Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

Why is it that we know so few of Franz Joseph Haydn’s symphonies? Could it simply be that he wrote so many that we struggle to get to know more than the handful that we regularly hear? Where do we start in an output of over 100 symphonies that represents such a large part of the Viennese classical world?

The 80th is one of Haydn’s lesser-played symphonies, but it quickly reminds us, despite (or because of) its relative obscurity, that ingenuity and invention rarely failed this composer. The more one dips a toe away from familiar waters and instead ventures into the less-frequently traversed parts of his symphonic output, the more we can find in which to delight — and the more Haydn’s mastery is revealed to us.

From the time he was 29 in 1761 until his death 48 years later, Haydn served at the Court of Esterházy, for the richest aristocratic family in the Austrian empire. For the second half of his time there, Haydn was increasingly involved in opera, which had become “all the rage” at court. Beginning in 1776, there was a regular operatic season at the Esterházy estate, and Haydn had to act as Kappellmeister for the operas in addition to writing his own works.

It has been suggested that Haydn’s operatic work between 1775 and 1784, both as conductor and composer, put such a strain on him that the concert music he wrote during this period fails to display the distinctive stamp of his inventive personality. It may be, however, that he was searching for new life to breathe into the symphonic and quartet forms. Symphony No. 80, written in 1784, certainly shows no signs of fatigue on Haydn’s part. Indeed, by 1786–87, when he composed the well-known “Paris” symphonies (Nos. 82–87), Haydn had gained a revitalized compositional voice with a remarkable diversity of form and expression.

In retrospect, Haydn’s operatic experience should perhaps be seen as an integral part of his symphonic development. As pianist and music critic Charles Rosen has written about this period in Haydn’s career: “The application of dramatic technique and structure to ‘absolute’ music was … the outcome of an age which saw the development of the symphonic concert as a public event. The symphony was forced to become a dramatic performance, and it accordingly developed not only something like a plot, but a unity of tone, character, and action it had only partially reached before.”

From 1782 onward, Haydn wrote his symphonies in groups of three or six. This was no doubt due to pressure from the publishing houses who preferred to issue works as sets. (The most famous of Haydn’s sets are his “London” symphonies: Nos. 93–98 and 99–104.) Musically, the groupings also allowed Haydn to vary the mood and key of the symphonies.

The three symphonies Haydn wrote in 1784 (Nos. 79–81) were for his syndicated group of publishers in Vienna, Paris, and London. No. 80, the middle work of the set, while in a traditional four-movement structure, is an excellent example of Haydn’s personal mix of symphonic and dramatic. The effects it contains are astonishing and arresting, yet always contained within strict Classical devices. And, as in so much of Haydn’s music, uneven phrase lengths and curious syncopations heighten the drama while also playing a part in the symphonic scheme of the whole work.

The ferocious beginning leads us to anticipate a movement of epic proportions, but its jokey second theme quickly dispels such expectations. Emotional contrast pervades all the movements. The slow second movement is warm and serene, while the Menuetto that follows it is more angular.

The Finale is a high-spirited romp. The off-beat rhythms at its start throw us continually off balance and never let the music settle. The whole movement is a delightful and brilliant close to an extraordinary symphony that incorporates Classical and forward-looking Romantic ideals with energy, wit, and refinement.

— Roger Wright

Roger Wright previously served as Artistic Administrator of The Cleveland Orchestra.

Gustav Mahler arguably did more to liberate symphonic form than any other composer in history.  Before Mahler, the symphony was largely tied to the formal traditions of the dance suites that preceded it. Voices were rarely used, and few had dared push the length of a symphony past 30 to 50 minutes. After Mahler, a symphony could be virtually anything the composer deemed it should be, at any length, using any resources at the composer’s disposal.

Mahler shifted the symphony’s focus away from motivic development and manipulation of key relationships and toward the juxtaposition of disparate elements for dramatic statement. “A symphony should be like the world,” Mahler once declared. “It should embrace everything.”

The son of a distillery and tavern owner and his cultured wife, Mahler’s childhood was a wrenching combination of joviality and despair. Behind the bustling business, the family witnessed a procession of tragedy — seven of Gustav’s 13 siblings died before they reached 3 years old. It’s little wonder that, throughout his life as a composer, Mahler eerily juxtaposed cheery folk tunes and funeral dirges. Young Gustav showed promise in his piano lessons and entered the Vienna Conservatory at age 15. He received a diploma three years later. 

Unable to win public recognition for his own music, Mahler turned to conducting. Over a remarkable career, he ascended the podium of Europe’s great opera houses and concert halls and led two of New York’s premier musical organizations: the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.

But success with a baton meant Mahler did most of his composing in the offseason, alone in a summer cottage, intensely trying to distill his musical thoughts of an entire year on paper.

Mahler’s first four symphonies reflect the composer’s love of song and are shot through with references to his own settings of poetry from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). In the First Symphony, these references are merely orchestral, while the next three symphonies adapt the poetry into lyrics for soloists or chorus.

With the Fifth Symphony, Mahler entered a new period where structural and instrumental considerations became paramount. Words were left behind for pure feeling. The human voice is not heard again in a Mahler symphony until his Eighth.

The genesis of the Fifth Symphony can almost certainly be dated to February 24, 1901, when the composer suffered an intestinal hemorrhage and nearly died. Mahler later wrote: “While I was hovering on the border between life and death, I wondered whether it would not be better to have done with it at once, since everyone must come to that in the end.”

Mahler started sketching the symphony in the summer of 1901, after he had just turned 41. He was lucky to be alive, and felt inclined to meditate on the meaning of a life that had nearly ended months before. The symphony opens with a funeral march, then proceeds — in reverse chronology — to major episodes in the dead man’s life, ending in a triumphant finale that represents the protagonist’s optimistic (perhaps falsely so) outlook on the cusp of life.

The symphony is five movements long, though the composer indicated that it is split into three separate sections. Part I contains the first two movements, the lengthy Scherzo stands alone as Part II, while Part III comprises the Adagietto and concluding Rondo. Mahler’s Fifth is sometimes listed as being in C-sharp minor, but the work does not dwell in a single key, and the tonal journeys for each movement support this, modulating from C-sharp minor to A minor to D major to F major and back to D major.

While working on this score, Mahler concurrently composed his first songs based on the texts of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children); some of those songs find echoes in the symphony. It was also while writing and scoring the Fifth that Mahler met, wooed, and wed Alma Schindler.

Part I

In the opening Trauermarsch (Funeral March), a solo trumpet announces death with a stark, C-sharp-minor fanfare. The orchestra takes up the cry, which leads to a lament intoned by the strings. At length, the trumpet, with its distinctive triplet figure, reasserts itself, and again the song of lamentation ensues, varied this time and expanded into something more personal than merely ritual. A third time the trumpet sounds the funeral call, but this time the orchestra takes off in an anguished cry of despair and outrage. Throughout the rest of the movement, the trumpet fanfare alternates with variations on the lament, from shock and anger to fond memories and, ultimately, resignation.

The opening bars of the second movement, marked “Stormily, with greatest vehemence,” seem to capture the tortuous defeat and rage that dominated the last years of the protagonist’s life. And then, a surprise: the strings reiterate a variant of the lament from the first movement. As the funeral fanfare in that movement was repeatedly interrupted by the lament, so will the violent outbursts of this movement alternate with slower meditations, until the woodwinds eventually turn the theme into a bright march. Near the end, the brass latch onto a subject that becomes a triumphant chorale in D major. That key becomes the new “home key” as the symphony wends its way back to a happy origin.

Part II

The Scherzo, in bright and confident D major, is a folkish Ländler (country dance), dominated by a solo obbligato horn. Mahler tosses around many related themes in masterful counterpoint. While there are quiet and reflective passages in the Scherzo, the overall mood is of vitality and adventure. The protagonist is at the peak of his life, and even the thought of death is distant.

Part III

The famous Adagietto for strings and harp is one of the most beautiful, romantic outpourings in Mahler’s output. Mahler may have intended it as a musical love letter to Alma, but one can still melt into this glorious music without knowing its exact inspiration. Its tempo is also a matter of great controversy. Mahler indicated a “very slow” tempo in both German and Italian, yet recordings of this movement by his contemporaries clock in at under 8 minutes, far less than the 10-to-12-minute Adagiettos presented over the past 50 years.

The horn, which heralds death in the opening movement then joy in the Scherzo, announces the blossoming of the protagonist’s youth. Mahler displays the polyphonic knowledge he acquired in his study of J.S. Bach, and as the melodies pick up increasing energy and pile on top of one another, a picture emerges of a new life progressing from birth through childhood to young manhood. The Adagietto theme is recalled, a portent of the protagonist’s love life. Amazingly, we hear at the very end the great D-major chorale from the second movement, the logic of its earlier appearance now made clear. Here in the Finale, it is the young protagonist’s assertion of newfound power in the world; in the second movement, it was a last grasp at the past, a farewell to the life force that had once been his. The symphony ends with the protagonist on the cusp of his maturity, unaware of the tragedy that will befall him — optimistic for the life that awaits him.

— Kenneth LaFave

Kenneth LaFave composes and writes about music. His program notes have appeared in the program books of The Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, and at Lincoln Center.