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GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor

In His Prime

Mahler called the central dance section of his Symphony No. 5 “an expression of incredible energy. It is a human being in full light of day, in the prime of life.” While writing the Fifth, Mahler was in the prime of his own life, both artistically and personally. He had completed four symphonies, each a significant innovation, and had met Alma Schindler, his young wife-to-be, for whom the Fifth Symphony’s transcendent slow movement was a love song. Mahler was determined to break new ground. No more heaven-storming mysticism, he vowed; no more choirs intoning visions of paradise. “There is nothing romantic or mystical about it,” he insisted. “The human voice would be absolutely out of place here. There is no need for words; everything is expressed in purely musical terms.”

By the time Mahler rehearsed the completed work in 1904, the formal scheme had changed a bit. Originally, there was to be no harp (too “romantic”?), but Mahler couldn’t resist using one briefly for the Adagietto. He originally envisioned four “self-contained” movements—a traditional symphonic structure for a change— but five emerged instead, and none are quite self-contained. Divided into three sections, they are linked by some of Mahler’s most subtle architecture: The exquisite Adagietto melody, for example, speeds up in the finale, becoming a comic waltz; and the ecstatic climax just before the coda in the finale is all the more satisfying because the same idea appears in the second movement, where its happy spirits fail to shake loose that section’s overwhelming gloom.

A Move Toward Comedy

In basic ways, Mahler did adhere to his formal and spiritual scheme. The unmistakable movement of the work is toward comedy rather than the mystical effusion of the earlier “Wunderhorn” symphonies or the tragedy of the symphony to come. (This is true despite assertions by scholars that the symphony is basically melancholy, a view clearly at odds with Mahler’s intentions.) The Fifth moves aggressively from the darkness of the opening funeral march toward the “light of day” in the finale. The Scherzo—the longest movement of the symphony and the entirety of Part II— is one of Mahler’s most extended essays in musical ribaldry; it was composed first, setting the tone and direction of the work. Rather than concluding with thoughts of resurrection or paradise, Mahler ends this symphony with a raucous laugh. One reason the Fifth feels so complete is that the journey is a considerable one; the first two movements are as dark as the last is elaborately joyful.

A Roaring Sea of Sound

How, then, does the Adagietto fit in? Taken by itself, this movement would appear to be an apparition from another, more delicate symphony. The scoring, for strings and harp alone, is different as well. When this movement was used by Visconti in his film version of Death in Venice, or by Leonard Bernstein at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, it became a heart-wrenching experience, as it always is when yanked from its context. Experienced in context, after the explosive gloom of Part I and Part II, this short movement feels like a necessary pause, a haven of calm. Since it leads, after its final sigh, directly into the finale, it seems like an introduction to it—a structural parallel to the relationship between the opening funeral march and the second movement.

One of the most challenging aspects of the symphony is the way its context keeps changing, continually deconstructing itself. Mahler was painfully aware that these radical shifts of mood might alienate his audience. “What are they to make of this chaos,” he asked his wife, “of which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble in ruin the moment after? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring sea of sound?”

What they said was exactly what Mahler feared. For nearly half a century, his symphonies were denounced for chaos, bombast, excessive length, and much else, before Bernstein and others successfully presented him as the great musical mirror of modern life. “My time will come,” Mahler was fond of saying, but it came too late to do him much good.

Three Times Homeless

Where Mahler did receive praise was from other composers, many of whom he influenced. His fundamental instability—in which new worlds are “engendered,” then brought to instant “ruin,” often without warning or transition—announces a modernity that became influential in the music of Webern, Berg, Shostakovich, and many others. Mahler’s unstable structures are often attributed not only to a sense of modern uprootedness characteristic of early 20th-century art, but to his ethnicity. An Austrian Jew born in Bohemia, he once said to his wife, “I am three times homeless; as a native Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world: everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” This loneliness is poignantly expressed in the Adagietto, which scholars are fond of linking to Mahler’s song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”).

Eyes on the Future, Heart in the Past

Mahler’s modernity is thoroughly grounded in the 19th-century German symphonic tradition, of which he was the last great exponent. According to Bernstein, who launched the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s, Mahler’s “breaking up of rhythms, his post-Wagnerian stretching of tonality to its very snapping point (but not beyond it!), his probings into a new thinness of texture, into bare linear motion … all these adumbrated what was to become 20th-century common practice; but they all emanated from those 19th-century notes he loved so well … He was a tormented, divided man, with his eyes on the future and his heart in the past.”

A Closer Listen

Despite the manic instability of much of the Fifth Symphony, each movement does have recognizable 19th-century structure, however shaky. The opening funeral march is an A-B-A structure that turns out to be an introduction to a sonata-form first movement. Based on a powerful fanfare borrowed from the development section of Mahler’s previous symphony, the march is interrupted by a typically sudden outburst of “wild” abandon (as the score marking indicates), but it does return, more mournfully than ever, strikingly harmonized by high woodwinds. The march finally dies out with a depiction of a coffin being lowered into the earth—a startlingly realistic piece of 19th-century tone painting, and a fulfillment of Mahler’s promise that “there will be no need for words” in this symphony because “everything is expressed in purely musical terms.”

The ensuing movement, to be played “with the utmost vehemence,” is technically a sonata- allegro—the most traditional of all symphonic forms—but its nightmarish fragmentation tells another story. A few stable moments tenuously hold this movement together: One is the return of the opening funeral march; another is the announcement of a chorale melody near the end that becomes not only a moment of hope in this despairing movement, but the crowning moment in the symphony two movements later.

All hell breaks loose in the Scherzo, both in the violent color of the full orchestra (which includes wood-clapper and glockenspiel) and in spectacular horn solos. This increasingly grotesque movement begins unassumingly as a ländler sequence. The slow movement, by contrast, is in a simple A-B-A format and is one of the most unambiguously gorgeous things Mahler ever wrote. It leads directly into the Rondo- Finale, which, as its title promises, keeps bringing back key tunes, much as Haydn and Beethoven did in their finales. This jubilantly contrapuntal movement piles ideas breathlessly on top of each other in a frenzied race to the finish.

—Jack Sullivan
© 2022 Carnegie Hall

Scoring
4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo)
3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn)
4 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet, 4th doubling bass clarinet)
3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon)
6 horns
4 trumpets
3 trombones tuba timpani percussion harp
Strings

Performance Time
Approximately 70 minutes

Premiere
Composed in 1901–1902, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 15, 1906, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke.

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor

In His Prime

Mahler called the central dance section of his Symphony No. 5 “an expression of incredible energy. It is a human being in full light of day, in the prime of life.” While writing the Fifth, Mahler was in the prime of his own life, both artistically and personally. He had completed four symphonies, each a significant innovation, and had met Alma Schindler, his young wife-to-be, for whom the Fifth Symphony’s transcendent slow movement was a love song. Mahler was determined to break new ground. No more heaven-storming mysticism, he vowed; no more choirs intoning visions of paradise. “There is nothing romantic or mystical about it,” he insisted. “The human voice would be absolutely out of place here. There is no need for words; everything is expressed in purely musical terms.”

By the time Mahler rehearsed the completed work in 1904, the formal scheme had changed a bit. Originally, there was to be no harp (too “romantic”?), but Mahler couldn’t resist using one briefly for the Adagietto. He originally envisioned four “self-contained” movements—a traditional symphonic structure for a change— but five emerged instead, and none are quite self-contained. Divided into three sections, they are linked by some of Mahler’s most subtle architecture: The exquisite Adagietto melody, for example, speeds up in the finale, becoming a comic waltz; and the ecstatic climax just before the coda in the finale is all the more satisfying because the same idea appears in the second movement, where its happy spirits fail to shake loose that section’s overwhelming gloom.

A Move Toward Comedy

In basic ways, Mahler did adhere to his formal and spiritual scheme. The unmistakable movement of the work is toward comedy rather than the mystical effusion of the earlier “Wunderhorn” symphonies or the tragedy of the symphony to come. (This is true despite assertions by scholars that the symphony is basically melancholy, a view clearly at odds with Mahler’s intentions.) The Fifth moves aggressively from the darkness of the opening funeral march toward the “light of day” in the finale. The Scherzo—the longest movement of the symphony and the entirety of Part II— is one of Mahler’s most extended essays in musical ribaldry; it was composed first, setting the tone and direction of the work. Rather than concluding with thoughts of resurrection or paradise, Mahler ends this symphony with a raucous laugh. One reason the Fifth feels so complete is that the journey is a considerable one; the first two movements are as dark as the last is elaborately joyful.

A Roaring Sea of Sound

How, then, does the Adagietto fit in? Taken by itself, this movement would appear to be an apparition from another, more delicate symphony. The scoring, for strings and harp alone, is different as well. When this movement was used by Visconti in his film version of Death in Venice, or by Leonard Bernstein at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, it became a heart-wrenching experience, as it always is when yanked from its context. Experienced in context, after the explosive gloom of Part I and Part II, this short movement feels like a necessary pause, a haven of calm. Since it leads, after its final sigh, directly into the finale, it seems like an introduction to it—a structural parallel to the relationship between the opening funeral march and the second movement.

One of the most challenging aspects of the symphony is the way its context keeps changing, continually deconstructing itself. Mahler was painfully aware that these radical shifts of mood might alienate his audience. “What are they to make of this chaos,” he asked his wife, “of which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble in ruin the moment after? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring sea of sound?”

What they said was exactly what Mahler feared. For nearly half a century, his symphonies were denounced for chaos, bombast, excessive length, and much else, before Bernstein and others successfully presented him as the great musical mirror of modern life. “My time will come,” Mahler was fond of saying, but it came too late to do him much good.

Three Times Homeless

Where Mahler did receive praise was from other composers, many of whom he influenced. His fundamental instability—in which new worlds are “engendered,” then brought to instant “ruin,” often without warning or transition—announces a modernity that became influential in the music of Webern, Berg, Shostakovich, and many others. Mahler’s unstable structures are often attributed not only to a sense of modern uprootedness characteristic of early 20th-century art, but to his ethnicity. An Austrian Jew born in Bohemia, he once said to his wife, “I am three times homeless; as a native Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world: everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” This loneliness is poignantly expressed in the Adagietto, which scholars are fond of linking to Mahler’s song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”).

Eyes on the Future, Heart in the Past

Mahler’s modernity is thoroughly grounded in the 19th-century German symphonic tradition, of which he was the last great exponent. According to Bernstein, who launched the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s, Mahler’s “breaking up of rhythms, his post-Wagnerian stretching of tonality to its very snapping point (but not beyond it!), his probings into a new thinness of texture, into bare linear motion … all these adumbrated what was to become 20th-century common practice; but they all emanated from those 19th-century notes he loved so well … He was a tormented, divided man, with his eyes on the future and his heart in the past.”

A Closer Listen

Despite the manic instability of much of the Fifth Symphony, each movement does have recognizable 19th-century structure, however shaky. The opening funeral march is an A-B-A structure that turns out to be an introduction to a sonata-form first movement. Based on a powerful fanfare borrowed from the development section of Mahler’s previous symphony, the march is interrupted by a typically sudden outburst of “wild” abandon (as the score marking indicates), but it does return, more mournfully than ever, strikingly harmonized by high woodwinds. The march finally dies out with a depiction of a coffin being lowered into the earth—a startlingly realistic piece of 19th-century tone painting, and a fulfillment of Mahler’s promise that “there will be no need for words” in this symphony because “everything is expressed in purely musical terms.”

The ensuing movement, to be played “with the utmost vehemence,” is technically a sonata- allegro—the most traditional of all symphonic forms—but its nightmarish fragmentation tells another story. A few stable moments tenuously hold this movement together: One is the return of the opening funeral march; another is the announcement of a chorale melody near the end that becomes not only a moment of hope in this despairing movement, but the crowning moment in the symphony two movements later.

All hell breaks loose in the Scherzo, both in the violent color of the full orchestra (which includes wood-clapper and glockenspiel) and in spectacular horn solos. This increasingly grotesque movement begins unassumingly as a ländler sequence. The slow movement, by contrast, is in a simple A-B-A format and is one of the most unambiguously gorgeous things Mahler ever wrote. It leads directly into the Rondo- Finale, which, as its title promises, keeps bringing back key tunes, much as Haydn and Beethoven did in their finales. This jubilantly contrapuntal movement piles ideas breathlessly on top of each other in a frenzied race to the finish.

—Jack Sullivan
© 2022 Carnegie Hall

Scoring
4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo)
3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn)
4 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet, 4th doubling bass clarinet)
3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon)
6 horns
4 trumpets
3 trombones tuba timpani percussion harp
Strings

Performance Time
Approximately 70 minutes

Premiere
Composed in 1901–1902, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 15, 1906, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke.