In 1901, Mahler began work on his song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), a setting of poetry by Friedrich Rückert, who wrote his work of the same title after the death of his two children. Gustav’s wife Alma was understandably mortified by this morbid new work, having just given birth to their second child. But as Mahler’s family grew, he was afflicted with persistent thoughts of mortality of children, having lost seven siblings during childhood. He was especially devastated when his younger brother, Ernst, died in 1875, and the sorrow continued when his brother Otto took his own life in 1895. These traumas lingered in Mahler’s psychology, and themes of death pervaded his music. Alma’s superstitions came to tragic fruition when, in 1907, their first daughter, Maria, died of scarlet fever.
Mahler had his own superstitions and feared the curse of the ninth symphony that afflicted Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner. Thinking he could cheat death, following his eighth, he composed a symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). But his Ninth Symphony would be his last, completing it in 1909. In 1911, he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis related to his defective heart valves that led to pneumonia, dying in Vienna on May 18, 1911, one year before his final finished symphony was premiered. He was buried next to his daughter Maria.
Conductor Ádám Fischer poignantly observes that the symphony “...is not about death, but about dying. Death and dying are two entirely different matters...the finale is just one sole extended act of dying, the disintegration of life.”
The melodic fragments of the third movement are completed here with a rich, yearning melody in the strings alone, until the contrabassoon appears as a spectre. The strings fight at first, then settle into the inevitability of death with ponderous melodies that climb toward a first climax. The color of the movement changes when winds alone convey an eerie, ethereal solitude. The orchestra combines and heroically grasps for climaxes, but relents, settling into the conclusive moments of stillness. Time and space are suspended in near silence as the final threads of life dissipate into nothing.
