Symphony No. 5

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.