World Premiere: October 18, 1904
Most Recent HSO Performance: October 18, 1904
Instrumentation: Harp, strings
Duration: 9’

Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor (1901-1902)

In November 1901, Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, daughter of the painter Emil Jacob Schindler, then 22 and regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Vienna. Mahler was 41. Romance blossomed. They were married in March and were parents by November. Their first summer together (1902) was spent at Maiernigg, Mahler’s country retreat on the Wörthersee in Carinthia in southern Austria. It was at that time that the Fifth Symphony was composed, incorporating some sketches from the previous summer. He thought of this work as “their” music, the first artistic fruit of his married life with Alma. But more than that, he may also have wanted to create music that would be worthy of the new circle of friends that Alma, the daughter of one of Austria’s finest artists and most distinguished families, had opened to him — Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller (who became Mahler’s stage designer at the Court Opera), architect Josef Hoffmann and the rest of the cream of cultural Vienna. In the Fifth Symphony, Mahler seems to have taken inordinate care to demonstrate the mature quality of his thought (he was, after all, nearly twice Alma’s age) and to justify his lofty position in Viennese artistic life as director of the Court Opera. Free of his duties at the Opera between seasons, he labored throughout the summer of 1902 on the Fifth Symphony at his little composing hut in the woods, several minutes’ walk from the main house at Maiernigg. So delicate was the process of creation that he ordered Alma not to play the piano while he was working lest the sound, though distant, should disturb him (she was a talented musician and budding composer until her husband forbid her to practice those skills after their wedding), and he even complained that the birds bothered him because they sang in the wrong keys (!). The composition was largely completed by early autumn when the Mahlers returned to Vienna, but Gustav continued to revise the orchestration until the year he died. The serene Adagietto, perhaps the most famous (and most often detached) single movement among Mahler’s symphonies, serves as a calm interlude between the gigantic dramatic movements that surround it.

©2023 Dr. Richard E. Rodda