Gustav Mahler on Music Theory Print

Bernstein–Mahler cycle

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First cycle#

Bernstein’s first Mahler cycle was the first (of now many) complete Mahler cycles with symphonies 1-9 recorded between 1960 and 1967 on the CBS (now Sony) label. Although they were not the first recordings of the individual symphonies, Bernstein’s advocacy was an important part of the Mahler boom of the 1960s (especially in the US) and helped increase the popularity of the less commonly played symphonies like the third, sixth, and seventh. The cycle used performances by the New York Philharmonic—the same orchestra that Mahler led during a brief tenure between 1909 and his death in 1911—as well as a performance of the 8th symphony by the London Symphony Orchestra. Bernstein subsequently re-recorded Symphony No. 2 for CBS with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1973; sometimes this recording has been included in CD editions of the cycle. Bernstein refused to conduct the complete tenth, rendered posthumously from Mahler’s sketches by the musicologist Deryck Cooke, although he did record the opening adagio with the New York Philharmonic in 1975.

Das klagende Lied

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Compositional history#

Mahler began to write the text of Das klagende Lied during the early part of his final year in the Vienna Conservatory, where he was a student between 1875 and 1878. It is based on “Der singende Knochen” (“The Singing Bone”) from the collection by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The draft text for the work is dated 18 March 1878, and composition of the music began in autumn of 1879. It was completed in November 1880. As originally composed, Das klagende Lied was in three parts: # Waldmärchen (Forest Legend) # Der Spielmann (The Minstrel) # Hochzeitsstück (Wedding Piece) The first performance did not take place until 1901, by which time Mahler had subjected his original score to several major revisions. The first revision of the work took place in the second half of 1893. This featured a significant reduction and re-arrangement of the orchestral and vocal forces, with the number of harps in the first part being reduced from six to two, and the vocal soloists from eleven to four. The boys’ voices were also removed. The off-stage orchestra, which had played an important role in the original score, was also completely removed from the second and third parts. In spite of having lavished such detailed effort on revising the work’s first part, Mahler then decided (Autumn 1893) to omit it completely. Further revisions to what was now a work in two parts (after the omission of the original first part) were made between September and December 1898. At this point, Mahler’s previous decision to remove the off-stage brass was reversed. The 1898 revisions were in fact so extensive that Mahler had to write out an entirely new manuscript score.

Das Lied von der Erde

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Composition#

Three disasters befell Mahler during the summer of 1907. Political maneuvering and antisemitism forced him to resign as Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his eldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diphtheria, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. “With one stroke”, he wrote to his friend Bruno Walter, “I have lost everything I have gained in terms of who I thought I was, and have to learn my first steps again like a newborn.” The same year saw the publication of Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, a free rewriting of others’ translations of classical Chinese poems. Mahler was captivated by the vision of earthly beauty and transience expressed in these verses and chose seven of the poems to set to music as Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler completed the work in 1909. Mahler was aware of the so-called “curse of the ninth”, a superstition arising from the fact that no major composer since Beethoven had successfully completed more than nine symphonies: he had already written eight symphonies before composing Das Lied von der Erde. Fearing his subsequent demise, he decided to subtitle the work A Symphony for Tenor, Alto (or Baritone) Voice and Orchestra, rather than numbering it as a symphony. His next symphony, written for purely instrumental forces, was numbered his Ninth. That was indeed the last symphony he fully completed, because only portions of the Tenth had been fully orchestrated at the time of his death.

Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler)

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History of composition#

Mahler’s self-composed text for the first of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Travelling Journeyman, often translated as Songs of a Wayfarer; 1884–1885) is clearly based on the Wunderhorn poem “Wenn mein Schatz”; his first genuine settings of Wunderhorn texts, however, are found in the Lieder und Gesänge (‘Songs and Airs’), published in 1892 and later renamed by the publisher as Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (Songs and Airs from Days of Youth). The nine Wunderhorn settings therein were composed between 1887 and 1890, and occupied the second and third volumes of this three-volume collection of songs for voice and piano. The titles of these nine songs (different in many cases from the titles of the original poems) are as follows: ;Volume II: # “Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen” – To Teach Naughty Children to be Good # “Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald” – I Went Happily Through a Green Wood # “Aus! Aus!” – Finished! Finished! # “Starke Einbildungskraft” – Strong Imagination ;Volume III: # “Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz” – On the Ramparts of Strasbourg # “Ablösung im Sommer” – The Changing of the Guard in Summer # “Scheiden und Meiden” – Farewell and Forgo # “Nicht wiedersehen!” – Never to Meet Again # “Selbstgefühl” – Self-assurance Mahler began work on his next group of Wunderhorn settings in 1892. A collection of 12 of these was published in 1899, under the title Humoresken (‘Humoresques’), and formed the basis of what is now known simply (and somewhat confusingly) as Mahler’s ‘Songs from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”’. Whereas the songs in the Lieder und Gesänge collection were conceived for voice and piano, with no orchestral versions being produced by the composer, the Humoresken were conceived from the beginning as being for voice and orchestra, even though Mahler’s first step was the production of playable and publishable voice-and-piano versions. The titles in this 1899 collection are: # “Der Schildwache Nachtlied” – The Sentinel’s Nightsong (January–February 1892) # “Verlor’ne Müh” – Labour Lost (February 1892) # “Trost im Unglück” – Solace in Misfortune (April 1892) # “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” – Who Thought Up This Song? (April 1892) # “Das irdische Leben” – Earthly Life (after April 1892) # “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” – St. Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish (July–August 1893) # “Rheinlegendchen” – Little Rhine Legend (August 1893) # “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm” – Song of the Persecuted in the Tower (July 1898), see: Die Gedanken sind frei # “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” – Where the Fair Trumpets Sound (July 1898) # “Lob des hohen Verstandes” – Praise of Lofty Intellect (June 1896) # “Es sungen drei Engel” – Three Angels Sang a Sweet Air (1895) # “Urlicht” – Primeval Light (1893) “Urlicht” (composed ?1892, orch. July 1893) was rapidly incorporated (with expanded orchestration) into Symphony No. 2 (1888–1894) as the work’s fourth movement; “Es sungen drei Engel”, by contrast, was specifically composed as part of Symphony No. 3 (1893–1896): requiring a boys’ chorus and a women’s chorus in addition to an alto soloist, it is the only song among the twelve for which Mahler did not produce a voice-and-orchestra version and the only one which he did not first publish separately. Other songs found themselves serving symphonic ends in other ways: a voiceless version of “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” forms the basis of the scherzo in Symphony No. 2, and “Ablösung im Sommer” is adopted in the same way by Symphony No. 3. An additional setting from this period was “Das himmlische Leben” (“Heavenly Life”), of February 1892 (orchestrated March 1892). By the year of the collection’s publication (1899) this song had been reorchestrated and earmarked as the finale of the 4th Symphony (1899–1900), and thus was not published as part of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, nor was it made available in a voice-and-piano version. After 1901, “Urlicht” and “Es sungen drei Engel” were removed from the collection, and replaced in later editions by two other songs, thus restoring the total number of songs in the set to twelve. The two new songs were: : “Revelge” – Reveille (July 1899) : “Der Tamboursg’sell” – The Drummer Boy (August 1901) Shortly after Mahler’s death, the publisher (Universal Edition) replaced Mahler’s own piano versions of the Wunderhorn songs by piano reductions of the orchestral versions, thus obscuring the differences in Mahler’s writing for the two media. In spite of this, voice-and-piano performances, especially of the lighter songs, are frequent. The original piano versions were re-published in 1993 as part of the critical edition, edited by and Thomas Hampson.

Frederica von Stade – Mahler Songs

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Recording#

The album was recorded using analogue technology on 8, 15 and 16 December 1978 in Abbey Road Studios, London. On 14 December 1978, von Stade, Davis and the London Philharmonic included the Gesellen songs in a concert given in London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Cover art#

The LP and cassette versions of the album share the same cover, designed by Allen Weinberg, featuring a photograph of von Stade taken by Valérie Clément.

Kindertotenlieder

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Poems and setting#

The original were a group of 428 poems written by Rückert in 1833–34 in an outpouring of grief following the illness (scarlet fever) and death of two of his children. Karen Painter describes the poems thus: “Rückert’s 428 poems on the death of children became singular, almost manic documents of the psychological endeavor to cope with such loss. In ever new variations Rückert’s poems attempt a poetic resuscitation of the children that is punctuated by anguished outbursts. But above all the poems show a quiet acquiescence to fate and to a peaceful world of solace.” Mahler selected five of Rückert’s poems to set as Lieder, which he composed between 1901 and 1904. The songs are written in Mahler’s late-romantic idiom, and like the texts reflect a mixture of feelings: anguish, fantasy resuscitation of the children, resignation. The final song ends in a major key and a mood of transcendence. The cello melody in the postlude to "" (mm. 129–133) alludes to the first subject of the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (1895/96), a movement titled “What love tells me” (""). “Musically, then, this is the last word of the : that death is powerful, yet love is even stronger.”

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

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Introduction#

The work’s compositional history is complex and difficult to trace. Mahler appears to have begun composing the songs in December 1884 and to have completed them in 1885. He subjected the score to a great deal of revision, probably between 1885 and 1886, and some time in the early 1890s orchestrated the original piano accompaniments. As a result of this situation, various discrepancies exist between the different sources. It appears to have been in the orchestral version that the cycle was first performed on 16 March 1896 by the Dutch baritone Anton Sistermans with the Berlin Philharmonic and Mahler conducting, but possible indications of an earlier voice-and-piano performance cannot be discounted. The work was published in 1897 and is one of Mahler’s best-known compositions. The lyrics are by the composer himself, though they are influenced by Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German folk poetry that was one of Mahler’s favorite books, and the first song is actually based on the Wunderhorn poem “Wann mein Schatz”. In this song cycle, Mahler extensively uses progressive tonality. Each of the four songs ends in a different key: (1) D minor to G minor; (2) D major to F-sharp major; (3) D minor to E-flat minor; (4) E minor to F minor. There are strong connections between this work and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, with the main theme of the second song being the main theme of the first movement and the final verse of the fourth song reappearing in the third movement as a contemplative interruption of the funeral march. In addition to the solo baritone, the work is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (both doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, and glockenspiel) harp, and strings.

Lieder und Gesänge (Mahler)

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External links#

Discography
Lieder und Gesänge (orch. Matthews)

Mahler Symphony No. 4 (Claudio Abbado 1978 recording)

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Recording#

The album was recorded using analogue technology in May 1977 in the Grosser Saal (main auditorium) of the Musikverein in Vienna.

Packaging#

The covers of the first LP, cassette and CD versions of the album share the same photograph taken by Herbert Tobias of Hamburg. The cover of the Abbado Edition release of the album, designed under the art direction of Hartmut Pfeiffer, features a photograph of Abbado taken by G. Baroni.

Mahler Symphony No. 4 (Yoel Levi recording)

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Background#

The album was recorded shortly after von Stade and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra had performed its programme with Levi in concert.

Recording#

The album was recorded digitally on 11–12 July 1998 in Symphony Hall at the Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, Georgia.

Packaging#

The cover of the album was designed by Jim Burt of Burt & Burt Studio under the art direction of Anilda Carrasquillo. It features photography by Tom and Pat Leeson.

Piano Quartet (Mahler)

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Background#

Mahler began work on the Piano Quartet in A minor towards the end of his first year at the Vienna Conservatory, when he was around 15 or 16 years of age. The piece had its first performance on July 10, 1876, at the conservatory with Mahler at the piano, The final known performance of the Quartet in the 19th century was at Iglau on September 12, 1876, with Mahler again at the piano; it was performed along with a violin sonata by Mahler that has not survived. It appears that at one point Mahler wished to publish the Quartet, as the surviving manuscript, which includes 24 bars of a scherzo for piano quartet written in G minor, bears the stamp of the publisher Theodor Rättig. Following the rediscovery of the manuscript by Mahler’s widow Alma Mahler in the 1960s, the work was premiered in the United States on February 12, 1964, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City by Peter Serkin and the Galimir Quartet. Four years later it was performed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 1968, at the Purcell Room, London, by the Nemet Ensemble.

Rückert-Lieder

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Composition#

In 1897, Mahler became the director of the Vienna Hofoper. Over the following years his compositional output dwindled due to over-work and ill health; between 1897 and 1900, he only completed the Fourth Symphony and the Des Knaben Wunderhorn setting “Revelge”. Eventually Mahler suffered a near-fatal haemorrhage on the night of February 24, 1901, requiring emergency treatment, an operation, and a seven week long recuperation. From June to August 1901, Mahler spent his vacation at his newly completed lakeside villa near Maiernigg. Its isolation meant the summer was peaceful, and he experienced the most productive summer of his life, completing two movements of the Fifth Symphony and eight Lieder, including four of the Rückert-Lieder. By 10 August, Mahler was playing six of his Rückert settings (including three of the Kindertotenlieder) plus “Der Tamboursg’sell” to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, and according to her chronicles, each song was composed in one day and orchestrated the next day. Then on 16 August, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” was completed. The serenity of his surroundings, as well as the emotional aftereffects of the near-death experience he had suffered earlier in 1901 (seen most in “Um Mitternacht”) exerted a considerable influence on the Rückert-Lieder, and they contributed to Mahler creating a new musical style which has been said to " reveal an artist who is already exploring another world". The next year, after his courtship and marriage to Alma Schindler, Mahler composed another Rückert setting that was eventually added to the collection: “Liebst du um Schönheit”. Unlike the other four, this was solely intended as a private gift to Alma as a proof of his love for her, due to simmering tensions between her and Mahler at the time. On 10 August, Mahler presented the song to Alma, who was deeply moved by the setting of the last line: Due to its intimate nature, Mahler never orchestrated the song, and it was not performed in public in Mahler’s lifetime. Instead, when the full collection was published, it was orchestrated by Max Pullman, an editor at the publishing company , who first published these Lieder.

Song of the Earth (ballet)

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Tudor version#

As staff choreographer with Ballet theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), Antony Tudor began creating a ballet set to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The six songs based on ancient Chinese poems, expressing the transience of human existence, had long interested him as a choreographic possibility. He explained their appeal: “Like the seasons, human experience is cyclical and has no sudden beginning or end.” His ballet, entitled Shadow of the Wind, had its premiere on 14 April 1948 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Scenery, costumes, and lighting were designed by Jo Mielziner. The dancers were Igor Youskevitch, Hugh Laing, and Dimitri Romanoff (in “Six Idlers of the Bamboo Valley,” set to song I); Alicia Alonso, John Kriza, and Mary Burr (in “The Abandoned Wife,” set to song II); Ruth Ann Koesun and Crandall Diehl (in “My Lord Summons Me,” set to song III); Diana Adams and Zachary Solov (in “The Lotus Gatherers,” set to song IV); Hugh Laing (in “Conversation with Winepot and Bird,” set to song V); and Nana Goldner, Hugh Laing, and Dimitri Romanoff (in “Poem for the Guitar,” set to song VI). Photographs of the cast by Carl Van Vechten show elaborate costumes of flowing draperies in pseudo-Chinese style and the dancers in supposedly Oriental attitudes. The ballet was not a success, receiving scarcely a positive word in the press. John Martin, writing in the New York Times, damned it with faint praise. “To this combination of ancient Chinese classic hedonism already screened through a process of Germanic Weltschmerz, Tudor has deliberately added the academic formation of the traditional ballet. The work had only three performances, the last of which played to a house that had dropped to 24 percent capacity.

Symphony No. 1 (Mahler)

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Composition#

The symphony’s movements are arranged in a fairly typical four-movement setup. Conventionally, the minuet and trio would be the third movement and the slow movement the second, but Mahler has them switched, which was also sometimes done by Ludwig van Beethoven. The keys are D major for the first movement, A major for the second, D minor for the third, and F minor for the last, with a grand finale at the end in D major. The use of F minor for the last movement was a dramatic break from convention. For the first three performances (Budapest, Hamburg and Weimar), an additional movement, (flower piece), was played between the first and second movements of the piece as it now stands. This movement was originally written in June 1884 as the opening piece – "" – of Mahler’s incidental music for a series of seven tableaux vivants based on Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s poem Der Trompeter von Säckingen, which, Blumine aside, has since been lost. The addition of this movement appears to have been an afterthought, and Mahler discarded it after the Weimar performance in 1894; it was rediscovered in 1966 by Donald Mitchell. The following year, Benjamin Britten conducted the first performance of it since Mahler’s time at the Aldeburgh Festival. The symphony is almost never played with this movement included today, although it is sometimes heard separately. In the 1970s, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra made the first recording of the symphony by a major orchestra to include Blumine. Some 20 recordings exist that include Blumine; however, most of them combine it with the revised edition of the other movements, thus making a “blended” version of the symphony that was at no time authorised by Mahler. Nevertheless, Mahler quotes the main theme from the Blumine movement in two subsequent movements. It appears early in the second movement; he also quotes it in the final movement, as well as other themes from the other movements, which is in keeping with Beethoven’s own practice in his Symphony No. 9 of quoting themes from the first, second, and third movements early in the final movement. Beethoven gave the impression of rejecting the earlier themes, after he quotes them, and then introduces the famous “Ode to Joy” theme. The five-movement version generally runs around an hour, just as Mahler’s later symphonies (except for Symphony No. 4) are an hour or longer in length. Mahler followed a precedent, established by Beethoven in his ninth symphony and by Anton Bruckner in many of his symphonies, of lengthier, more detailed development of the themes, usually resulting in a performance time of an hour or more. Under this early five-movement scheme, the work was envisioned by Mahler as a large symphonic poem in two parts, and he wrote a programme to describe the piece, but without adding any further title for the 1889 Budapest première. The first part consisted of the first two movements of the symphony as it is now known plus Blumine, and the second consisted of the funeral-march and finale. For the 1893 Hamburg and 1894 Weimar performances, Mahler gave the piece the title Titan after the novel by Jean Paul, although Mahler specified that the piece was not in any way “about” the book; the nickname is often used today, but properly only applies to those two versions. changed from major to minor, thus giving the piece the character of a funeral march. The mode change to minor is not an invention by Mahler, as is often believed, but rather the way this round was sung in the 19th and early 20th century in Austria. A similar use of is present throughout the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

Symphony No. 10 (Mahler)

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Composition#

Mahler started work on his tenth symphony in July 1910 in Toblach, and ended his efforts in September. He did not complete the orchestral draft before his May 1911 death at the age of 50 from a streptococcal infection of the blood. Mahler’s drafts and sketches for the Tenth Symphony comprise 72 pages of full score, 50 pages of continuous short score draft (two of which are missing), and a further 44 pages of preliminary drafts, sketches, and inserts. In the form in which Mahler left it, the symphony has five movements: # Andante–Adagio: 275 bars drafted in orchestral and short score # Scherzo: 522 bars drafted in orchestral and short score # Purgatorio. Allegro moderato: 170 bars drafted in short score, the first 30 of which were also drafted in orchestral score # Scherzo. Nicht zu schnell : about 579 bars drafted in short score # Finale. Langsam, schwer: 400 bars drafted in short score The parts in short score were usually in four staves. The designations of some movements were altered as work progressed: for example, the second movement was initially envisaged as a finale. The fourth movement was also relocated many times. Mahler then started on an orchestral draft of the symphony, which begins to bear some signs of haste after the halfway point of the first movement. He had got as far as orchestrating the first two movements and the opening 30 bars of the third movement when he had to put the work aside to make final revisions to the Ninth Symphony. The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Tenth were highly unusual. Mahler was at the height of his compositional powers, but his personal life was in complete disarray, most recently compounded by the revelation that his young wife, Alma, had had an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. Mahler sought counseling from Sigmund Freud, and dedicated the Eighth Symphony to Alma on the verge of its successful première in Munich in a desperate attempt to repair the breach. The unsettled frame of Mahler’s mind found expression in the despairing comments (many addressed to Alma) on the manuscript of the Tenth, and must have influenced its composition: on the final page of the final movement, Mahler wrote, “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” (To live for you! To die for you!) and the exclamation “Almschi!” (his pet name for Alma) underneath the last soaring phrase.

Symphony No. 2 (Mahler)

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Origin#

Mahler completed what would become the first movement of the symphony in 1888 as a single-movement symphonic poem called Totenfeier (Funeral Rites). Some sketches for the second movement also date from that year. Mahler wavered five years on whether to make Totenfeier the opening movement of a symphony, although his manuscript does label it as a symphony. In 1893, he composed the second and third movements. The finale was the problem. While thoroughly aware he was inviting comparison with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9—both symphonies use a chorus as the centerpiece of a final movement which begins with references to and is much longer than those preceding it—Mahler knew he wanted a vocal final movement. Finding the right text for this movement proved long and perplexing. When Mahler took up his appointment at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, he found the other important conductor there to be Hans von Bülow, who was in charge of the city’s symphony concerts. Bülow, not known for his kindness, was impressed by Mahler. His support was not diminished by his failure to like or understand Totenfeier when Mahler played it for him on the piano. Bülow told Mahler that Totenfeier made Tristan und Isolde sound to him like a Haydn symphony. As Bülow’s health worsened, Mahler substituted for him. Bülow’s death in 1894 greatly affected Mahler. At the funeral, Mahler heard a setting of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s poem (The Resurrection), where the dictum calls out “Rise again, yes, you shall rise again / My dust”. “It struck me like lightning, this thing,” he wrote to conductor Anton Seidl, “and everything was revealed to me clear and plain.” Mahler used the first two verses of Klopstock’s hymn, then added verses of his own that dealt more explicitly with redemption and resurrection. He finished the finale and revised the orchestration of the first movement in 1894, then inserted the song “Urlicht” (Primal Light) as the penultimate movement. This song was probably written in 1892 or 1893. Mahler initially devised a narrative programme (actually several variant versions) for the work, which he showed to a number of friends (including Natalie Bauer-Lechner and ). He even had one of these versions printed in the program book at the premiere in Dresden on 20 December 1901. In this programme, the first movement represents a funeral and asks questions such as “Is there life after death?”; the second movement is a remembrance of happy times in the life of the deceased; the third movement represents a view of life as meaningless activity; the fourth movement is a wish for release from life without meaning; and the fifth movement – after a return of the doubts of the third movement and the questions of the first – ends with a fervent hope for everlasting, transcendent renewal, a theme that Mahler would ultimately transfigure into the music of Das Lied von der Erde. As generally happened, Mahler later withdrew all versions of the programme from circulation.

Symphony No. 3 (Mahler)

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Structure#

In its final form, the work has six movements, grouped into two parts: The first movement alone, with a normal duration of a little more than thirty minutes, sometimes forty, forms Part One of the symphony. Part Two consists of the other five movements and has a duration of about sixty to seventy minutes. As with each of his first four symphonies, Mahler originally provided a programme of sorts to explain the narrative of the piece. He did not reveal the structure and content to the public. But, at different times, he shared evolving versions of a program for the third symphony with various friends: Max Marschalk, a music critic; violist Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a close friend and confidante; and Anna von Mildenburg, the dramatic soprano and Mahler’s lover during the summer of 1896 when he was completing the symphony. Bauer-Lechner wrote in her private journal that Mahler said, “You can’t imagine how it will sound!” In its simplest form, the program consists of a title for each of the six movements: Mahler, however, elaborated on this basic scheme in various letters. In an 1896 letter to Max Marschalk, he called the whole “A Summer’s Midday Dream”, and within Part One, distinguished two sections, “Introduction: Pan awakes” and “I. Summer marches in (Bacchic procession)”. In a June 1896 letter to Anna von Mildenburg, Mahler reaffirmed that he conceived the first movement in two sections: I. What the stony mountains tell me; II. Summer marches in. In another letter to Mildenburg from Summer 1896, he said that “Pan” seemed to him the best overall title () for the symphony, emphasizing that he was intrigued by Pan’s two meanings, a Greek god and a Greek word meaning “all”. All these titles were dropped before publication in 1898. Indeed, several musical motifs taken from “Heavenly Life” appear in the fifth (choral) movement of the Third Symphony.

Symphony No. 4 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is the last of the composer’s three symphonies (the others being his Second and Third Symphonies). These works incorporated themes originating in Mahler’s (The Boy’s Magic Horn), a song cycle setting poems from the folk poetry collection of the same name. The core of the Fourth Symphony is an earlier song, (“The Heavenly Life”), set to text from but not included in Mahler’s song cycle. Mahler considered the song both the inspiration and goal of the Fourth Symphony, calling it the “tapering spire of the edifice.” Fragments of it are heard in the first three movements before it is sung in its entirety by a solo soprano in the fourth movement. Mahler completed in 1892, as part of a collection of five (Humoresques) for voice and orchestra. He adapted the text of from the original Bavarian folk song (“Heaven is Hung with Violins” or “The World through Rose-colored Glasses”) in . The poem describes scenes and characters from a child’s vision of heaven. In 1895, Mahler considered using the song as the sixth and final movement of his Third Symphony. While remnants of can be found in the Third Symphony’s first, fourth, and fifth movements—including a quotation of the song in the fifth movement’s (“Three Angels were Singing”)—Mahler eventually decided to withdraw the song from the work. He instead opted to use the song as the finale of a new symphony, his Fourth. Consequently, there are particularly strong thematic and programmatic connections between the Third and the Fourth through , though the composer also realized that the Fourth was closely related to his First and Second Symphonies. In conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the summer of 1900, Mahler described the Fourth Symphony as the conclusion to the “perfectly self-contained tetralogy” of his first four symphonies: she later expanded on this to suggest that the First depicts heroic suffering and triumph; the Second explores death and resurrection; the Third contemplates existence and God; and the Fourth, as an extension of the Third’s ideas, explores life in heaven. According to Paul Bekker’s 1921 synopsis of the symphony, Mahler made an early program sketch titled that has the following six-movement form: The sketch indicates that Mahler originally planned for the Fourth Symphony to have three purely symphonic movements (first, third, and fifth) and three orchestra songs: (composed as a song), (completed in 1895 as the Third Symphony’s ), and . However, the symphony would be modified until only the program sketch’s first and last movements would be realized as their respective movements in the symphony’s final form, resulting in a Fourth Symphony of normal symphonic length (around 45 minutes) as opposed to the composer’s significantly longer earlier symphonies. During Mahler’s 1899 summer vacation in Bad Aussee, the Fourth Symphony, in Bauer-Lechner’s words, “fell into his lap just in the nick of time” in late July. The vacation served as Mahler’s only chance during the entire year when he was free to compose, but his productivity heretofore was hindered by poor weather and listening to what he called “ghastly health-resort music”. As the vacation neared its end, Mahler worked on the symphony for ten days, during which he drafted “about half” of the three instrumental movements and sketched the variations of the Adagio third movement, according to Bauer-Lechner. Mahler finished the Fourth during his summer vacation in Maiernigg the next year; following another bout of unproductivity that summer, Mahler eventually found his working rhythm and completed the symphony’s (first full orchestral score) on 5 August 1900. The symphony’s completion suddenly left Mahler feeling “empty and depressed because life has lost all meaning”, and Bauer-Lechner reports that he was “deeply upset to have lost such an important part of his life” composing the work. Later that year during the Christmas holidays, Mahler revised the Scherzo second movement, finalizing its orchestration on 5 January 1901. Though Mahler published his programs for the First and Second symphonies, he refrained from publishing a program for the Fourth. In the words of the musicologist James L. Zychowicz, Mahler intended for “the music to exist on its own.” Mahler was also opposed to giving any titles for the symphony’s movements, despite having “devised some marvelous ones”, because he did not want critics and audiences to “misunderstand and distort them in the worst possible way.”

Symphony No. 5 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition history#

Mahler wrote his fifth symphony during the summers of 1901 and 1902. In February 1901 Mahler had suffered a sudden major hemorrhage and his doctor later told him that he had come within an hour of bleeding to death. The composer spent quite a while recuperating. He moved into his own lakeside villa in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia in June 1901. Mahler was delighted with his newfound status as the owner of a grand villa. According to friends, he could hardly believe how far he had come from his humble beginnings. He was director of the Vienna Court Opera and the principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. His own music was also starting to be successful. Later in 1901 he met Alma Schindler and by the time he returned to his summer villa in summer 1902, they were married and she was expecting their first child. Symphonies Nos. 5, 6 and 7, which all belong to this period, have much in common and are markedly different from the first four, which all have strong links to vocal music. The middle symphonies, by contrast, are pure orchestral works and are, by Mahler’s standards, taut and lean. Counterpoint also becomes a more important element in Mahler’s music from Symphony No. 5 onwards. The ability to write good counterpoint was highly cherished by Baroque composers, and Johann Sebastian Bach is generally regarded as the greatest composer of contrapuntal music. Bach played an important part in Mahler’s musical life at this time. He subscribed to the edition of Bach’s collected works that was being published at the turn of the century, and later conducted and arranged works by Bach for performance. Mahler’s renewed interest in counterpoint can best be heard in the second, third and fifth movements of this symphony.

Symphony No. 6 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nickname of#

The status of the symphony’s nickname is problematic. Nor does the word appear on any of the scores that C. F. Kahnt published (first edition, 1906; revised edition, 1906), in Specht’s officially approved (’thematic guide’) or on Zemlinsky’s piano duet transcription (1906). By contrast, in his Gustav Mahler memoir, Bruno Walter claimed that “Mahler called the work his Tragic Symphony”. Additionally, the programme for the first Vienna performance (4 January 1907) refers to the work as . Although not using the title, Alma Mahler’s famous statement has influenced the association of the symphony with tragedy:

Symphony No. 7 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

In 1904, Mahler was enjoying great international success as a conductor, but he was also, at last, beginning to enjoy international success as a composer. His second daughter was born that June, and during his customary summer break away from Vienna in his lakeside retreat at Maiernigg in the Carinthian mountains, he finished his Symphony No. 6 and sketched the second and fourth movements (the two Nachtmusik movements) for Symphony No. 7 while mapping out much of the rest of the work. He then worked on the Seventh intensively the following summer. While Mahler later claimed to take just four weeks to complete the first, third and fifth movements, scholars have asserted that a timeframe of six to seven weeks is more plausible. The completed score was dated 15 August 1905, and the orchestration was finished in 1906; he laid the Seventh aside to make small changes to the orchestration of Symphony No. 6, while rehearsing for its premiere in May 1906. The Seventh had its premiere on 19 September 1908, in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic, at the festival marking the Diamond Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. The three years which elapsed between the completion of the score and the symphony’s premiere witnessed dramatic changes in Mahler’s life and career. In March 1907 he had resigned his conductorship of the Vienna State Opera, as the musical community in Vienna turned against him (which was why he chose Prague for the work’s debut); on 12 July his first daughter died of scarlet fever; and, even as she lay on her deathbed, Mahler learned that he was suffering from an incurable heart condition. Musicologists surmise that this is why the optimism and cheerfulness of the symphony was subsequently tempered by the small but significant revisions Mahler made in the years leading up to its premiere. The symphony was first published in 1909 by the firm Bote & Bock. In 1960, a critical edition of the symphony edited by Erwin Ratz appeared, correcting about 800 printing errors. Two years later, Hans Redlich’s edition of the symphony was published without any of Mahler’s amendments to the score made after publication, unlike Ratz’s edition.

Symphony No. 8 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

By the summer of 1906, Mahler had been director of the Vienna Hofoper for nine years. Throughout this time his practice was to leave Vienna at the close of the Hofoper season for a summer retreat, where he could devote himself to composition. Since 1899 this had been at Maiernigg, near the resort town of Maria Wörth in Carinthia, southern Austria, where Mahler built a villa overlooking the Wörthersee. In these restful surroundings Mahler completed his Symphonies No. 4, No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7, his Rückert songs and his song cycle Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). Until 1901, Mahler’s compositions had been heavily influenced by the German folk-poem collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), which he had first encountered around 1887. The music of Mahler’s many Wunderhorn settings is reflected in his Symphonies No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4, which all employ vocal as well as instrumental forces. From about 1901, however, Mahler’s music underwent a change in character as he moved into the middle period of his compositional life. Here, the more austere poems of Friedrich Rückert replace the Wunderhorn collection as the primary influence; the songs are less folk-related, and no longer infiltrate the symphonies as extensively as before. During this period Symphonies No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7 were written, all as purely instrumental works, portrayed by Mahler scholar Deryck Cooke as “more stern and forthright …, more tautly symphonic, with a new granite-like hardness of orchestration”. The composer’s wife Alma Mahler, in her memoirs, says that for a fortnight Mahler was “haunted by the spectre of failing inspiration”; Mahler’s recollection, however, is that on the first day of the vacation he was seized by the creative spirit, and plunged immediately into composition of the work that would become his Eighth Symphony.

Symphony No. 9 (Mahler)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instrumentation#

The symphony is scored for a large orchestra, consisting of the following: ;Woodwinds :piccolo :4 flutes :4 oboes (4th doubling cor anglais) :E clarinet :3 B and A clarinets :bass clarinet :4 bassoons (4th doubling contrabassoon) ;Brass :4 horns :3 trumpets :3 trombones :tuba ;Percussion :4 timpani :bass drum :snare drum :cymbals :triangle :tam-tam :3 deep bells in F, A, and B :glockenspiel ;Strings :2 harps :1st violins :2nd violins :violas :cellos :double basses