A key precept of classical education involves understanding the development of Western literary genres through study of the acknowledged masterworks. Classical educators enthusiastically trace the lines from ancient literature through Dante and Shakespeare. Optimally, they continue to draw that line, examining Baroque style, moving through the era of timeless novels by Austen, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters, continuing across a web of works by Dumas, Hugo, and Melville, and savoring the labyrinth of monumental undertakings by writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Far rarer do educators take the same measured journey through the masterpieces of Western symphonic repertoire. Granted, certain composers and their works may be studied, but how often do teachers examine the path from the first blush of instrumental genres (Renaissance, Baroque) into the symphonies by Viennese masters Mozart and Haydn, and then across the rocky world of Beethoven and into the glorious orchestral works by nineteenth-century Romantics like Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky? Only through following this line can a person appreciate the value of this tradition.
Yet, even if such a journey is taken, it does not always culminate in its pinnacle: the symphonic works by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), a composer whose name alone mesmerizes musicians. Introducing Mahler into the classical curriculum may not seem to be an imperative, but it will unlock a depth of understanding that cannot be accessed through any other repertoire.
The Uniqueness of Mahler’s Style
Could a world of musical sound exist that is so nuanced as to be simultaneously hidden while startlingly forthright? What if this music lavished beauty upon the ear one moment only to jar and bewilder the next? Could such music proceed according to a tight formal design that nonetheless feels amorphous? Finally, would contemporaries embrace this music, or would decades have to pass before it found a revered place in the Western canon?
These features describe the works that flowed singularly from Mahler’s pen. His compositions express the human experience on its deepest levels with unusual authenticity. His musical phrases take listeners somewhere—whether they pulsate boldly or are transparently gentle. Mahler utilized an exceptionally large orchestra, yet many passages rely on small groupings of instruments in the style of chamber music. His symphonies are long when compared to those of his era, but not longwinded. Instead, they breathe, sigh, and dissolve into seemingly inconsequential episodes built from basic elements like folk tunes, the gestures of a dance, or the kind of repetitive patterns that might be created by a child.
Mahler was passionate about nature and immersed himself in natural surroundings whenever possible. Not surprisingly, he cultivated the sound of the natural world in his pieces (cowbells, jingle bells, hammer blows, bird calls), expressing effects commonly heard in the meadows and mountain paths of alpine Austria. The dramatic landscape of his music emulated the clashes found in nature. Even when passages are translucent with beauty, contrasting elements intrude, often grotesque and tempestuous, as they engage in a battle with the serene. These clashes are reconciled, but retain an edge, ending in a curious dissonance, an incomplete melody, or a sonorous oddity that protrudes from the harmonious fabric.
All this intensity flowed from a quiet, thin man wracked by internal doubt, bothered by physical infirmities large and small, and jostled by the dynamics that triggered the First World War and foretold the terrible path to the Second. Although biography is a poor tool for understanding musical style, certain facts about Mahler’s life do illuminate his accomplishments as a composer.
Who Was Mahler?
Mahler was of modest birth and simple background. He grew up in Bohemia as an outsider: a German-speaking Austrian who moved awkwardly amid the dynamics of nineteenth-century Czech society. The circumstances within his family were not harmonious. Fortunately, his prodigious talents shone early and he received an exemplary musical education at the Vienna Conservatory. Still, the path to becoming a successful composer was not certain. He thus turned to conducting, spending his adult life torn between the worlds of conducting and composing.
For the ten critical years of 1897 to 1907 (including the period of writing the fourth symphony), he suffered beneath a Herculean yoke as head of Vienna’s Imperial Opera. A Moravian Jew, Mahler had ascended to the post amid controversy. To be considered for such a position required the essential, although to him not inordinate, sacrifice of converting to Christianity. This requirement seems unfathomable today; yet, antisemitism was woven into the bureaucracies of institutions across nineteenth-century Europe, including those within the Habsburg Empire.
Mahler made himself Christian enough to be palatable to Emperor Franz Josef, but his Judaism handed his critics yet another reason to reject his efforts to bring needed reforms to the Imperial Opera. Mahler’s attempts to change anything beyond superficial issues were met with brutal resistance. The resulting turmoil would have debilitated any artist whose chief joys were simplicity, stillness, and focused thought.
Approaching Mahler through Symphony No. 4
Unquestionably, the study of Mahler’s nine completed symphonies (and a tenth left in draft) takes a lifetime. Still, no symphony gives a better place to start than his fourth (1899–1901)—a work that marked the closure of his first period as a composer and opened the door to a spectacular series of five symphonies that transformed the parameters of the form.
When Mahler began writing his fourth symphony, he was emerging from what people today call a “writer’s block.” His first three symphonies, by no means commercially successful even if admired in certain quarters, were receding from audiences’ memories. A composer paralyzed by an absent muse resembled a film director today whose accolades lie a decade in the past. A false step here, a disappointment there, could be accommodated by an adoring public. But when the wellspring of creativity appeared to run dry, the audience would turn. Clearly, in such circumstances, a composer’s anxieties multiplied stratospherically.
In addition, the six-week summer holidays during which Mahler could compose unencumbered were regularly plagued by issues familiar to anyone hoping to accomplish a year’s worth of work in a limited timeframe. During the summer of 1899, while he tried to bring the first drafts of Symphony No. 4 into order, factors domestic and beyond distracted him, including the ambient “serenades, funeral marches and wedding marches every day from eleven o’clock and on Sunday from eight in the morning” that drifted up from the village below the place where he worked. Still, he was able to configure initial versions of three of the four movements that would become his fourth symphony.
Hoping to create a better work environment for the following summer of 1900, Mahler purchased land and had a “composer’s hut” built (Komponierenhaüschen, or composing-little-house). Mahler would utilize several such retreats across his compositional career. To this day, these huts evoke not just Mahler’s circumstances, but the universal problem of an artist seeking the focus necessary to create. Even with a better working space, though, more problems arose (including ill health), yet Mahler was able to push through his difficulties. Ultimately, the fourth symphony would have its premiere on November 25, 1901, albeit to mixed reviews.
Initially, Mahler cast this symphony in six movements beneath an umbrella title of Symphonic Humoreske. Part of this original intention survived the compositional process, although other parts became key movements of different works. Initially Mahler gave the movements descriptive titles—a popular practice at the time that he had used in previous symphonies. But in 1900, he reversed course, eschewing the use of descriptive titles for purely instrumental movements (those without a vocal text) in part to distance himself from the appearance of writing program music. Nonetheless, extra-musical influences can be discerned. For example, while composing this symphony, Mahler was entranced by a playscript, Hippolytus, written by a former schoolmate and friend Siegfried Lipiner (1856-1911). Two of the play’s characters symbolized the classical opposition between Apollo and Dionysius, one being Phaedra who embodied the Lebensdrang, or Life Force, and the second, Hippolytos, who represented the Seelenstille, or Rest of the Soul. Mahler himself related these characters to the contrasting moods he would cast in the fourth symphony.
Insofar as scoring, Mahler made a surprising choice to back away from the monumental scope of his second and third symphonies. He crafted the fourth symphony as if it were a string quartet, employing a full orchestral palate with the care and clarity appropriate for chamber music. Every detail of its instrumental color (and there is much of it) sounds clearly and defines the structure, much as strands of twinkle-lights define the shape of a Christmas tree. Except for select passages that overwhelm with orchestral power, Mahler achieved his goal to maintain lightness as the overall tenor of the piece.
Movement 1: Transcendent Joy
The first movement expresses the atmosphere Mahler had originally designated: “heavenly gaiety” (). He set the stage for this gaiety with the shake of sleigh bells over a solo flute line evoking a bird call, followed quickly by a lyrical string melody and the skipping motion of ascending bass lines in dotted rhythms. Throughout the movement, a juxtaposition of contrasting styles and moods recalls the spirit of childish play: repeated rhythms, nursery melodies, rustic dances, frenetic passages that stop suddenly, extreme shifts in dynamics. The movement is driven by a relentless energy that dissolves at times into stunning repose.
Despite the seeming mishmash of elements, the first movement is tightly constructed in an overall classical sonata form. Most notable is the turbulent development section, where Mahler probes the depth of his disparate materials. Woven into the energy and turmoil, however, are some of the most passionately beautiful melodies he would ever compose.
As with most composers, Mahler cultivated signature melodic shapes. His most beloved melodic line, usually labeled the Ewigkeit (Eternity) motive, plays a glorious role in this movement.
Here, a two-note descending gesture (sigh) moves upward yearningly, drops again, only to reascend, yet to drop again and then soar until clashing with the downward pull of bitter forces. As simple as the pattern is, it expresses one of the most satisfying of musical incarnations: unquenchable longing. Its effect is simultaneously edifying and devastating.
Movement 2: Death Strikes Up a Dance
Classical-era symphonies often featured a dance rhythm as a second or middle movement. A sleek Mozartean minuet or bucolic Haydnesque Ländler were especially popular, each containing a contrasting “trio” arranged in A-B-A form. This practice gave way in Beethoven’s time (turn of the nineteenth century) to a more free-wheeling form called a scherzo (“play” or “joke”), also with a contrasting trio. For the second movement of this symphony, Mahler chose an extravagant version of this last path, writing an unusual succession of three scherzos with trios.
The movement opens with a characteristic Mahlerian shift: a jarring horn call followed by the outburst of a country dance played by solo violin given a scordatura tuning. Scordatura indicates a specified “mistuning” requested by the composer. Such tunings would give the solo violin different effects. In this case, Mahler wanted a melody full of roughness or ghostliness when compared to the smoothness of the full string section. Ever explicit in his scores, the composer instructs the solo violin to play without a mute (while the string section in this movement often is muted) and to remain prominent throughout. Although not shown in the final score, Mahler initially entitled the movement with the phrase Freund Hein spielt auf (“Friend Hein [Death] plays away” or “takes up the fiddle”). Accordingly, duality and ambivalence pervade the movement as scherzo and trio—grotesque and sublime—present the two faces of death, one frightening and one alluring.
In playful fashion, the scordatura melody marks the beginning of each scherzo, while each trio expresses the spirit of a traditional Ländler through the melody of a solo clarinet. Both the scordatura violin and the solo clarinet, along with prominent solos by the trumpet and horn, illustrate Mahler’s ongoing focus on individual instruments spotlighted from within the larger orchestra. In fact, orchestral players are drawn to Mahler’s music partly because of the composer’s fondness for giving every instrument the prominence of a soloist.
Movement 3: Peace
In the third movement Mahler turns to another standard classical form, that of theme and variation. But again, Mahler brings his own peculiar approach. Instead of the classical variation form used by Mozart, Mahler adheres to the freer form favored by composers like Brahms. The movement, accordingly, is better viewed as a series of metamorphoses, each striving for a higher plane. Apt comparisons can be made to the progressive structure of Dante’s Purgatorio.
The third movement opens in sublime tranquility marked (restful), with a melody Mahler himself described as “divinely serene, yet profoundly sad.” The simplest of bass lines, spacious with rests, undergirds the melody.
The sense of breadth in this movement results first from the steadiness of Mahler’s confidence in this bass line. Each variation has its own character. The dynamic level rises and the tempo increases until the music arrives at one of Mahler’s signature climaxes with cymbal crashes, wild glissandi, and the bells (ends) of the horns and clarinets pointed to the sky per Mahler’s explicit instructions. This climax is not an ending, as listeners might expect, but rather a door to a new realm of sound: a place that is otherworldly, that floats inconclusively in an evocation of eternity—the music of the spheres.
Movement 4: The Child Answers “This is the Heavenly Life”
Contrasting Franz Liszt’s decision not to compose a finale around “Paradiso “in his Dante Symphony, Peter Brown notes that Mahler “not only composes a gateway to paradise, but goes on to realise it in the Finale.” Mahler’s initial plan to end the fourth symphony with a naïve, transcendentally beautiful song for voice and orchestra survived the compositional process. It opened the floodgates to original approaches Mahler would pour into each of his symphonic essays thereafter.
This final movement begins as the orchestra issues a morning call, setting the possibility of something unusual about to appear.
Indeed, this call foretells the similarly shaped soprano melody that responds to the call, proclaiming the first charming verse of the movement (“We enjoy the heavenly Joy”).
Like composers before him, Mahler chose a familiar folk song for his principal melody. The text he reconfigured from a landmark collection of folk poetry, Des knaben Wunderhorn (Of the Little Boy’s Magic Horn), published in 1805, and widely considered a landmark of German national identity. Mahler praised the “roguishness and deep mysticism” of the text and elevated it with a charming melody that almost skips off the page. Mahler specifies in the score: “To be sung with childlike and serene expression, absolutely without parody.”
The text makes frequent reference to Gospel figures, saints, and the heavenly feast. Vegetables, fruits, and meats are in abundance. On fast days, fish come swimming and Saint Peter casts his net into the pond. Angels bake the bread; Saint Martha must become the cook. The text also evokes the Innocent Lamb led patiently to his death. Mahler spaces each of his four strophic verses with a bridge of purely instrumental music, conveying memories of earth. But these passages serve primarily as reminders that strife on earth continues, although that strife does not affect the heavenly life.
Few passages in the Western tradition can equal the final section (coda) of the fourth movement of this symphony. Discord is erased. Pulsating energy is suspended. Only tranquility of sound remains to express the text: “There is no music on earth that can be compared to ours.” Saint Cecilia smiles as she leads the court musicians; even Saint Ursula has to laugh. The orchestra fades into what biographer Jonathan Carr equates to a music offering: “the peace that passeth all understanding.”
Mahler’s Legacy
Today Mahler’s fourth symphony is regarded as one of the highest expressions of classical symphonic form. At its premiere, though, the reception was far from affirming. To the ears of his ever-poised-to-strike critics, the symphony turned away from the mass force and breathtaking scope of his innovative second and third symphonies. This new work disappointed. It was too transparent and simple, even as it demanded too much of the ear. After all, Vienna at the fin-de-siècle operated as Europe’s center of luxury and sensual indulgence. The rigors of all-night waltzing were understood by all. The aural demands of Mahler’s crystalline melodies pierced by a tumble of boisterous tunes collapsing into quiet ecstasy fit nowhere in that paradigm. In fact, these very passages annoyed and fueled those who wanted to diminish the talents of Mahler. This Jewish conductor whose day-to-day standards pricked the tenured players’ complacency continued to throw their assumptions off balance.
And so Mahler would continue to struggle through his symphonic compositions. Each one presented new challenges, vastly expanding the concept of symphonic form and triggering puzzled reactions from listeners. At Mahler’s death in 1911, the verdict was out regarding the importance of his legacy. The destruction of the First World War overtook the world. Postwar modernism unabashedly turned the world of music on its head and then drove away concert audiences. New technologies like the radio and phonograph recordings forever changed the public’s primary method of encountering music. Before any of those developments could settle, the Second World War upended the world again.
Only after that war did Mahler’s star finally rise, lifted by the brave endorsement of key figures like Leonard Bernstein, and facilitated by a generation that had assimilated the radical experimentalism of the early twentieth century. The ears of performers and listeners were open; the depth of Mahler’s voice spoke to them. From the ashes of a destroyed European musical culture arose the realization that Mahler’s voice had been unique. That word, used literally and forcefully, continues to be the best and most valid assessment of Mahler’s ability to encounter, assimilate, recast, and present anew every known possibility of musical sound.
Classical Inquiry and the Music of Mahler
Mahler’s music deserves attention from anyone pursuing a classical understanding of Western culture. The idiosyncratic beauty of his works takes time to assimilate. Beauty that is immediately understood, like love at first sight, carries the risk of being immature and fleeting. Over time, if genuine, beauty deepens through repeated encounters of struggle and resolution. It is this reconciliation and the promise of redemption in Mahler’s music that allows us to experience an otherwise unfathomable level of beauty through orchestral sound. And it is this struggle that sets Mahler’s works as a crowning jewel of the Western symphonic tradition.
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