Legend has it that Beethoven made an offhand comment to a subordinate when asked, to explain the opening of his famous fifth symphony. “That is fate knocking at the door.” This apocryphal story is debated. It reminds me of the Jewish scholar Hillel who asked by a man mockingly, “Teach me Judaism while I stand on one foot.” replied, “What is hateful to you, do not to others. All else is commentary.”

Taking a hot morning shower, I got the feeling I had broken a certain code. Without remembering anything of my dream, I knew I dreamt of it. I’d been listening the night before, to Mahler’s Third Symphony. The opening played by horns quotes the Brahms First Symphony’s Famous Majestic Finale. What of it? Mahler quotes others occasionally in his music. Chasing the Brahms quote in the Mahler, the very next section replaying in my head is positively funereal.

Wait a minute. The Brahms First starts as a funeral march, masterfully and positively resolved in the Alpine triumph of the horns in the famous majesty of the finale or, more precisely, death is bested by the majesty of high ideal. Mahler has taken the baton from Brahms in his third, longest of all symphonies in the repertoire. The symphonies of Brahms and Mahler start with death but end in their own affirmation yet veer in different directions. Mahler’s work ends with a slow contemplative transfigurative finale of love. Along the way, Mahler explores real life, including the banal, and sarcastic noise of a carnival or as Mahler states a Bacchanal. Overall, the Third actualizes forests and nature, which Mahler loved. Let’s face it. We are all in nature in life and in death. Mahler’s first musical program for the first movement of the third, which he later scrapped, “Pan awakens. Summer Marches in. What the Forest teaches me.”

The idea of a funeral march is foreign to my own religious background. But in the shower, Mahler’s Second symphony played back to me. Why? So easy to appreciate it was conceived as Totenfeier, funeral rites. It is clear to me, Mahler’s default mental state was depression. At the very least, he was obsessed with death. He must have spent his life searching for an escape route out of this painful mental state, manic explosions of high emotion in forests and nature, always with bird sounds in the woodwind section of the orchestra.

But what is a funeral march? What are the basic elements that define it? I was blown away when I had recently discovered Leonard Bernstein’s rendering of the opening of Mahler’s second symphony. Bernstein, more than anybody, in his conducting forced into the opening, a machine gun staccato followed by more sustained notes. Other conductors I had heard were never so blatant. If you’re a pallbearer carrying a coffin, you push rapidly forward, followed in alternating pauses. This is fodder for a march, machine gun forward progress alternating with a short delay, the original so-called in German trauermarsche. That is distinct from Chopin’s famous piano sonata no. 2 played at his own funeral, marche funebre.

The first reference to multiple short notes followed by a sustained note can be found in the opening to the Beethoven fifth, “dit dit dit dah” accepted by nearly everyone to represent “Fate knocking at the door.” Well, it occurred to me, not fate necessarily, but the grim reaper or angel of death. Death awaits us all. Now it is said that just at the time Beethoven was writing his fifth and the more optimistic sixth or Pastoral symphonies, he was experiencing the gradual loss of his hearing and tinnitus. This was to disable him as a performer and pianist and isolate him in his inner world. Deafness and tinnitus are credited with forcing Beethoven to compose his best work, produced at the end of his life. What caused the deafness is still much debated, probably not lead poisoning, maybe otosclerosis or age-related hearing loss. Whatever the pathology, we are the beneficiaries of his most incredible music.

Now Mahler opens his own Fifth Symphony with the solo trumpet quoting Beethoven’s dit dit dit dah in a section that is actually labeled a funeral march. But wait again. The dit dit dit dah figure appears even earlier in Beethoven, namely the second funereal movement of Beethoven’s 3rd “Eroica” symphony also labeled, “trauermarsche.” Beethoven repeats this figure, again and again, three dots then a dash. Beethoven is obsessed with musical ideas, which he presses to their own emotional limit.

I said to myself, after all, I was alone in the shower, how does one decode the funeral march, and where does it appear? You need to be in the minor key, C minor, for the twin Beethoven symphonic references. The requirement is machine-gun staccato, followed by legato. This is the letter “V” for victory, in Morse code, three dots, and a dash. Generally, you’d do well to give the machine gun staccato then longer note held to the lowest strings.

I don’t have to tell you that composers are a pretty morose bunch, well, maybe not quite as depressed as poets. It is the work of composers and poets to express emotion in music. Yet they are not masters of their own emotion. Artists are conquered by emotion. About the greatest tragedy we face is death. There being no means of escape from the ultimate fate, one strategy is to struggle in delirious and banal excitement as in Mahler. Mahler is clearly searching for a reply to death in much of his work. He seems to alternate in his resolution between resurrection, powerful love, or finally, an end of immense struggle in a cocoon of silence as in the Ninth. Death is ultimate silence and darkness, the absence of sense. Beethoven’s escape is the triumphal close of the Fifth Symphony or perhaps with the high ideals expressed in the choral Ninth?

Beethoven was not a happy fellow. Born of humble means, recurrently unrequited in love, he died alone of ascites and alcoholism. The inner isolation of deafness is credited with leading him to his most remarkable work. By this time, he was so highly skilled and willing to experiment with new forms, such as a choral symphony, capable creator of such vast masterpieces as the Missa Solemnis, all the while sadistically molested by loud tinnitus.

Let’s us not forget the Brahms famous German Requiem, shall we?, whose second movement is solemnity and transfiguration rolled into one, in the key of none other than C minor. Brahms revealed complete death march in this ethereal movement in all of its glory and heavenly transfigurations almost all at once. It does indeed include dit dit dit dah but also a machine gun staccato portion of the death march in its full entirety. Recall the machine gun staccato was appropriated by Leonard Bernstein in the Mahler second.

We have Brahms’s first symphony, the trauermarsche of the Requiem, the second movement of the Beethoven Eroica, Mahler 2nd symphony, all beginning in the key of C minor. Mahler’s later works beginning with the quotes of Brahms and of Beethoven are in the key of D minor and C# minor. Why?

Take a look at the somber start of the Brahms first. It is said Brahms may have struggled for 20 years, composing his first symphony. Brahms was held to be the successor of Beethoven, and the Brahms First Symphony is sometimes offhandedly referred to as Beethoven’s tenth. That was a lot of pressure for Johannes Brahms. Mahler, born after Brahms, is often thought of as the last romantic period composer, and Mahler’s descendants introduced the music of the twentieth century, situated as Mahler was at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. In homage to his predecessors, you wonder if Mahler saw himself as a half or whole step beyond, eschewing the C minor key, Mahler’s third and fifth open in the keys of D minor and C# minor. The D minor opening quotes Brahms, the C# minor Beethoven. Perhaps Mahler felt he’d advanced a full step beyond Brahms but only a half step on Beethoven. This is pure speculation and would be immodesty on the part of Mahler. Mahler and Beethoven gave us 9 complete symphonies, one for each of the planets I grew up with. It has been said that Mahler hesitated with number 10 to go beyond the number of Beethoven. Brahms wrote 4 symphonies, unable to advance beyond the terrestrial planets.

In researching this article, I discovered Brahms piano quartet no 3, again in the portentous key in C minor, where the fourth movement quotes none other than the Beethoven Fifth Symphony. This brilliant and pivotal work may, in part, express his love for Clara Schumann.

I’m the first to admit how easy it is to be taken up by your own thought processes. With that in mind and profound humility, I offer this disclaimer. I am not a professional musician, only an admirer of music. Still, I have talked to myself over these past number of days a great deal. So I ask that you humor me in that at the very least I have covered a lot of ground. I humbly offer holding simultaneously in mind some of the most consequential works in all of the musical repertoire.

Beethoven Eroica symphony no 3, second movement
Beethoven Symphony number 5
Brahms Symphony No 1
Brahms piano quartet no 3
Brahms Requiem second movement
Mahler Symphony no. 2
All of these begin in the key of C minor.
Succeeded by:
Mahler Symphony no 3 in D minor
Mahler Symphony no 5 C# minor

All unite in elements of a so-called German trauermarsche.
Suddenly decoded “dit dit dit dah” in a dream dated May 13, 2020.

Why did I have such a dream? The reason is apparent. I don’t expect there will be music at my funeral, but if there were, I’d pick the second movement of the Brahms Requiem.