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In the last 40 years, Mahler’s
symphonies have grown so
phenomenally in popularity that
there are probably not many
listeners who are completely
unfamiliar with them. Even taking
into account normal fluctuations of
taste, one finds it difficult to
explain this phenomenal growth in
popularity. What is it that makes
Mahler’s music so relevant, even
irresistible, to our time, so vastly
more appealing than that of his
contemporaries (or even
near-contemporaries) Wagner,
Strauss, Sibelius, and Franck?
One thing that immediately sets
Mahler’s music apart is his
orchestration. Though the orchestra
he uses is huge, it very rarely
plays with one voice. More often
several independent instrumental
strands form an intricate web on
contrasting emotions, directions,
and meanings. For instance, there is
a passage in the second movement of
the Fifth Symphony in which two
horns sing a somber melodic line in
dotted rhythm. At the same time
there is a cackling motive in the
woodwinds. Meanwhile the timpani and
the double-basses play a funereal
drumbeat figure and the cellos
intone a scarcely audible
countermelody in quarter-notes. As
if all this weren’t enough for the
ear to take in, a solo violin and a
flute exchange brief anguished sighs
with an English horn. Thus, in a
single moment we are given a wide
range of human emotions: despair,
longing, aspiration, anguish,
tenderness. And because these
emotions are so inextricably woven
together we experience keenly that
sense of ambiguity, discontinuity,
and ambivalence which is so
characteristic of modern life and so
prevalent in the music of later
twentieth-century composers such as
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. We
have come, it would seem, as far as
possible from the kind of music
which presents a single melody
comfortably resting on the cushion
of an accompaniment.
Of course Mahler was still a
Romantic composer, committed to the
liberation of man’s spirit and to
the sense of power and mystery in
the natural world. And, in the true
late-Romantic tradition, he also
expressed the world-weary
disillusionment of a post religious
age. But Mahler also stood at the
turning-point of modern culture. He
lived at a time when profound unrest
was felt most intensely throughout
Europe, when the old order of
aristocratic Vienna was
disintegrating, when there was a
widespread sense of dread and
exhaustion, of imminent catastrophe.
Mahler’s music, better than any
other, expresses all these qualities
of his age.
We can understand the pessimism and
bitterness we hear in his music even
better if we look for a moment at
the series of disasters that marked
Mahler’s life. As a Jew he felt
ostracized from Viennese society.
His early life was fraught with
violence (his father was brutally
cruel to his delicate mother) and by
death (he lost seven brothers and
sisters) as well as by poverty,
illness, madness, and suicide.
Yet, paradoxically, Mahler was also
a passionate lover of life; and in
fact his obsession with suffering
was intimately related to this
equally intense instinct towards
life. At the heart of his music lies
a deep and dynamic struggle between
innocence and experience, idealism
and brutal reality, affirmation and
denial. Though he was in part a
Romantic and an idealist, he strode
courageously into the twentieth
century, riddled with doubt and
perplexity, ill-at-ease in an
unfriendly cosmos.
In each of his symphonies, indeed at
every moment of all of them, Mahler
seems to be searching for a
resolution to these antinomies, for
an identity and a language: it is
this quality of constant searching
which, perhaps more than anything
else, draws us so powerfully to his
music.
Nowhere is this search more
fascinatingly dramatized than in the
Fifth Symphony. Just as Mahler
stands poised between the Romantic
and the modern periods, so his Fifth
Symphony (composed in 1901–02)
stands at the mid-point of his
career as a composer, holding
elements of his earlier and later
works in uneasy balance. Mahler
himself, feeling suddenly bereft of
the technique and the language he
had employed in his earlier works,
saw the Fifth Symphony as a leap
into modernism. He revised the work
over a span of six years and
commented on the first version: "I
cannot understand how I could have
written so much like a beginner.
Clearly the routine I had acquired
in the first four symphonies
deserted me altogether, as though a
totally new message demanded a new
technique." Two days before the
premiere of the Fifth Symphony in
October 1904, Mahler wrote home to
his ailing wife, Alma: "Heavens,
what is the public to make of this
chaos in which new worlds are
forever being engendered only to
crumble into ruin the next moment?
What are they to say to this
primeval music, this foaming,
roaring sea of sound, to these
dancing stars, to these breathtaking
iridescent and flashing breakers?…
oh that I might give my symphony its
first performance 50 years after my
death."
As he was writing the Fifth, Mahler
completed his last song using a text
taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn
(The Boy’s Magic Horn), a popular
collection of folk-verse upon which
he had frequently drawn for his
early song-cycles and symphonies. As
he turned away from the Wunderhorn
as a source of inspiration, a
certain "open" lyricism disappeared
from Mahler’s symphonies. Folk
elements embodied in human voices no
longer offered idealistic solutions
to the problems raised by his works.
The style of the Fifth is more
severe and granitic than that of its
predecessors, and polyphony—so
richly expressive of conflict—is
more pervasive than earlier. (Mahler
had, incidentally, just acquired the
complete edition of Bach’s works and
was greatly excited by what he found
there.) The work’s five movements
are grouped into three sections:
Part I
Trauermarsch
("Funeral march"),
C-sharp minor
Stürmisch bewegt ("Stormily agitated"),
A minor
Part II
Scherzo, D major
Part III
Adagietto, F major
Rondo-Finale, D major
The first movement—a black death
march marked "with measured pace;
strict; like a funeral procession"
—reminds us that as a child Mahler
lived near a military barracks.
(Similar reminders occur frequently
in the other symphonies, as well as
in the Wunderhorn songs: in the one
about ghost soldiers, for example,
or the one about the doomed
drummer-boy—the song on which Mahler
was working as he was composing the
Fifth.) The movement, like the first
movement of Beethoven’s Fifth,
begins with one of those
unforgettable gestures that make an
indelible mark on one’s musical
memory: a solitary solo trumpet
softly intoning a chilling,
doom-laden fanfare. And it is worth
noting that the fanfare recalls
Beethoven’s Fifth not only because
it is unforgettable and because it
suggests fate but also because it is
almost identical rhythmically.
This iron refrain returns in varied
guises throughout the movement. The
funeral music—by turns sad,
poignant, violent,
oppressive—alternates with a middle
section in which the trumpet screams
its anguish over a brutally simple
accompaniment and the violins lash
downwards with a grating chromatic
figure. (Mahler marks the beginning
of the section "impassioned, wild,"
and in a footnote to the conductor
he adds that the playing of the
violins must be "at all times as
vehement as possible!")
Everywhere there are images of
collapse, every attempt to rise up
is followed by a falling away. The
only real climax in the movement is
marked "klagend" ("lamenting") and
is followed by a long arc of dying,
the trumpet muttering its fanfare.
Against an ominous roll on the bass
drum, the procession halts and its
burden appears to be slowly lowered
into the ground. For the last time
the trumpet plays its fanfare: first
close by, then farther away, and
finally in the extreme distance (so
softly that it must be given instead
to a flute). The movement ends with
a final savage punctuation mark,
half-defiant yet half-hopeless.
With the second movement, which is
closely linked to the first in its
expression of Mahler’s tragic
vision, suddenly the mode of
ferocious protest is dominant (the
movement is marked "stormily
agitated, with the greatest
vehemence"). Snapped chords,
grotesque leaps of anguished minor
ninths, shrill screams in the
woodwinds, pounding
eighth-notes—these and other
gestures of overpowering violence
are everywhere. Just as the first
movement was slow with a fast
interruption, so in this movement
the driven tempestuous music
alternates with brief elegiac
passages specifically marked to be
played in the same tempo as the
earlier funeral march. Thus once
again, as so often in Mahler,
contrasting emotional states are
simultaneously evoked.
Towards the end of the movement the
brasses, in a bravely affirmative
D-major chorale, seem to signal a
hope for salvation from lamenting
and suffering. But victory’s time
has not yet come; the grand
proclamation fades away into
terrifying, isolated cries of
despair. Yet somehow we know that
it, and its key of D major, will
return again.
Part II, the third movement, is a
huge Scherzo, a Viennese dance
movement of staggering invention and
equivocal tone. We know that Mahler
regarded Vienna’s great past with
deep affection and nostalgia. (When
performing this symphony in concert
I have often preceded it with
Strauss’ elegant Emperor Waltzes,
which embody so perfectly the spirit
of the city in the 1890’s.) Vienna,
after all, was the city of Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms,
and Bruckner; the city of
coffee-houses and the Opernring; the
city of light-hearted gracious
living. Yet for Mahler Vienna also
meant anger and loss. He was the
victim of intrigue, callousness, and
spite. Poised between nostalgia for
a glittering past and a horror of
things to come, Mahler’s Vienna was
a city in which revolutionary ideas
struggled for expression in a
reactionary climate of opinion. The
great Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony
takes the Viennese Waltz, which we
know Mahler loved, and pushes it
over the brink into a forced,
merciless gaiety. A ghastly grimace
seems frozen on the face of
turn-of-the-century Vienna. Gone are
the lilt and the glitter, the
ecstatic elegance: they have become
merely a mockery of themselves. Yet
this movement is also emphatically a
dance of life, totally different
from Part I, with its insecure,
hysterical, even despairing
ruminations upon death. In the
quieter sections the horns call to
each other as across great spaces,
evoking yet another of Mahler’s
haunted landscapes, a twilight world
of ancient legends and enduring
folk-memory.
Like Part I, Part III is comprised
of two movements, linked both
thematically and by mood.After the
exhilarating Scherzo, the famous
F-major Adagietto for harp and
strings comes as a haven of peace,
full of rapturous yearning and
consolation. From the bustle and
agitation of the streets and
coffeehouses and the elegance of the
glittering ballrooms of Vienna, one
is suddenly drawn into a more
personal space.
Although for many, this movement,
detached as it often is from its
context as film score or memorial
music, has come to be seen as an
expression of melancholy, full of
images of nostalgia, dissolution,
and decay, in the symphony the
Adagietto precedes the most joyous
and exuberant movement of Mahler's
oeuvre. Mahler's close friend, the
conductor Wilhelm Mengelberg,
characterized the Adagietto movement
as "Love, a smile enters his life…".
Scrawled in the marginof
Mengelberg's score to the Fifth is
this note: "This Adagietto was
Gustav Mahler's declaration of love
to Alma! Instead of a letter he sent
her this in manuscript: no
accompanying words. She understood
and wrote to him: he should come!!!
Both told me this!" As an expression
of love, rather than mourning, it
makes a perfect transition to the
celebration of joy in the Finale.
In a magical transition the horn and
solo winds, playing fragments of
folk-motives out of which the music
to follow will grow, call back the
listener from the hesitant
inwardness of the Adagietto to the
radiant, abundant D-major world of
the Finale. It is a movement that
masterfully combines the forms of
sonata, rondo, and fugue in an
exuberant affirmation of the very
joy in creation.
But the triumph of the Finale is not
arrived at through a gradual
spiritual progression from the
beginning of the work; it is not a
synthesis of previous emotional
experiences, as is the Finale of the
Ninth. For the Fifth Symphony is,
even more than most of Mahler’s
other works, a study in contrasts.
The experience of anxiety and
mourning encountered in Part I is
genuine and is examined
unflinchingly; but the joy and
vitality of Part III is no less
genuine and no less directly faced
and explored. In this work Mahler
presents himself as both fragmented
and courageous: fragmented in the
sharp juxtaposition of seemingly
unrelated moods and statements, both
within the contrapuntal writing and
between the movements; courageous
because of the daring with which he
examines, without denial or
proffered solutions, the full extent
of human experience. The liberating
discovery that one experience is as
valid as another, and therefore does
not need to be reconciled with any
other, is perhaps the most
paradoxical aspect of this work and
therefore possibly the aspect that
most draws us to it today.
When the great brass chorale from
the second movement returns in the
Finale, this time in its full
extension and as a gesture of
triumph, we do not feel the security
of an achieved synthesis but rather
a structural bridge across the whole
work, affirming rather than denying
the irreconcilability of the
disparate elements of darkness and
light at its two ends.
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