Rise again, yes, rise again.

February is necessary.

It’s amazing what a little warmth and sunlight can do for us.

We haven’t felt the sun like this in months, and the past few weeks alone have challenged some of the most grizzled New Englanders in my life.

Today when I arrived in the parking lot at the school, a new feeling hit me:

You made it.

It’s the kind of sunlight that feels like it hits your face and stays there for a few moments. The chest feels a little more open, the brain a little clearer. This is my 19th winter as a southern transplant, and I never get tired of the feeling of spring.

Renewal.

I’ve been thinking about Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 lately, having discussed it with a few friends. Though not authorized by the composer, its nickname is “The Resurrection”. It comes from a poem read at a friend’s funeral while he was agonizing over how to finish this epic work.

I think it can help us on a day like today, where the warmth and sunlight offer a glimmer of things to come: longer days, spring cleaning, summer nights, perhaps more time with friends and family.

In a word: hope.

Let’s dive in and see what we can make of it.

Mahler had the opening movement of his Second Symphony for years before he could finish the piece. It was dark and heavy… a funeral march he’d composed as a standalone work called Totenfeier, or “Funeral Rites.” He knew where the piece began. He had no idea how to end it. How does one follow something that heavy? What do you say after all that weight?

The answer came at a funeral.

When his friend and mentor Hans von Bülow died in 1894, Mahler attended the memorial service. A choir sang a hymn setting of an old poem: Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n.

“Rise again, yes, rise again.”

He said it struck him like a thunderbolt. The ending he’d been searching for arrived in the middle of grief, in a moment he couldn’t have planned or manufactured.

He also wrote something unusual into the score: after the crushing weight of the first movement, the music must pause—at least five minutes of silence—before anything new begins. He built the discomfort of waiting and grief directly into the piece.

And then at the end, the finale builds from near-silence into one of the most overwhelming conclusions in all of classical music. A choir, barely audible at first, and then the whole thing opens up into something that can soften the hardest heart.

Today, I understand it a little better.

September shows up with a punch, especially if you have any ties to an academic calendar (students, teachers, music schools, colleges, etc). But even if not, August is the time of year when almost everyone squeezes in that last trip of summer.

The days are still warm, but you can feel the shortness creeping in at the edges. Uncertainty mixes with resignation. Back at it. Blech. A long series of months stretch out ahead of you, feeling enormous and unmapped.

Then October arrives, bringing total fall (my favorite season), and it’s almost unfair how beautiful it is. Routines settle. We find our footing. Something that felt impossible in week two starts to settle in week six. Sweaters, fire pits, crisp mornings.

And then winter. This year, real winter. More snow than we’ve seen in years. It’s a vice grip that sets in from December until, well, today. And I know that we’re not out of the woods yet. This is New England, after all. But it’s too late. The heart and mind know what’s ahead, especially after experiencing a day like today.

Does any of this sound familiar?

A resurrection works because of everything that came before it.

Today hits harder (in a good way) because two weeks ago, 20+ inches of snow were on the ground. February’s temperatures were punishing. Bleak isn’t too strong of a word.

But today. Glorious today. I’m looking out the window, and I can’t WAIT to walk to the bank.

Mahler was onto something (that feels like an understatement). The finale (resurrection) works because of what came before it. Seventy-five minutes of everything before it. The weight, the memory, the long silences. The offstage brass in the final movement that you hear before you can even locate where the sound is coming from. The choir that enters in a whisper before it fills the hall. Even the payoff doesn’t arrive all at once.

I think about that when I watch a student push through something difficult. It isn’t just the difficulty in a challenging line of music, though that applies, too. Difficult like showing up anyway. Hard like playing the piece again after having to stop in the middle of it last week. Hard like being a beginner when you’d really rather already be good.

It’s easy to just want the finale, the resurrection. I understand the impulse as a teacher, as a parent, and as someone who watches students work for months toward a moment that lasts about three minutes. We want to skip straight to the good part.

But a resurrection requires something broken, crushed, or buried first. The suffering is a necessary part of it.

Today is evidence. It’s evidence that something has been happening all along, in the cold and the dark and the ordinary days when nobody particularly wanted to be there. I hope you get to enjoy it, even if only for a moment.

I’ll leave you with the final few minutes of Mahler’s 2nd. Press play and give it some time. The whole point is that it takes time.

Spring is coming.

Note by note,

Nick