THE HOT STRIVING OF LOVE

The violins and violas joyfully leap up, bursting into a realm of brightness, where the harp celebrates their arrival. The contralto voice now follows – the dark voice that has sung of the terrible neediness of human life – celebrating, in her free springing movement, release from “all-penetrating pain.” With a sensuous soaring movement the two female voices spiral around one another, like serpents made of light, coiling through the sky with the strings and harp, winged by their own passionate energy:

The choice of two female voices is significant: for, as we have seen, Mahler frequently drew attention to the connection of his creativity with a female or receptive element in the personality, which is, as he puts it, “played on by the spirit of the world.” And as the voices rise to the hidden world of light, wrestling upward in separate striving movements, each uttering separately the passionate words of love, they arrive together at the summit, at the words “zum Licht” – the soprano a third above the contralto, suddenly hushed in triumph.