon Pledge—promising “never to commit, condone, or remain silent about all forms of gender-based violence.” (The White Ribbon Campaign was founded in Canada in 1991 as a response to the massacre of female students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.)
Hopkins’s plight came to the attention of Jake Heggie, who proposed a musical response. Marshaling the talents of Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), Heggie composed eight exquisite songs that addressed, in strikingly intimate terms, the pain of loss. The protagonist here often sings to the lost loved one directly, evoking a poignancy reminiscent of Schubert’s Winterreise. (“I was too late, too late to save you / I feel the rage and pain in my own fingers / Why should he be here still and not you?”)
“I felt so numb after Nathalie’s murder,” said Hopkins, a veteran of stages worldwide and a favorite at the Metropolitan Opera. “It was … almost impossible to comprehend. But Margaret’s words and Jake’s music have opened a door, and stepping through it has allowed me to access all my complicated feelings surrounding Nathalie’s death.”
Atwood, too, felt the impact. “I have known two women who were murdered, both by jealous former romantic partners, so the killing of Joshua’s sister resonated with me.” Still, she added, “I could not promise anything. With songs and poems, they either arrive or they don’t … Then I wrote the sequence in one session. I made the ‘sisters’ plural because they are indeed—unhappily—very plural. Sisters, daughters, mothers. So many.”
The eight poems Atwood crafted were included in a volume of verse published in November 2020 as Dearly: New Poems. “Margaret sent a perfect, complete set of eight texts and asked, ‘How about something like this?’” Heggie said. “Josh and I were stunned and deeply moved … It was a great honor and privilege to explore every corner of her poems to shape this musical, emotional journey for Josh.” The songs follow a path from dazed disbelief and denial (“If this were a story”) to nightmares, rage, and frantic reflection.
Heggie has become one of the most significant composers of vocal music today. Among his works are no fewer than 18 operas (including Dead Man Walking, The End of the Affair, Moby-Dick, It’s a Wonderful Life); some 30 cycles comprising more than 300 songs; large-scale vocal-orchestral compositions; and chamber and orchestral music.
Raised in Florida and in Columbus, Ohio, Heggie studied privately with Ernst Bacon during high school and, after two years of study in Paris, continued as an undergraduate at the University of California–Los Angeles. Among his teachers were Roger Bourland, Paul Des Maris, David Raksin, and Johana Harris. Carlisle Floyd, the late American opera composer, was a mentor.
After an early career in public relations, Heggie explored opportunities in song composition and opera. During the late 1990s, San Francisco Opera General Director Lotfi Mansouri approached him about composing an opera with playwright Terrence McNally. The result was Dead Man Walking, which since its premiere in October 2000 has received more than 70 productions worldwide.
Written on commission from Houston Grand Opera and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Songs for Murdered Sisters was given its first live performance by Joshua Hopkins in March 2022 at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, with the composer at the piano. In its orchestrated form it received its premiere in February 2023 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre with conductor Alexander Shelley and Hopkins, again, as soloist.
“You don’t process grief in a linear fashion,” Hopkins has said. “Any emotion can come up any time you’re experiencing an emotional influx. But meaning transforms grief in a more peaceful and hopeful experience. These songs have provided that meaning for me.”
—Paul J. Horsley
“Gustav Mahler was a Saint.” With these words Arnold Schoenberg began his 1912 memorial address honoring the composer, who had died the previous year at age 50. A younger generation of Viennese composers, including Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, shared his passion for Mahler’s music. Admirers sent a funeral wreath reading, “Bereft of the saintly human being Gustav Mahler, we are left forever with a never-to-be-lost example of his life and impact.” Berg spoke repeatedly of the “Holy Mahler,” and Schoenberg dedicated his important treatise on harmony “to the memory of Gustav Mahler … this martyr, this saint.” One might add yet another characterization: prophet. For many, Mahler’s music prophesized not only his own life, but also foretold the future of music and even of the 20th century.
Saint, Martyr, Prophet—such images have vast implications for an understanding of Mahler’s life and his music, especially his three final compositions: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and the Ninth and 10th symphonies. These works explore shared musical and philosophical issues, and they are all, in a certain sense, unfinished. Mahler did not live to perform them, and he invariably continued to revise a piece through the stages of bringing it to the public as well as afterward. While the 10th Symphony is clearly unfinished (even its first movement, which reached the most advanced stage and is frequently performed separately), both Das Lied and the Ninth would surely have undergone further refinements had Mahler lived to conduct them. His friend and protégé, Bruno Walter, led the first performances in 1911 and 1912 respectively.
“It seems that the Ninth is the limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the 10th for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the hereafter.” Mahler supposedly shared these superstitions of Schoenberg’s about composing a ninth symphony, as had concluded the careers of Beethoven and Bruckner. (Schubert and Dvořák might now appear to be candidates for this list as well, although their symphonies were not so numbered in Mahler’s time.)
Alma Schindler Mahler, the composer’s widow and an often unreliable source, reported that her husband tried to cheat fate after the uplifting Eighth Symphony by initially calling Das Lied the Ninth, but that he later “crossed the number out.” Das Lied, left unnumbered, was titled a “Symphony for Tenor and Alto Voice and Orchestra,” and sets Hans Bethge’s German adaptations of Chinese poetry. After completing the symphony we hear tonight, the official Ninth, Mahler allegedly told her, “Actually, of course, it’s the 10th, because Das Lied von der Erde was really the Ninth.” When he began what he evidently intended to be a five-movement 10th Symphony in F-sharp Major, he remarked: “Now the danger is past.” The Ninth is a work that begins where the haunting final song of Das Lied, “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”), ended. Mahler composed most of the Ninth Symphony during the summer of 1909. The following one, his last, he sketched the 10th.
The connections between and among these pieces, as well as their ultimate place in the composer’s output, have made it all too tempting to view them as pointing toward death, a “farewell” trilogy, the artistic testament of a dying man. Mahler had, after all, received serious personal blows in 1907: His beloved elder daughter, Maria Anna, died at the age of four; he resigned an untenable position, aggravated by anti-Semitism, at the Vienna Court Opera; and he was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. Mahler accepted a lucrative offer from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but returned to Europe each summer, when he always did most of his composing. By 1909, the year of the Ninth Symphony, his professional situation in New York had become more complicated, as had his marriage to the nearly 20-year-younger Alma, who was soon to begin an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius (later her second husband). Mahler eventually learned of this liaison and sought relief from Sigmund Freud in the summer of 1910. There was to be no next summer. The fatally ill Mahler left New York for Vienna, where he died on May 18.
The blows of 1907 left their mark on his last four years. Mahler commented in some of his most personal letters that he had to “start a new life.” In 1908, while composing Das Lied, he remarked on trying to settle into a different location (he refused to return to the site of his daughter’s death the previous summer): “This time it is not only a change of place but also a change in a whole way of life. You can imagine how hard the latter comes to me. For many years I have been used to constant and vigorous exercise—roaming about in the mountains and woods, and then, like a kind of jaunty bandit, bearing home my drafts.” The doctors advised that he curtail not only the long walks that he so treasured, but also some of his taxing conducting activities. “I stand vis-a-vis de rien” (face to face with nothing), he wrote to Bruno Walter, “and now, at the end of my life, I have to begin to learn to walk and stand.”
And yet we might want to resist what may be too simple a connection between Mahler’s late works and death. He had, after all, dealt with the subject extensively in his earlier music. His first known composition, supposedly written at around the age of six (and now lost), was a “Polka with Introductory Funeral March.” Funeral marches abound in his symphonies, beginning with the third movement of his First. He wrote his haunting Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) before the death of his own child. Moreover, whatever his frustrations, Mahler enjoyed considerable success in New York. (The final devastating blow of his life was personal, not professional: learning of Alma’s infidelity.) And, despite the initial warnings from his doctors, he gradually became more active, conducting the New York Philharmonic, of which he was music director from 1909 to 1911, in a large number of concerts and on tours. The year of the Ninth he wrote to Walter: “I am experiencing so much more now (in the last 18 months [since Maria’s death]), I can hardly talk about it. How should I attempt to describe such a tremendous crisis! I see everything in such a new light—am in such a state of flux, sometimes I should hardly be surprised suddenly to find myself in a new body. (Like Faust in the last scene.) I am thirstier for life than ever before.”
Mahler provided few comments about the intent or meaning of his last compositions. Concerning the Ninth, he informed Walter that “the work itself (insofar as I know it, for I have been writing away at it blindly, and now that I have begun to orchestrate the last movement I have forgotten the first) is a very satisfactory addition to my little family.” This is an interesting metaphor, given the recent loss of his daughter, and may indicate how successfully Mahler sublimated a wide range of feelings into his music. “In it something is said that I have had on the tip of my tongue for some time.” He compared the work to the Fourth Symphony, but admitted the two symphonies were “quite different.” His nearly daily letters to Alma, who was at a spa, speak little about the composition and dwell on more mundane matters.
Also revealing are some indications that he scribbled in the sketches and manuscript. In the first movement of the Ninth, he wrote: “O Youth! Lost! O Love! Vanished!” and in the finale: “O Beauty, Love! Farewell! Farewell!” (He made similar annotations in the 10th: “Farewell, my music! Farewell. Farewell. Farewell” and at the end of the finale: “To live for you! To die for you, Almschi!”) These were personal notes, not meant for public consumption. Although they do not appear in the published score, colleagues such as Berg (to whom Alma gave the draft manuscript of the first three movements in 1923) and conductor Willem Mengelberg learned of them, and it no doubt influenced their interpretations. The latter noted in his score: “The Ninth Symphony is: Farewell from all whom he loved—and from the world!—and from his art, his life, his music.”
Mahler’s view about divulging “extra-musical” information concerning his works changed over the course of his career. His early symphonies initially carried intricate programs and descriptive titles, some of which he later withdrew. His middle trilogy of purely instrumental ones (Nos. 5–7) furthered the retreat. With regard to his last works, it has primarily been musicians, critics, and listeners who have invented their own “programs,” especially ones that make connections with farewell and death. A similar situation applies to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, premiered just nine days before the Russian composer’s death in 1893, and a piece, like Mahler’s Ninth, that ends with an emotional slow movement. (Mahler allegedly did not much care for Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, although he conducted it six times in 1910–1911.)
More recent biographers and commentators have continued to make the connections. British musicologist Deryck Cooke, who constructed the most frequently performed edition of the 10th Symphony, remarked that Mahler’s earlier works project “images” of mortality, while the late ones have the “taste” of death. Since the Mahler revival of the 1960s, in which he played a commanding role, Leonard Bernstein’s views of the Ninth Symphony have been particularly influential. “The Ninth is the ultimate farewell,” the conductor noted. The end of the Ninth is “the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up.” The Ninth was Mahler’s “last will and testament,” a sonic presentation of death itself. But Bernstein saw more than prophesies of Mahler’s “own imminent death,” extending to “the death of tonality” and, finally, “the death of society.” After recounting a list of 20th-century horrors, he remarked that “only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that it foretold all.”
The opening of the first movement (Andante comodo) picks up harmonically and thematically from the end of Das Lied, with its nine-fold repetition of the word ewig (forever). The rhythm, presented by cellos and a horn repeated on the pitch A, returns at crucial structural moments in the movement, including at the climax “with utmost force.” As early as 1912 (and taken up by Cooke and Bernstein later), the rhythm was likened to “a very slow heartbeat, irregular, fractured.” A nostalgic D-major theme gradually emerges in the second violins, accumulating force through a series of fragments played by strings, harp, clarinets, and muted horns. The organic growth of the themes marks one of Mahler’s greatest compositional achievements. Over the past century, commentators have discerned various allusions in this movement, not just to Mahler’s own music, but also to other compositions, including Johann Strauss Jr.’s waltz “Freuet euch des Lebens” (“Enjoy Life”) and, more tellingly, Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” (“Farewell”) Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a. (This allusion comes at the point where Mahler wrote “Leb’ wol” [Farewell] in the draft score.) Berg believed that “the whole movement is permeated with the premonition of death … Again and again it occurs, all the elements of worldly dreaming culminate in it … which is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano.”
The slow first and last movements frame two fast, more ironic central ones. The marking for the second is Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers (“in the tempo of a relaxed Ländler”). Although it starts innocently, it takes on the flavor of a “Dance of Death,” as T. W. Adorno observed. The following Rondo-Burleske likewise offers a wide range of moods, including the gestures of popular music of the sort that brought charges of banality against Mahler. The movement shows Mahler’s increasing interest in counterpoint, taking his studies of J. S. Bach to new extremes. Fugato mixes with marches, grotesque and angry passages with more tender moments. A quieter, phantasmagorical middle section looks forward to the final movement. Adorno called this movement the first major work of new music.
The concluding Adagio opens with a forceful unison violin theme reminiscent of two other final works: the slow movement of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Parsifal, both of which also project lush, hymn-like meditations. The music plunges into the key of D-flat major. Whereas in some of his earlier symphonies the tonality progressed upward, for example, in the Fifth Symphony from C-sharp minor in the first movement to D major in the finale, here the tonality is regressive, from D major to D-flat. All the Ninth’s movements, except for the furious coda of the third, end in disintegration, approaching the state of chamber music. The incredible final page of the Ninth offers the least rousing finale in the history of music, but undoubtedly one of the most moving. Mahler provides one further self-allusion, played by the first violins, to the fourth of his Kindertotenlieder. The unsung song, heard in the first violins, originally accompanied the words “Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh’n” (The day is beautiful on those heights), telling of the parents’ vision of their dead children at play on a distant mountain. The music becomes ever softer and stiller, almost more silence than sound, until we may be reminded of the heartbeat that opened the symphony, but now realize it is the consciousness of our own heartbeat. In this extraordinary way Mahler implicates his listeners in the work, which ends ersterbend—dying away.
Psychologists, notably Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, have explored the various stages of dealing with death, including denial, anger, and acceptance, and one might argue that all these and more are conveyed in Mahler’s final three works, both within and among the individual compositions. One finds denial in Das Lied through the ecstatic celebration of nature and life, but also rage, and ultimately peace. The Rondo-Burleske in the Ninth Symphony is an even more terrifying expression of rage, while the last moments of the work transcend acceptance so as to suggest some sort of visionary state. The sketches for the 10th Symphony indicate similar moments of extreme, dissonant anger, although they suggest that Mahler aimed for acceptance at the end. These works not only ponder death, but also bid farewell to the passing of a musical and artistic world, the end of Romanticism, tonality, and perhaps even the genre of the symphony. At the same time Mahler looks forward, offering a prophetic vision of music that we are still trying to understand.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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