Alma Mahler (née Schindler) was considered to be the leading interpreter of Gustav Mahler’s works throughout the twentieth century. While her interpretations are incredibly important to the understanding of Gustav’s life and works as a whole, modern scholars insist we take her recollections with a grain (or tablespoon) of salt. Gustav Mahler is one of the most hyperromantic figures of the twentieth century; it makes sense that his wife would be just as passionate, therefore exaggerated, in her memories of the great composer. Her perspective is, of course, a deeply personal and intimate glance into Gustav Mahler’s life and works, though one must concede that there is no diary or memoir anywhere without an inflated account (or two). The words penned by the composer’s wife and confidante are an important source in the understanding of his life as a whole. The Sixth Symphony is Gustav Mahler’s most personal work and it is valuable to peer through the lens of the woman closest to him, especially as tragedy befell the composer and his family in the time he composed Symphony No. 6. 

She wrote of the Mahlers’ vacation to their Austrian mountain home in 1903, a “composing holiday” for Gustav. It was the summer, and Mr. and Mrs. Mahler traveled to their mountainside retreat with their young daughter, Maria Anna. Gustav Mahler was, as many composers are, vastly inspired by nature. He spent his time enjoying the outdoors (he was an avid cyclist and swimmer) and found many melodies in their wooded retreat, tucked into the Alps. Mrs. Mahler retells that her husband had drafted the first movement of No. 6 at this time, and in it he wove an ode to his wife. “I have tried to capture you in a theme; I do not know whether I have been successful,” admitted Gustav. He added, “You will have to put up with it.” The amorous F-major theme in the first movement is Alma’s theme, sweepingly luscious and passionate. Two harps accentuate the already full-bodied orchestration, adding even more romance to the texture. Alma’s theme enters the symphonic landscape after an intensely foreboding march is presented by strings, accented by snarling snare rolls that introduce the symphony. Mrs. Mahler’s theme is gorgeous but brief, soon overtaken by the return of militant basses which stomp towards another refrain of Gustav’s treacherous march. 

Mahler’s Sixth is the only one of his symphonies to end with a somber finale. The rest of his nine completed symphonies conclude either triumphantly major (the choral ending to Resurrection is pure exalted victory), or somehow transformed (the Fourth begins mysteriously but ends with visions of Heaven), but in no other Mahler symphony is his final cadence truly grim. The ending of the Sixth is requiem-esqe, going so far as to employ literal blows of inescapable fate. In the last movement, a tuba presents a distressing dotted figure—a feature present throughout the entire symphony—accompanied with a clanking interjection of harp in its lowest, spookiest register. Mahler’s orchestral textures ebb and flow just as his moods do. In a moment, a dirge turns into another march variation, though this time the stride becomes excitedly frenzied rather than particularly militant. A splash of major sonorities are heralded in by a horn solo though, gradually, the orchestral landscape takes a mysterious turn. A brief moment of herdenglocken (cow bells) breezes in from a distance alongside more offstage percussion, harkening back to Mahler’s time composing in the Alps. Just as we are lulled into a state of calm, we are smacked awake by the first of Mahler’s fateful hammer blows. 

Gustav Mahler composed the Sixth through 1904, in which time Alma gave birth to their second daughter, Anna. In the midst of what should have been the happiest time of their personal lives, Gustav Mahler busied himself with densely tumultuous works. As he wrote the Sixth, the composer was completing his newest set of vocal-orchestral works based on text by Fredrich Rückert. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) disturbed Alma greatly, and she superstitiously admonished her husband for “tempting fate” by composing such an ominous song cycle with two toddlers in their care. 

With his newest symphony completed, Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of the Sixth in May 1906, which was received with mixed reviews. The dress rehearsal, however, left the composer-conductor utterly grief-stricken. Alma wrote that Gustav was “sobbing, wringing his hands, and not in control of himself.” In her 1940 memoir, she’d go on to say that not a single other work touched his soul the way the Sixth Symphony had: 

“No other work has flowed so directly from his heart as this one. We both cried at the time; we felt so deeply what this music meant, what it forebodingly told us. The Sixth is his most personal work and is also a prophetic one. In The Songs on the Death of Children and in the Sixth, he musically anticipated his life. He, too, received three blows from fate, and the last felled him. But at the time, he was cheerful and conscious of the greatness of his work; he was a tree in full leaf and flower.” 

Although it would have been easy for Alma to make these florid comments decades later—hindsight is 20/20—the foreboding nature of the Sixth Symphony is both chilling and prophetic. Mahler had been described as a “determinist” by his first biographer, Richard Specht. Specht reported that Mahler was utterly convinced that “the creative person is lifted up by his inspiration to a higher, anticipatory level of existence, and that in his creative work he would anticipate the experience that everyday life would later bring.” Mahler’s Sixth Symphony seems eerily foreboding in retrospect, and his full body reaction to the dress rehearsal seemed to supernaturally grip his soul. Perhaps Mahler’s determinist outlook was rooted in ill-fated truth and his music indeed anticipated his grim fate. It seems that the Sixth comes straight from Gustav Mahler’s core, his work full of unfortunate premonitions. 

With the gift of hindsight, it certainly feels that the blows of fate in the Finale symbolize three major tragedies in Mahler’s final years. Although there was no way to predict it medically, the Mahler’s eldest daughter, Maria Anna, died of a fatal heart condition in July 1907, just over a year after the Sixth’s premiere. The death of his beloved Maria, only five years old, was the most meaningful “blow of fate” that struck the composer in the short time before his own death (1911). The asymmetrical rhythmic motif in the Scherzo has a particular creepiness to it when paired with this unfortunate truth; Alma Mahler had described this as the sound of children staggering while running and playing on the beach. As the third movement progresses, the rhythmic figure wanes to only include (seemingly) one child. 

The second most dreadful blow came earlier that year: in May 1907, Mahler was forced to resign from his position as music director of the Vienna Court Opera, a position he had been working towards since 1895. He was appointed in 1897, after holding multiple other conducting positions, though his tenure in Vienna was shaky from the start. In his decade on the podium there, musicians and singers found Mahler to be too demanding. In 1903, stagehands revolted against the conductor, demanding better working conditions and more realistic standards. Many operagoers did not believe that Mahler’s contemporary-leaning artistic vision was appropriate for the uber-traditional Vienna Court Opera. While these internal issues certainly influenced Mahler’s forced resignation, the most glaringly painful reason for his dismissal was political duress: Gustav Mahler—although he converted to Catholicism in 1897, specifically to secure his Viennese appointment—was consistently attacked by anti-Semetic press due to his Bohemian birth and Jewish parents.

The final blow of fate: Mahler’s diagnosis. After discovering he had a fatal heart condition, his doctors implored Mahler to avoid stress and overfatigue. A disastrous diagnosis for anyone, certainly, but especially for Mahler. Not only was he a man who found respite and inspiration in outdoor activity, he was very active while conducting. In his lifetime, Mahler was most well known as a conductor; his style on the podium was very active and gestural, and brought much of the athleticism to the craft that we see in conductors today. In her memoir, Alma Mahler states of this time, “I had been alarmed for years by the creaking sound his heart made—it was particularly loud at the second beat—and I had always known that it must be diseased . . . he had a pedometer in his pocket. His steps and pulse-beats were numbered and his life [was] a torment.” 

These three events were catastrophic to Gustav Mahler. It seemed that life itself was trying to stop the composer, that his world was doomed to collapse. As he revised the Sixth through 1906, he had no idea how hellish 1907 would be, and yet Symphony No. 6 seems to preempt Mahler’s misery. Something supernatural had indeed gripped the composer, and in completing this symphony it seems Mahler did determine his own fate. It is unclear if its nickname, Tragic, was given to the symphony by the composer or if it was superimposed onto the work post-performance, but an element of tragedy—waging an unwinnable war against a predetermined, unconquerable fate—certainly runs through the eighty-minute work.

For nearly sixty of those eighty minutes, a large wooden box sits quietly in the back of the orchestra. In the final portion of the Finale, an alarmingly large sledgehammer is raised to administer multiple menacing blows of pure sonic force. It has become known as the “Mahler Box,” though the composer refers to it in the score simply as the “hammer.” Originally written for three beastly occurrences, Mahler omitted the third blow as he revised the work over time, and performances often only include two strikes of the Mahler Box. Music critic Paul Bekker argued that the blows signify “an interference by something outside this world, something of a supernatural, crushing effect that mankind can no longer fight against.” The composer called for these obtrusive sounds to emit forcefully from the back of the ensemble at the symphony’s bitter end, “like the fall of an ax,” having no idea that they’d posthumously be aligned with tragedies in his own final years. The ultimate moments of Mahler’s Sixth are surely tragic; the symphony wages war through the final bars, ultimately closing with the dwindling feeling of certain death. We are met with a predetermined but unfortunate outcome; the symphony fades to a pianissimo close before a final full-orchestral blow from Fate, unconquered.