“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything,” Gustav Mahler told Jean Sibelius in 1907. Today, Mahler is best known for his lengthy symphonies, which did indeed “contain everything”, from the natural world to fin de siècle angst to ecstasy and resignation. But in his lifetime, Mahler was more famous as a conductor, including high profile appointments at the Stadttheater Hamburg, the Hofoper in Vienna, the Metropolitan Opera, then the New York Philharmonic.
Gustav Mahler (1907)
© Public domain
Mahler was born in 1860 in Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg Empire. From humble beginnings, his father had built up a distillery and tavern business in Iglau, where young Gustav was introduced to music via street songs, dance tunes, folk melodies and military bands, sounds that would permeate his early symphonies in particular. A Jew, he often felt an outsider – “always an intruder, never welcomed” – particularly in Vienna, where antisemitic factions made his work difficult. Mahler was never especially popular with orchestras and singers thanks to his rigorous rehearsal schedules, but he certainly drove up standards and championed new works.
After a whirlwind romance, he married Alma Schindler in 1902. Tragedy was never far away; in the summer of 1907, their eldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diptheria and, almost immediately, Mahler was diagnosed with a defective heart, something Alma described as a virtual death sentence. He died in 1911, aged only 50.
Gustav Mahler by Emil Orlik (1902)
© Public domain
Mahler’s music was not always well received during his lifetime. A Viennese critic’s response to the Third Symphony read, “Anyone who has committed such a deed deserves a couple of years in prison.” Convoluted, sprawling, written for huge orchestral (and sometimes choral) forces, they confused many audiences of the day. Mahler himself knew that his time as a composer would come. It was another composer-conductor, Leonard Bernstein, who, if not exactly rescuing Mahler from oblivion, did much to popularise the symphonies, helping to make them a mainstay of every orchestral season. This playlist doesn't contain all the symphonies... but it's close!
1Symphony no. 3 in D minor
The Third Symphony is Mahler’s great hymn to nature, an epic work in six movements, at 90 minutes the longest symphony in the standard repertory. It is a paean to pantheism, set in motion by the opening movement entitled Pan Awakes, Summer Comes Marching In. Sounds of nature represent the “worldly tumult”, but Mahler’s wider world view can be seen through two song settings: Zarathustra’s Midnight Song from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with its oboe glissandi, which forms the fourth movement; and Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life), a Wunderhorn song which Mahler intended as this symphony’s finale, but recast as the finale of the Fourth Symphony instead. Mahler closes with a long, rapt Adagio under the heading What Love Tells Me, a movement described by William Ritter in 1902 as “Perhaps the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven”.
2Symphony no. 2 in C minor, “Resurrection”
Mahler’s Second Symphony, concerning faith and doubt, life, death and resurrection, was composed over a period of seven years. Work was interrupted in 1889, during which time his father, mother and sister all died within a few months of each other, and the premiere of his First Symphony met with an unfavourable critical response. Mahler did not return to the symphony until 1893, by which time he had published the first movement as an independent symphonic poem entitled Todtenfeier (Funeral Rites). Des Knaben Wunderhorn provided the motivation for Mahler to continue: he wrote the song St Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes at the same time as incorporating an orchestral version into the third movement, while Urlicht (Primal light) became the fourth. Inspiration for the uplifting choral finale struck when Mahler attended the funeral of Hans von Bülow in 1894, where he heard lines from Klopstock’s Auferstehen (Resurrection) sounding from the organ loft.
3Symphony no. 9 in D major
Following the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him, Mahler had to give up his rambling in the woods and mountains. In 1909, much of his summer was spent alone in his composing hut in the Tyrol. Writing to the conductor Bruno Walter, Mahler confessed, “The solitude, in which my attention is turned more inward, makes me feel all the more distinctly that everything is not right with me physically.” In his Ninth Symphony, Mahler is preoccupied with his own mortality – Leonard Bernstein suggested that the syncopated rhythmic motif at the start represents Mahler’s irregular heartbeat. Despite the bucolic Ländler in the second movement and the Rondo-Burleske third, in the words of Alban Berg, “death is inevitable”, the long, slow finale acting as a reflective farewell. Mahler went on to begin his Tenth the following summer, but he was never to complete it.
4Symphony no. 5 in C sharp minor
The Fifth was Mahler’s first purely instrumental symphony since his First. It is his most famous, largely because its fourth movement, an Adagietto scored only for strings and harp, found a wide audience via its iconic use in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice. According to the conductor Willem Mengelberg, “This Adagietto was Gustav Mahler’s declaration of love to Alma! Instead of a letter, he confided it in this movement without a word of explanation. She understood.” The symphony is in five movements, grouped into three parts. The first is a funeral march, proclaimed by a solo trumpet. A gigantic Scherzo forms the symphony’s centre-point, while the finale is a Rondo of unrestrained joy.
5Rückert-Lieder
Mahler composed songs throughout his life. His settings of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) are very special, the composer’s melodic lines reflecting the hyper-romantic texts. Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder warns the listener not to be too inquisitive about artistic creation: only judge the finished work, not the process. In Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft!, a spray of lime fills the room with the fragrance of love. Um Mitternacht is a journey of the soul. Liebst du um Schönheit, a gift from Mahler to his wife Alma, argues that you should not love for wealth or physical beauty, but for love’s sake alone. At the emotional heart of the set is Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world), of which Mahler once said, “It is truly me.” Here is the artist as a solitary figure, withdrawn from the world, music of peaceful resignation.
6Symphony no. 4 in G major
Das himmlische Leben, a child’s vision of heaven, forms the finale of Mahler’s sunlit Fourth Symphony, the last of his Wunderhorn symphonies. It is lightly scored – no trombones or tuba – with a percussion section including glockenspiel and sleigh bells, the latter heard at the very outset. It is pastoral in mood, with a cheeky Scherzo featuring a violin tuned higher to suggest a rustic fiddler. The Adagio is a gently rocking lullaby, growing to an ecstatic peak as we enter the gates of heaven, leading to the finale, where a child imagines a carefree life, with good food – asparagus, beans, fish and wine – and dancing.
7Symphony no. 6 in A minor
The most classical of his symphonies in structure, the Sixth sometimes carries the nickname “Tragic”, with its fateful hammer blows in the finale. According to Alma, the last movement describes Mahler himself and his downfall. “‘It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled,’ were his words. Not one of his works came as directly from his inmost heart as this. We both wept that day.” A prediction of Mahler’s fate? Within a year, their four-year-old daughter Maria had died, Mahler’s fatal heart illness had been diagnosed, and he had departed from his post at the Hofoper. Apart from the pastoral Andante, the Sixth is largely dark, angst-ridden and pessimistic. Mahler changed his mind about the order of the inner movements and removed the prophetic third hammer blow. Viennese critic Heinrich Reinhardt dismissed the symphony as “Brass, lots of brass, incredibly much brass! Even more brass, nothing but brass!”
8Symphony no. 1 in D major
Mahler wrote “Wie ein Naturlaut” (Like the sound of nature) at the head of the score to his First Symphony and nature permeates the whole work: rustling leaves, birdsong, rustic revelry, the sound of a klezmer band, summer storms. Mahler quotes from his own Songs of a Wayfarer as well as a funeral march based on the tune we know as Frère Jacques which begins with a double bass solo. Originally performed as a symphonic poem in five movements, Mahler discarded the second movement (a charming miniature called Blumine).
9Das Lied von der Erde
With Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), the highly superstitious Mahler tried to trick fate. Composed after his mighty Eighth (the “Symphony of a Thousand”), he thought of it as a symphonic work but refused to number it as such because of “the curse of the Ninth” (Beethoven’s Ninth was his final symphony, Bruckner died before completing his Ninth). Das Lied sets six Chinese poems, a strange mix of drinking songs, resignation and irony.
The finale, Abschied (Farewell) is terribly moving, weariness embracing death. In a letter to Bruno Walter, Mahler said, “I have long known that I must die... Without trying to explain or describe something for which there are probably no words, I simply say that at a single stroke I have lost any calm and peace of mind that I have ever achieved.”
10Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Mahler’s early orchestral song cycle, Songs of a Wayfarer, was composed while he was conductor at the opera house in Kassel. They are based on his own verses, although heavily influenced by Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), a collection of folk poetry that Mahler later set in a separate collection. The cycle is a tale of unrequited love familiar from Schubert’s Müller settings. Two songs later turned up in Mahler’s First Symphony.