Powers, Richard: Orfeo

The poems had poured out of Rückert, two or three a day — thousands of raw and compulsive stanzas. Some of them were stillborn. Some were filled with a sick calm. Some sank into the hackneyed, while others talked to themselves in an airless crypt. Rückert hid them away for private use. None were published in his lifetime.

Fresh from his own near-death, Mahler read the poems like a lost diary. Seven of his thirteen siblings were dead by the age of two. His beloved younger brother died on the threshold of puberty. And here was the field guide to those deaths. The forty-one-year-old bachelor consumed the hundreds of lyrics like a parent come loose with grief.

The songs took shape, an exercise in convalescence. Then came Mahler’s whirlwind marriage to the child bride, Alma Schindler. In quick succession, they had two healthy children. When, in the summer of 1904, Mahler returned to work on the songs, his wife was horrified. Incomprehensible, setting the death of children to music, when the man had kissed his own daughters good night moments before. For God’s sake, don’t tempt fate! But tempting fate was music’s job description.

Els goes to the kitchen, pours single-malt scotch into a jelly glass, and takes it into the front room. He sits in the Eames chair and pushes away the footstool, making space at his feet for the dog. He goes limp, closes his eyes, and hears Clara whisper to him. These songs are the death knell of tonality . Where did a self-taught, eighteen-year-old virgin get such grandiosity? Els, an ignorant hick with a gift, had believed her. He’d loved her for her eager, bright pretension. And hers were the first girl’s breasts he’d ever touched.

A click on the remote, and the music starts up. And one last time, in the bare opening notes, Els makes out the sounds of a death foretold. The death of a child he spent his life trying to revive.

AT FIRST, THERE’S only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from bare fourths and fifths.

The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. Now the sun will rise so brightly. .

The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle. Scant, muted violas and cellos in their upper registers enter over a quavering harp. The line wavers between major and minor, bright and dim, peace and grief, like the old hag and lovely young thing who fight for control of the fickle ink sketch. The voice sings, It’s almost as if nothing terrible happened in the night!

Nerves gather in the broadening orchestra, joined now by clarinet and bass clarinet. Then the killer touch, the daub that Els would have traded his soul to make. The ensemble falls away to two pianissimo strikes on the glockenspiel. Then two more. A child’s toy, a funeral chime, a light in the night all rolled into four soft, ringing high D’s.

The lines of entwined oboe and horn return, but colored now with small, stray variants. The singer comes back, to claim that death is no more than a blot on a day that is everywhere bright and gathering. But she protests too much: When the chopped-up echoes of the opening duet reprise, shadowed now by the remorseless glockenspiel, the notes begin to go astray. The lines haunt each other in parallel intervals, perseverating, like a lone figure rocking in the corner, biting his sleeve.

The verse starts again, but the tune veers off into a vacant elsewhere. Now the voice rises where it once fell, clashing against the oboe’s mirror inversion. You must not fold up the night inside you. You must drown it in eternal light! The singer struggles to do just that. The words try to push toward grace; the music drowns in grace’s opposite. Yet the whole ensemble holds out the hope that death itself may be a brilliant light, and kinder than anyone can suppose.

In the fourth return of the instrumental interlude, the song turns deranged and the twentieth century begins. The orchestra sets off in a frantic ecstasy, gusting through chromatic swells and counterswells, shaking loose of all center, anchored only by a deep, droning pedal point in the horn.

The frenzy breaks. Flute and oboe attempt the opening lines again, but they’re dogged now by the tolling glockenspiel. A small voice says, A little light has gone out in my tent . The notes set a path where their offspring must go: upward into the light, over the surrender of the strings and hollow harp. But the song stutters and catches. The voice drops out, while the surging orchestra carries the melody forward. Two measures too late, the singer rallies— Heil! — to welcome in the joyous light of day. The orchestra obliges, pushing toward redemption. But at the last moment it falls back into minor. The last word belongs to the glockenspiel, repeating the singer’s final note three octaves higher, throwing off glints from a place unreachable by grief or consolation.

At eighteen, hearing these songs while holding Clara’s breasts was like graduating from the Crayola eight-pack to the rainbow box of sixty-four. At seventy, alone in the house with an untouched glass of scotch, Els can still make out, in the songs’ recesses, the germ of a freedom that isn’t done with him.

Why should bottomless grief feel so bracing? The day is lovely; don’t be afraid. Over the decades, he’d read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener: The antibody theory. The sanctuary theory. Shadowboxing. Mastery by habituation. Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els’s life beyond saying.

Don’t be afraid; the day is lovely. They have only gone out, and do not feel like coming home again.

Els swirls his scotch and listens through the other four songs. His favorite passages shine and die. The second song, shifting through keys and meters, between clarity and cloud. The third song, with its Bach-like trio sonata that mimics the mother’s unsteady steps: When your mother walks through the door by the candle’s light, you always come in too, slipping in behind her. . And that song’s end, its wayward cadence on the dominant: he knows it cold, but still the run-up chills him. Someone came up with these chords. Someone remembered the sound of false recovery.

The fourth song, in radiant E-flat, always felt like the first flash of real light in the whole cycle. But tonight it’s a klezmer-tinted, lurching folk dance. They’ve just gone out for a long walk. They’ve only gone on ahead of us. The day is beautiful. The final phrases ascend into bright uplands, the music almost escaping to the distant sunny hill the words describe, alongside two small children who can’t be bothered to turn around and wave.

Then the storm. Does it make him a depressive, that he loves the storm best of all? The thrill of lightning, of an ambulance, of safety crumbling away. The full orchestra, at last — the wrenched strings, the plummeting winds — pumps out a tempest. In the interludes between each stanza, the storm blows out of control: at first nothing, then four bars, then eight. The voice ratchets up— in this weather, in this weather, in this weather— rising in each successive entry, from a monotone D to an E to a G. In this raging, in this horror, I would never have let the children out!

Guilty survivor, beating up on himself. The music locates the storm inside the singer’s mind, like the one in Peter Grimes , another work that Clara gave Els in that year of miraculous discoveries. The song’s storm isn’t the one that takes the children; this is a later gale, long after the fact. I would never have let the children out in such weather. I’d worry that they might die. Now there’s no reason to worry about anything.