Mahler’s Sixth Symphony

The English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827) claimed from a young age that he had prophetic dreams of God, Satan, heaven, eternity, and dead friends and relations, pouring the spiritual and emotional energy of these reveries into his literary and artistic works. His visions helped him develop a singular voice and aesthetic philosophy, but they also created a distance between him and other writers of his era, like William Wordsworth, who was fascinated by Blake but said, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad.”

Blake’s “Mad Song,” originally published in his 1783 volume Poetical Sketches, is written from the perspective of someone who has known ostracism and isolation. Initially, the speaker presents as a tortured insomniac, expressing dread about the approaching dawn as a storm rages in the background and “the wild winds weep.” In the middle stanza, he reveals his agency, acknowledging that it is his own cries that “make mad the roaring winds.” By the third and final stanza, the speaker displays an understanding of his own idiosyncratic point of view, identifying himself as “a fiend in a cloud” and explaining that he turns his back on the clarity and brightness that gives others comfort because “light doth seize my brain / With frantic pain.”

“Mad Song” is full of sounds — the “rustling birds of dawn” and the speaker’s “howling woe,” to name two — and the throbbing resonances of the text make the poem a particularly fruitful site for musical adaptations. Several composers over the years have set the text for voice, but in his 2020 concerto Mad Song, American composer Geoffrey Gordon chose to represent the guttural cries of the poem’s subject with the reedy sound of an English horn.

In a 2024 recording of the concerto with soloist Dimitri Mestdag and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gordon recalls in the liner notes how “William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience lit my love of poetry in college. I have been looking for a way to write a Blake-inspired work ever since. … The text of this Mad Song speaks for itself — riveting, harrowing, full of passion and madness. Who wouldn’t want to score that? Seize my brain, indeed.” In many of his works, Gordon chooses underappreciated members of the orchestra to tackle literary and mythic source material. The English horn is strongly associated with pastoral contexts; for example, it plays a lonely shepherd’s call in the third movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (“Scene in the Country”). It is haunting to hear this instrument of forests and fields instead embody the crazed subject of “Mad Song,” who scorns the comforts of such bucolic imagery and wishes to remain ensconced in night and misery.

Gordon uses the three stanzas of the poem as inspiration for the concerto’s three continuously played movements. In the opening, he writes violent swells in the percussion and brass, along with swirling sweeps and trills in the winds, bringing the stormy scene to life. The English horn’s entries are obsessed with a nagging, lamenting, falling half step. Even when the soloist has explosive figures that traverse the range of the instrument, these moments of turbulence often come to settle on that simple, narrow interval. Close to the end of the first movement, the harp offers a few consolatory arpeggios, glimpses of dawn that only drive the music further into darkness.

The second movement starts with a swaying, slow dance in a lopsided 5/4 time. Bass pizzicatos, loose pulses from the cellos and violas, and a sweet melody from the soloist give the music the slightest hint of pastoral calm, but the percussion and brass continually interrupt with menacing chirps, those desperate notes that “strike the ear of night.” These cries eventually take over the texture, leading to a thunderous climax and a cadenza in which the soloist develops the half-step idea, presenting it more and more frantically.

The orchestra reenters for the third movement, which begins with violent statements from the timpani and, after a section of glassy stillness, builds to a final, desperate expression of “howling woe.”

— Nicky Swett

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He serves as a regular program annotator for concert presenters across the US and UK, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic, Music@Menlo, the BBC, and Wigmore Hall.

“Mad Song”

By William Blake (c. 1783)

The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.

Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.

Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do crowd,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas’d;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

Gustav Mahler’s regular routine, during the years when he was music director of the Vienna Court Opera (now the Vienna State Opera), was to devote the winter months to the opera house and the summer months to composition. To both activities, he devoted a heroic work ethic and a fanatical concentration, and it helped him for his “summer job” to get away from the city to work in total tranquility. To this end, he built himself a villa at Maiernigg on the shores of the Wörther­see (a lake in southern Austria), with a further refuge being a small composing hut set away in the woods. The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh symphonies were the astonishing fruit of this regimen.

These were happy years for Mahler. He married the beautiful Alma Schindler in 1902, and she gave birth to their first child the same year. A second daughter was born in 1904. Mahler’s works were played with increasing frequency in Germany and Holland, and with his post at the Opera, he had reached the pinnacle of the musical profession. He was 43, rich, and in the prime of life.

How then can we explain how the Sixth Symphony acquired the nickname, the “Tragic”? Like Schubert’s Fourth Symphony, on which Schubert himself wrote the German word Tragische even though the music is far from tragic in character, Mahler himself allowed the term to be applied to his Sixth, then later repressed it. Hindsight has played more part in the interpretation of this work than any other, and there is evidence that Mahler too saw his music in a different light when his life was darkened by tragedy.

Most notably, there are the famous hammer blows in the last movement, and the often-debated question of whether Mahler called for two or three (both reduced from the original five). In a huge orchestra with extensive percussion, it is merely a rein­forcement to add a hammer to the already heavy thud of the bass drum. A hammer itself is not tragedy until it is described as a “hammer-blow of fate,” which Alma says Mahler came to interpret those moments in the finale.

The fateful three blows in the composer’s own life fell in quick succession in 1907, three years after the completion of the Sixth Symphony. He was diagnosed with a heart lesion, which eventually proved fatal; he resigned under heavy pressure from the Opera; and his adored elder daughter, Maria Anna, died at age 4. He is said to have removed the third hammer blow from the score as a portent of his own death.

Then there is the curious fact that during the composition of the Fifth Symphony (before he had children of his own), Mahler had begun to set five poems by Friedrich Rückert: Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children. Surely, it is argued by those wanting to find it, his life was prophetically encoded in his own music.

To these points can the case for the Sixth Symphony as “Tragic” be made. The evidence of our ears, meanwhile, places the arguments almost entirely on the other side. Any large work will encompass moods of every kind, including passages that might be dark and foreboding — but here, for much of the work, we have music that lifts the heart and seems to sing with the birds of summer. The final bars conclude in the minor key, it is true, but these two pages cannot overturn the impression of the rest.

The two middle movements in particular, the Andante and the Scherzo, are respectively serene and light. Mahler originally placed the quick Scherzo second and the slower Andante third. At the first performance in February 1906, he decided to reverse the order and later always performed it as such. By that time, though, publishers had already printed the score with the Scherzo second. Arguments for the suitability of either sequence can be easily made, and it is normally the conductor’s choice in today’s performances.

Certain types of musical character are important in this work. March tempos, always a favorite for Mahler, appear in the first and last movements, and are especially striking at the beginning, as if to convey the stamping tread of marching feet. Then there are hymn-like passages or chorales, sometimes reminiscent of Bruckner’s style. The second section of the first movement is such a passage, played by the winds over occasional plucked-string pizzicatos.

Taken as a whole, Mahler’s achieve­ment in a purely orchestral work of such a size as the Sixth is remarkable, especially since the listener is free to determine its character. The “tragic” label may be right for some, but others will surely find in this music a broad landscape of great beauty, full of life and color, neither threatening nor doomed, a landscape wherein we may all enjoy the deepest satisfactions and always find something to smile at.

— adapted from a note by Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.