SYMPHONY NO. 5

GUSTAV MAHLER

(1860-1911)

DURATION: 68:00

In many ways you may think of Gustav Mahler as the last and quintessential Romantic composer. His life spanned the final decades of the 19th century and the political and cultural ferment of that time while his death preceded the horrors of world wars and the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, not to mention the development of atonality, jazz, and other forms of “new” music. He was raised in Moravia, a Czech-speaking region not far from Vienna, though he and his family spoke German. More significantly, he was Jewish in a predominantly Christian social environment. One of 13 children, he watched eight of his siblings die in their youth; Mahler himself inherited a weak heart that compromised his health throughout his life.

These biographical facts may help to explain the fairly neurotic adult that Mahler became: he could never feel himself at home. He grew up isolated from his Czech neighbors; though he spoke German he was always recognized—and generally scorned—for being a Jew (despite his converting to Christianity later in life) and was never fully accepted into Viennese society of the time, where the stamp of anti-Semitism was powerful and ugly. His early life experiences prefigured themes in his music—the struggles of humans to find acceptance in a dark and doleful world. Mahler biographer Deryck V. Cooke has written: “Of a basically life-loving nature, [Mahler] was confronted from the start with the terrifying destructiveness of existence.”

Despite the dour tone of the preceding two paragraphs, Mahler was remarkably successful in his relatively short life. Though little recognized as a composer in his lifetime, Mahler became a premier conductor, spending his final years as artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera. It is said that, next to the Emperor, Mahler was the most famous man in Vienna at the time. His success as a conductor allowed him to spend most summers in quiet sylvan surroundings, where he wrote, among other things, 10 major symphonies.

And the Fifth Symphony is, in many ways, the grandest of them all. Composition began in 1901 (the same year the composer suffered a brain hemorrhage and managed to recover); the first performance took place in 1904. Not surprisingly, the narrative of the symphony is vast and complicated, musically and emotionally. Its five movements can be thought of in three groups—the grim and forbidding first movement (appropriately labelled “Funeral March”), followed by the second, whose tempo indication reads “Moving stormily, with the greatest vehemence.” Not a very auspicious instruction for the telling of a life drama. Fortunately, the threatening clouds roll away for the third movement, a fairly lilting set of undanceable dances that, in this longest movement of the entire symphony, make up the second group. The two movements that follow (group three) lead from a very tender Adagietto to a powerful, upbeat (in more ways than one) Rondo-Finale. There is a happy ending, though not without a few frightening musical flashbacks to the tumult of the opening movements.

The first movement begins with a famous trumpet call; it is in fact the Presentation March of the Austro-Hungarian Army. The stentorian trumpet and its insistent rhythm become the backbone of the entire terrifying (try playing it!) movement. The second movement builds on the demonic music and motion of the first although towards the end there is a thrilling and gigantic chorale (you might ask if chorales can be “gigantic”—but, remember, this is Mahler) in the key of D. That breath of hope gives way, of course, to a return to the frenzy of the initial minutes of the movement although its echoes recur later. The third movement, a scherzo, blends folk dances with the more refined waltzes of the time as the composer moves from death to the dance floor. By far the most well-known part of the entire symphony is the fourth movement, likely the most well-known of Mahler’s musical pronouncements. The brass and the horns are banished from the orchestral score; instead, a single harp sings with the strings. Mahler had met and married Alma Schindler while the symphony was being written, and some have suggested that this movement is a tribute to her and to their love. Regardless, its breathtaking beauty has gained it a wide and deserving audience: Leonard Bernstein performed this movement at the funeral of Bobby Kennedy in 1968, just to provide one example. The concluding movement is no less demanding of orchestra than the first two, but at least the anger has been mitigated. Fragments of all previous movements appear in the score, and the work ends with a restatement of the chorale heard earlier, only this time the music— and the entire symphony—ends in triumph.