Contemplating the Sublime

writing his Fifth Symphony, Gustav Mahler wondered how listeners would respond to the brooding, obsessively churning motifs that seem to chase one another into ecstasy or wearily wind down into despair. "How should [the public] react," he asked, "to this chaos that is eternally giving birth to a world that then perishes in the next moment, to these primordial sounds, to this blustering, bellowing, roaring ocean, to these dancing stars, to these shimmering, flashing, breathing waves?" His Eighth Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand, makes that question sound almost modest. With its intended number of players, it is a precursor to Cinemascope and the Sony Imax. But the technology has not yet been invented that can reproduce the sensation that Mahler was after with his settings of a ninth-century Latin hymn and another sacred text for German Romantics, the last scene of Goethe's "Faust." Mahler was in competition with the gods. "These no longer are human voices," he wrote of his chorus, "rather planets and suns that are circling." Extreme, no doubt, just as the symphony is an extreme example of what might be called the musical sublime. But the extreme is partly what the sublime is all about, and Mahler's goals actually fit into a tradition of Western music in which sound is meant to reproduce the effect of nature's spectaculars. In fact, the more we look at the concert music of the last two centuries, the more it seems as if the sublime was one of its primary preoccupations. Certainly, the ambition to overwhelm the senses and mind was there in Beethoven's Ninth, in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, in Bruckner's Eighth, in Lizst's В Minor Sonata. During their time, Haydn and Mozart were also described as having similar power. Haydn's setting of the words "Let there be light" in his Creation was for many decades considered a prime example of the sublime. Much of the music at the heart of the Western tradition seems to yearn for the sublime's imposing grandeur and humbling effect.