It doesn't count as a song, but for about 15 years now I've always listened to Mahler 2 in the darkest of dark moments. It's weird. There's this one moment right near the end of the final movement, when there's a massive release of musical tension, and suddenly, hope. A minute of hope and peace and freedom and good. The bells strike my very essence. And I can feel one of two polar opposite ways about it, though I never really have managed to figure out which one is likely to occur and what decides how I'll feel at any given listening. Sometimes, I hear that hope, and I feel it. I feel like there is a hope somewhere, and whether that hope is to be achieved through living or dying, I never know, but there is a hope out there. At other times, I hear that hope, and I know it's not for me. I feel that there is a hope out there, but I can't grasp it myself and I can never know it myself. I guess in both cases, it's a sort of feeling of there being a light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a matter of whether you can actually get to the end of the tunnel that decides everything.
I won't link anything, because the full work is about 80 minutes in length, and as far as I'm concerned, listening to the fifth movement in isolation just can't give that sudden moment where everything is different, for better or for worse. The fifth movement alone is about half an hour anyway, so you might as well strap in for the whole show. I wouldn't expect anyone to go out to listen to it. I just wanted to put down in words how that one same feeling of hope from that one same moment in that one same work can mean completely opposite things to me, and I never really managed to understand why.
