Symphony No. 6, “Tragic”

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.