GUEST POST: Music for a Hike by Marc Reigel

Don’t bother looking at the view – I’ve already composed it.

Gustav Mahler

Marc Reigel is an audiophile and Blissful follower. He’s interested in all kinds and genres of music and hosts a “Friday Favorites” each week to share in the listening adventure. This week, he included one of my favorite composers along with this note: “Mahler’s Ninth cuts right to the chase, and I think particularly appropriate as backdrop for a Blissful Hiker walk though a particularly difficult passage on the Arizona Trail. Just musing, of course.”

When our youngest daughter was at Northwestern, during the early 90’s, we visited her in Chicago – my favorite Big City, for inarticulate-able reasons – and I somehow got tickets to hear the on-tour Berlin Philharmonic at Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue, directly across the street from the Guard Lions of the Art Institute.

There was but one piece on the program, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, since the it takes nearly an hour and a half to play. Attending a live performance of a World Class orchestra is a visceral experience for me – the emotions the music evokes can range from joy to anger to peace to alarm to ecstasy to despair.

Oh, you mean, everything in the Human Experience of Living Life Down Here on Earth!

READ MORE about composers who hiked as well as the benefits of hiking at a walking tempo.

Yes, that’s what I mean about Mahler’s Ninth: you’ll get the whole shebang about the cost / benefit ratio of being alive.

And, Gentle Reader & Listener, I am aware most of you don’t have 1:24:40 to spend on hearing your life pass before you on a Friday in February. But as a reviewer for bachtrack.com notes, “Quotations from earlier works appear alongside folk elements, and the Finale is a heartbreaking Adagio movement – all in all, a musical parable of living and dying: in the draft score, Mahler noted the words: Farewell! O youthful days! Vanished! O, love! Gone with the wind!

So, l recommend you go directly to the Adagio, the final movement, starting at 57:54. Even that section is 27 minutes in length, and I know that’s a stretch. Maybe, then, just go to 1:19:09, for the still-glowing embers of the music – although you’ll miss the soaring parts which come earlier in the Adagio.

I’ve selected this magnificent performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, recorded in 1982, and evocative of the the experience I had ten years later when I heard it performed in Chicago, under the baton of Claudio Abbado, the end of the symphony barely heard, fading away, like Life.

The audience was silent for several held breaths, and then erupted in thunderous applause, many of them – like me – understanding they had just heard and felt their lives summarized for them in the Sacred Space of a concert hall in a Great City by one of the World’s Best Orchestras. I wept.