“Beethoven wrote only one Ninth; all my symphonies are Ninths.” Gustav Mahler went out of his way to deny ever having made this statement—but it seems that he protested too much. The remark, whether Mahler actually uttered it or not, is to the point insofar as Beethoven’s Ninth had given an entirely new meaning to symphony as a genre, and Mahler’s entire symphonic output, like Bruckner’s before him, arose to a large extent as a creative answer to the Beethovenian challenge.

In his Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) Mahler had retraced the path of Beethoven’s Ninth from a dramatic, tension-laden first movement to an optimistic and transcendent choral finale. In his own Ninth, Mahler created a sort of “anti-Ninth:” the claims to universality and transcendence are the same, but the work’s inner journey does not lead from turmoil to triumph but rather from grief to vitality, followed by deep introspection.

Mahler’s life changed drastically in 1907, the year that saw his forced resignation as Director of the Viennese Opera House, the death of his older daughter, and the diagnosis of a heart condition that made him acutely aware of his own mortality. The trilogy of works he wrote after 1907—Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), the Ninth Symphony and the unfinished Tenth—were necessarily affected by these fateful events. At the same time, this period was also marked by a new start in Mahler’s life with the invitation to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Despite some difficulties of adjustment, Mahler was energized by his new responsibilities and, during his summer vacations in Austria, composed as feverishly as ever.

Das Lied von der Erde ends with a heartrending farewell to life, after offering a whole panorama of life experiences in the previous movements. The work proceeds from darkness to light and back to darkness. The Ninth Symphony is constructed along a similar arc, although this time there are no words and no explicit verbal program other than the general idea of “farewell.” It literally picks up where the previous work had left off, with a theme derived from the same “mi – re” descending motif to which the last word, ewig (“eternal”) was sung in Das Lied. In the symphony, this nostalgic motif is extensively developed, culminating in a sudden eruption marked Mit Wut (with fury).

The “mi - re” motif makes one expect a continuation toward the “do,” or the fundamental note of the scale. The resulting “mi - re - do” motif was used by Beethoven in his Piano Sonata Op. 81/a (Les Adieux—“Farewell”): Beethoven expressly labelled it Lebewohl (“Farewell”) in his score. It seems that Mahler had been thinking of Beethoven’s Lebewohl motif, but he didn’t make the reference explicit until the very end of the movement, where, after the “re” has been sustained by the oboe for four full measures, the piccolo finally supplies the missing “do” in the upper octave, doubled by the high harmonics of the cellos.

The second movement revisits the familiar Mahlerian realm of the Ländler, the Austrian country dance. Only this Ländler very quickly turns into its own caricature. The tempo indication Etwas täppisch und sehr derb (“Somewhat clumsy and very coarse”), the instruction schwerfällig - wie Fiedeln (“heavy-footed; like fiddles”) reveal what Mahler had in mind for the first of the three sections that make up this movement. In the second section the tempo speeds up and the waltz melody becomes distorted in a way reminiscent of Ravel’s La Valse, written a decade later. One means of distortion is the so-called whole-tone scale that all but destroys any traditional sense of tonality. The last new idea is again in a slower tempo, quiet and expressive, but it is never allowed to play more than an episodic role: the first two ideas dominate the movement right to the rather surprising ending.

The third movement, titled Rondo-Burleske, is another caricature. The manuscript bears the inscription “To my brothers in Apollo,” meaning Mahler’s colleagues in the musical world. Mahler’s bitterness is understandable after his departure from the Viennese Opera and in the face of unrelenting opposition to his music from professional quarters. The sarcasm of the music anticipates Shostakovich, who always acknowledged Mahler’s profound influence on his works.
In this Rondo-Burleske, to be played Sehr trotzig (“Very defiantly”), Mahler took his cue from the Rondo-Finales of his own Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, turning their exuberant optimism into parody. The forceful rondo theme is developed in counterpoint, a device Mahler did not use very often. The biting character of the music is made even stronger by the clash between a learned technique and the harsh material to which it is applied.

In a sense, both the second and the third movements represent trivial reality. With the final Adagio, we return to the transcendent world of the first movement. A broad, hymn-like melody is introduced by the strings playing “very expressively” and “with a big sound.” The next section is marked, surprisingly, “without emotions,” as the texture thins out to high violins against low cellos and basses with no middle voices. The hymn melody soon returns and grows in intensity. After a fortissimo climax, the music ends, according to the instructions, ersterbend (“dying away.”)

As in several of his previous symphonies, Mahler did not respect the classical unity of keys. The Ninth begins in D major and ends in D-flat major—a descent of a half-step that suggests resignation and decline. In comparison, the tonal outline of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was the exact opposite: it rose a half-step from the opening C-sharp minor to the bright D-major conclusion.

Mahler was deeply preoccupied by the symbolic significance of writing a Ninth Symphony (“and in D, no less,” he once remarked, in reference to the key of Beethoven’s Ninth, which Bruckner had also adopted for his Ninth). He keenly felt the weight of this whole cultural baggage, painfully aware that no major composer since Beethoven had been able to complete more than nine symphonies. After finishing his Eighth, Mahler had tried to fool Fate by writing Das Lied which is, in essence, a symphony with voices but was not assigned a number. The Ninth Symphony then followed, and it remained Mahler’s last completed work. He did not live to complete his Tenth, in which, as the extant sketches indicate, the existential crisis of the Ninth would have been resolved and an optimistic ending achieved again.

Notes By Peter Laki