Photo by Moritz Nähr
Gustav Mahler famously said, “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” With their unprecedented length and enormous performance requirements, one could joke that Mahler’s early symphonies do contain everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink.
By less superficial measures, though, it is perhaps the Symphony No. 5 that most effectively spans the full range of human experience. It opens with a massive funeral march set in motion with a musical evocation of the coffin lid slamming shut. From there, it takes a survivor’s dark journey through despair, rage, terror, darkness, and fear before finally rejoining the world in joy.
The dramatic fulcrum in this transformation is the fourth movement, marked Adagietto. The shortest of the symphony’s five movements by half, it’s also the most spare, employing just strings and harp. In it, Mahler’s semi-autobiographical protagonist finds the strength to overcome the loss and tragedy expressed in the three previous movements through the power of love.
In Mahler’s case, that love was with the former Alma Schindler, the beauty of Vienna he had wooed, married, then partially alienated by insisting she give up her own composing and dedicate herself to supporting his career. In other words, Mahler’s relationship with Alma was as complicated and seemingly contradictory as the other major facets of his life.
The Adagietto has become Mahler’s most performed work, and for fairly practical reasons. Because it was crafted as a moment of emotional respite, it can be more successfully extracted from its whole than any other Mahler symphonic movement. The minimal forces it requires make it manageable. It also earned renewed fame when Leonard Bernstein conducted it at Robert Kennedy’s funeral Mass in 1968 and, a few years later, when it was used in the soundtrack of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Of course, it’s also surpassingly beautiful.
Unfortunately, the aura of death surrounding both of those more recent settings has saddled the movement with a weight – and, more importantly, length – the composer did not intend. Mahler’s own performances of the Adagietto reportedly ran about seven minutes; today’s standard is between 10 minutes and 12 minutes. While it’s certainly still beautiful slower, the extra gravitas undermines its original (one could say “true”) meaning.
One of the earliest champions of Mahler’s music was the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg. In his copy of the score of the Adagietto, he wrote a story Alma Mahler related to him in a letter: She said the Adagietto was an instrumental setting of a love song Mahler composed for her. She included the words, which Mengelberg also transcribed. This is no guarantee that the movement melody is indeed that song without voice (although words and melody do line up pretty well), but it certainly offers us a guide to approaching the piece. Those words, with translation, are:
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Wie ich Dich liebe, Du meine Sonne, |
In which way I love you, my sunbeam, |
In his sixth symphony and song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), Gustav Mahler confronted some of his darkest fears. In that symphony’s massive finale, for example, the semi-autobiographical protagonist (because everything Mahler wrote was autobiography made abstract) is broken by three blows of fate, the last of which kills him.
To create such darkness seemed strange in the summers of 1903 and 1904, when by contrast, everything in his life was sunny: As music director of the Vienna Court Opera (and, by extension, the Philharmonic), he held the most prestigious musical job in Europe; he was married to a beautiful and brilliant woman, the former Alma Schindler; and he had two young daughters, on whom he doted. He was even able to spend his summers immersed in nature in the mountains of the Austrian countryside. (“As soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself,” he wrote, “everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me.”)
Alma Mahler, in her memoirs, called the sixth a prophetic creation. Just a few years later, in 1907, three blows of fate did indeed strike the composer. Political machinations and anti-Semitism forced his resignation from the opera; his elder daughter died of scarlet fever; and he was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect that forced him to stop taking vigorous daily hikes in his beloved mountains. The weakness would contribute directly to his death in 1911.
Combined, the blows wrought emotional trauma that, like most of Mahler’s experiences, made their way into his music. Although wrestling with fate, faith, life, and death had been recurring themes since his earliest compositions, his final trilogy of masterpieces put these in rarified focus and unsurpassed technical mastery. The first of these, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), paints death from somewhat of a distance. The Symphony No. 10, still unfinished at Mahler’s death, comes more to terms with death through a brave resolve to enjoy life despite its tragedies.
It’s in the middle of the three, the Symphony No. 9, that the full force of the realization that his time is running out pours forth. What makes the symphony truly a pillar of Western civilization, though, is how Mahler harnesses his emotions with intellectual and technical discipline. The result is a masterpiece of formal and tonal innovation, crafted to make a devastating impact on the listener.
“The first movement is the greatest Mahler ever composed.” So said then-young composer Alban Berg in a letter to his wife about the ninth symphony. “This whole movement is dominated by the presentiment of death, which makes itself known again and again over the movement’s course. It is the culmination of everything on earth and in dreams, with ever more intense eruptions following the most gentle passages, and of course this intensity is strongest in the horrible moment where death becomes a certainty, where, in the middle of the deepest, most poignant longing for life, death makes itself known ‘with the greatest violence.’ Against that, there is no resistance.” (“With greatest violence” is Mahler’s instruction in the score at the movement’s climax.)
Mahler built this “greatest” movement not on usual themes and harmonies but on fragmentary motifs (one not coincidentally like a faltering heartbeat) and a recurring, massive crescendo. Those seeds are presented in quick succession from the first measure: the heartbeat in the low strings, a bell-like knell of fate in the harp, a call from a distant (muted) horn, and a fluttering figure like leaves in the wind in the violas. The violins soon enter with the official theme, whose head motif is a falling whole step from F sharp to E – the third to second degrees in a D-major scale. That falling step reappears through the movement, sometimes halting, sometimes as an emotionally dramatic ninth, occasionally in the context of the whole, heartfelt tune. What it never does until the very last note, though, is resolve to its tonic of D.
In the first movement, Mahler once again turned to a form he had made a compositional trademark, the sonata-rondo. Instead of the simple repetitions of a rondo (a main theme, labeled A, alternates with contrasting music in, for instance, an A-B-A-C-A-B-A order), Mahler transforms the contrasting sections into development sections. This results in more opportunities for detailed treatment of the building blocks of the musical material. In the ninth, this form achieves an unequalled complexity and integration into an organic whole.
The falling step turns out to be integral to the entire piece, too, reappearing in the second movement’s main ländler theme and the mocking theme of its trio. It’s back in third movement, though more disguised, and it’s central to the ongoing emotional collapse in the finale. It even can be seen in Mahler’s application of the idea of progressive tonality. He believed the progression of keys of his symphonies’ movements added emphasis to their emotional impact. In the fifth symphony, that meant an optimistic, upward shift from C-sharp minor to D major. In the ninth, it’s a disheartening, half-step slide from D to D flat.
The falling step motif also serves as one of many outside musical references, both veiled and explicit, embedded in the symphony. It’s a callback to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26, Les Adieux (The Farewell), symbolic both programmatically – the sonata portrays emotions at a forced separation from a good friend – and professionally: Mahler played the sonata in one of his first public performances. Mahler used the reference, too, in the final bars “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde.
The first movement also contains three quotes of a Johann Strauss Jr. waltz, “Freuet euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life!). It, too, is symbolic on multiple levels, the first being its obvious exhortation to enjoy the time we’re given on Earth. At its second appearance in the score, Mahler wrote, “O Jugendzeit! Entschwundene!” (Oh, time of youth! Vanished!). The waltz was written for the 1870 dedication of the great hall of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and Mahler studied at the Gesellschaft’s conservatory just a few years later. So the gaiety of a Strauss waltz provides a bittersweet memory of Mahler’s lost youth.
At the fading last notes of the finale, Mahler sneaks in a quote from the fourth of the Kindertotenlieder. The snippet’s words: “[I]n the sunshine! The day is fair on those hills in the distance.”
The symphony is unusual in having functionally two scherzos for middle movements. The first is based on the ländler, the folk dance that has evoked the Austrian countryside from Mozart through The Sound of Music. Instead of the usual reassurance of nature, though, it devolves into a sarcastic parody in which the harmonies under the ubiquitous falling-step motif crumble underneath.
The astonishing Rondo-Burleske is a tour-de-force in polyphony. It’s a double fugue built on two melodic fragments, one of which echoes the second movement of the fifth symphony. In the score, Mahler dedicated the movement “to my brothers in Apollo,” a barbed reference to critics who suggested he lacked skills in polyphony. On the Kübler-Ross stages of grief progression, this is anger, as the outline of a usually joyful polka is transformed into a vicious rage. The sun breaks through briefly in a radiant interlude, but the clarinets laugh off this attempt at happiness, and the darkness explodes again, leading the movement to a frenetic end.
The final Adagio, then, balances the sibling scherzos both structurally and emotionally. It’s an unusual configuration (the obvious analogues being Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, the Pathètique, and Mahler’s own third symphony), but, like Tchaikovsky’s work, the emotional narrative requires it. Over and over, the melody tries to climb away from the abyss (a harrowing effect created with contrabassoon and high violins), but the harmonies under the chain of falling-step links collapsing under it. Finally it reaches a desperate climax, accepts the inevitability of death and begins a long, slow fade to oblivion.
One last inside-baseball thing to listen for is the transformation of what is known as a “Wagner turn” (so-called because Wagner used it extensively). It’s an ornamentation that goes to the note above and then below a melodic note; it adds intensity and can help sustain a long, slow melody. In the ninth, it first appears in the bitter Rondo-Burleske, where, as the title suggests, it’s reduced to a caricature of its usual self. A solo trumpet in that movement’s interlude offers a glimpse of the figure’s restored nobility. In the finale, it becomes the cornerstone of the melody, laden with a majestic tragedy. Finally, that turn, by then disembodied and deconstructed, is the last thing we hear as the music fades into nothingness.
– Thomas Consolo
For half a century, Gustav Mahler’s most impassioned champion was the American composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. “The first spontaneous image that springs to my mind at the mention of the name ‘Mahler’,” he wrote, “is of a colossus straddling the magic dateline ‘1900’. His destiny was to sum up, package, and lay to ultimate rest the fantastic treasure that was German-Austrian music from Bach to Wagner.”
His evangelism went even to children in “Who is Gustav Mahler”, one of his legendary Young People’s Concerts.
Bernstein gave a far deeper insight into his views on Mahler in “The Twentieth Century Crisis”, the fifth of his Harvard Norton lectures. Bernstein homes in on Mahler at an hour and 23 minutes into the lecture and stays there for the duration.
Of the Symphony No. 9, Bernstein said, “It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate … in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything.”