By Milner Fuller
Manager of Classical Programming
Why do we seek out tragedy?
We spend much of our lives trying to avoid pain, grief, and fear. And yet we willingly sit in a concert hall and listen to a work like Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, a piece so overwhelming that it can leave us shaken, even in tears.
And somehow, we feel better for it.
This paradox reaches back at least as far as Aristotle, who argued that tragedy works by arousing pity and fear, then guiding us through those emotions to a kind of release, or catharsis. The experience is intense, but it is also shaped. The emotions are given form and direction. We are not left in them. We are led through them.
Greek tragedy established a pattern that has endured for centuries. A world is presented, often ordered and structured, but already under strain. That world begins to fracture. Moments of clarity or tenderness emerge, only to be overtaken by forces that cannot be undone. The result is not comfort in the usual sense, but something deeper. We have felt fully, and come through the experience intact.
This same pattern appears in the tragedies of William Shakespeare, and few plays trace it more starkly than King Lear.
At the beginning of Lear, the world is highly ordered. There is hierarchy, ceremony, and power. But that order is already flawed. Lear’s demand that his daughters publicly declare their love is not an act of wisdom, but of control. The structure remains intact, even as it reveals the failure at its core.
As the play unfolds, that structure begins to warp. Authority persists, but fractures into competing claims that no longer stabilize anything. Even as Lear clings to the forms of power, the world around him stops responding to it. Language fractures. Logic slips. What once felt inevitable now feels unstable.
Mahler’s Sixth follows a strikingly similar arc.
The opening movement presents a world of clarity and force. The march is disciplined and direct, but also relentless. This is not a peaceful order. It is rigid, implacable, and already touched by something harsher. Yet within it, a contrasting lyrical idea emerges, warmer and more expansive, as if something human were trying to assert itself against that force, something that feels out of place within the system that contains it. Like Lear’s court, everything is in its place, yet the underlying logic is unyielding and oppressive.
The order of the inner movements in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony has long been debated. Heard one way, the Scherzo follows the opening movement directly, its distorted rhythms echoing what has come before. Heard another, it comes later, casting a darker shadow over the Andante’s warmth. In either case, the same tensions are present, and the same tragic arc remains.
The Scherzo does not introduce a new world. It reflects the first, but in distorted form. The gestures are familiar, yet the rhythms lurch where they once drove forward. What once felt controlled now feels unstable from within, as if the system itself has begun to falter.
Then comes the Andante.
After the strain of what has come before, the effect is immediate. The tension does not disappear, but it softens. There is warmth, lyricism, and something deeply human emerging within the larger struggle. It does not resolve the tragedy. It shows us what is at stake.
In King Lear, that moment finds voice in Cordelia:
“O my dear father! Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made!”
It is not a reversal of the tragedy, but a brief and luminous act of repair. In Mahler’s Sixth, the Andante offers something similar: a fragile restoration that cannot endure.
And it does not.
At the end of Lear, the play strips away any remaining illusion of recovery. Lear enters carrying Cordelia’s body. There is no restoration of order, no final resolution. Only the raw fact of loss. “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” he cries, a sound that feels less like speech than grief itself, as if language itself has given way under the weight of it.
The finale of Mahler’s Sixth moves with a similar sense of inevitability. The forces that have been present from the beginning assert themselves fully. The famous hammer blows do not introduce tragedy. They confirm it. Like Lear’s cry, they feel less like expression than impact, as if the music has been pushed beyond articulation.
So why does an experience like this leave us feeling, if not happy, then somehow at peace?
Part of the answer lies in structure. Tragedy gives shape to emotions that are often difficult to process in daily life. Fear, grief, and even a sense of overwhelming force unfold over time, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Part of it lies in distance. We are deeply engaged, but we are also safe. We can feel intensely without being personally threatened.
And part of it lies in recognition. These works do not invent suffering. They reveal patterns that already exist in human life, in human systems, even in ourselves. To experience them in this concentrated form can feel like understanding.
Mahler returned to the question of death in his Ninth Symphony, but in a very different way. There, the music seems to dissolve rather than collapse, unfolding as a long farewell. Both works confront mortality, but they do so from opposite directions. The Sixth meets it as something imposed, a force that cannot be resisted. The Ninth approaches it as something gradually accepted, even relinquished.
The Sixth offers no such release. It asks us instead to endure.
And yet, we come out the other side.
That may be the deepest form of catharsis. Not the removal of suffering, but the knowledge that we can face it, experience it fully, and still remain ourselves.
Experience Mahler’s Sixth Symphony live with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra this June at Hilbert Circle Theatre. It is a work that demands something of us, and gives something back. You may find yourself changed.