At the turn of the century, Mahler’s career was firmly taking root with his appointments as director of the Vienna Court Opera and principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. Even his music, at this time, was beginning to be successful. With this new success, Mahler built a lakeside villa in the Austrian province of Carinthia in June 1901. That summer he also began work on his Fifth Symphony. Besides the successes of his professional life, Mahler’s personal life also underwent changes during this period. In February 1901, Mahler succumbed to serious health problems. According to his doctor, he nearly bled to death due to major hemorrhaging, and was a long time recovering. However, later that year, he met Alma Schindler, stepdaughter of the painter Carl Moll, and by the following March, they were married with Alma expecting their first child. Both incidents had an effect on the composition of the Fifth Symphony, while the former had a lasting effect on the composer’s output for several years. Mahler’s style changed with the composition of the Fifth Symphony, marking the beginning of his middle period. The lure of the voice and vocal music, which was featured in the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies, was abandoned for purely orchestral sonorities, and a greater interest in counterpoint emerged, inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. As for Alma, she inspired the beautiful Adagietto fourth movement, which has become Mahler’s most memorable piece of music, taking on a life of its own separate from the symphony itself.
In five movements, the Fifth Symphony is one of Mahler’s most conventional works, yet its length (which is over an hour) and its other peculiarities maintain his reputation as an unconventional composer. The first movement is an austere funeral march in C-sharp minor, an unusual selection for sure for the opening movement of a symphony. However, its relation to the succeeding stormy second movement in A minor, with which it forms Part I of the symphony, casts it in the role as an extended introduction to a much more conventional dramatic and tense movement. Following this opening duo, the Scherzo forms by itself the second part of the symphony, and is the work’s longest single movement. In the brilliant key of D major, it is a joyous movement somewhere between a rondo and sonata form. The famous Adagietto, in F major, then begins the third and final part of the work, and is followed by the lively Rondo-Finale in D major.
The first edition of the score appeared in 1904, yet Mahler continued to revise the work until 1911. These last revisions, however, did not appear in print until 1964 with the Complete Edition of Mahler’s music. Joseph DuBose
___________________________________________
Symphony No. 5 Gustav Mahler
Mahler underwent a profound change around 1901-2. Virtually all his earlier music inhabited the fantasy world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with musical form subservient to his literary imagination. Symphony No. 1 was symbiotically interlinked with Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, and Symphonies 2, 3 and 4 included sung texts whose meanings cannot be ignored. His song Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden (1892) was to have been the finale of his Third Symphony (1896), but instead became that of his Fourth Symphony (1900). Here, a blissfully serene lullaby fades like a child drifting into "bee-bo-land", but at the very end the slow pulsing darkens ominously. Was Mahler bidding farewell to his own youth? Then there's a trumpet call, appearing just once in the first movement, an enigmatic spectre which realises its destiny in the Fifth Symphony.
1901 saw the premières of the Fourth Symphony (to general ridicule - there's no pleasing some folk) and his early cantata, the gruesome Das Klagende Lied. He wrote Der Tamboursg'sell, his last and bleakest Wunderhorn song, then turned to more adult matters, writing four of the Rückert Lieder and working on Kindertotenlieder and the Fifth Symphony. Not only is the poetry in the contemporaneous songs more realistic than the "fairy tale" Wunderhorn, but also - an obvious kinship between the Adagietto and Ich bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (from the Rückert Lieder) apart - the Fifth Symphony is a completely new departure. Gone is that pervasive song/symphony relationship, and with it the explicit imagery of sung texts. Instead we have "absolute music", propelled by a new concentration on strict, though innovative, form.
That's some change. So, what caused it? Well, why does any man "grow up" suddenly? "Woman", maybe? This change matured around the time he met and married Alma Schindler, a woman of extraordinary beauty and intellect, and herself a composer. The truth is, he was already working on the symphony's first two movements. She must, nevertheless, have had some influence: the Adagietto is apparently a "love song" for Alma. But she was more than a passive source of inspiration: for example, in 1902, while copying the score of the Fifth, Alma showed Mahler a passage where she thought he had obliterated the melody with percussion. Mahler (a supreme orchestral technician!) promptly eliminated the offending parts.
In considering the structure of the Fifth Symphony, arguably his most complex and formally integrated, we need to be aware of a particular technique. Ever since Beethoven recalled themes from previous movements in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, composers have variously used idées fixes, motto themes, and leitmotifs to lend integrity to their increasingly complex structures. In his first four symphonies, Mahler developed a partiality for "feeding forward" materials within his structures, including (in the Third) feeding forward a "process" from the first movement to the last. In the Fifth, he applied this idea systematically, starting with the feeding forward of that trumpet call from the Fourth Symphony. Overall, he cast the five movements into three parts. The first and last pairs each form a part, the leading movement of each acting as exposition to the latter's development. Part I is funereal, turbulent, anguished. Part III is an Emergence into Light - through the Adagietto to the finale's unbuttoned joviality. The third movement stands alone, a vast celebration of both the Ländler and its offspring, the Waltz (Mahler's tribute to Johann Strauss Sohn). A key structural element is the chorale which evolves in the second movement. This re-emerges at the corresponding point of Part III, re-clothed in the thematic fabric of the finale, a device reminiscent of that stunningly effective one in the Third Symphony. The general impression is of stupendously original symphonic thought, music as tight as a drumskin.
By making the first and fourth movements "expositional preludes" to the second and fifth respectively, Mahler effectively released himself from the constraints of "standard" symphonic sonata-form, which is conspicuously absent. The first and fourth movements seem to follow the sonata pattern, with blatant simplicity. However, the first movement's themes are in constant flux, while with only one, exquisitely extended subject the fourth amounts to a simplified sonata-form. Their internal "development sections" are brief, because Mahler has freed himself to develop his materials in the open air of imaginatively extended ternary forms. The central scherzo goes the opposite way! The subjects are developed even as they appear, and the expected final "work-out" of the main subject is supplanted by a volcanic coda vividly amalgamating all the subjects. Should we be surprised that Mahler would next turn to the "classical" symphonic form?
Luckily, all this formality in no way dimmed the passions that inflamed his earlier works. Being both acutely sensitive and holding the toughest of jobs, Mahler must have regarded composing as therapeutic, releasing the stresses of his very stressful urban life (we, in our stressful epoch, use his music for much the same purpose!). Part I's dark torments are thought to reflect his fears, both concerning an intestinal haemorrhage and (I would add) those intimations of mortality which strike men on achieving the "Big Four-Oh". Love and Marriage brought a dramatic improvement in his fortunes which simply must have penetrated this music. The unforced jollity of the bucolic Ländler contrasts the haunted conclusion of Part I: did this symbolise a "honeymoon", with Mahler representing himself by the ancient folk-dance, and his young and beautiful wife by its "modern" progeny? The first movement's funeral march is transformed into the blissful subject of the Adagietto: does this symbolise a new beginning? What of the incredible finale? Having "put childish things behind him", he slips a quote from a Wunderhorn song into the clutch of motifs from which he will weave his most magical musical tapestry. Anybody prepared to guess why he should have chosen a theme from In Praise of High Intellect, where the cuckoo and the donkey make an ass of the nightingale?
PART I
1. Trauermarsch (In gemessenem Schritt - Streng - Wie ein Kondukt): The first subject, a stark, naked trumpet solo answered by massive brass and percussion, rings as hollow as it is loud. The continuously curling second subject meanders aimlessly. Leaden parody is the only constant in the exposition "repeat". A sudden outburst of rage gradually yields to the first subject's gloom, and the grim treadmill returns. The coda turns "Rage" to "Pleading", but the first subject's towering bulk grinds it down to a weary, sullen "plunk". One suspects that all is not well.
2. Stürmisch bewegt, mit grösster Vehemenz: (A-B-[A-B-C]-[A/B-C]-A) more or less sums up Mahler's deployment of materials in this complex movement. [A] is a development of "Rage", while the melancholy [B] develops "Pleading". During the movement two first movement themes are explicitly referenced. The first [C] sprouts the beginnings of a chorale, a striking, brassy two-note descent. Soon, there is dancing (!), from which the second [C] draws the full chorale theme. This dies in flower, bequeathing anguish and haunted uncertainty. In this mixture of hope, fear and brief promise, I fancy Mahler was "recounting" his first encounter with Alma.
PART II
3. Scherzo (Kräftig, nicht zu schnell): If this were a play, we might preface this with "Some months later". Gone are the anger and uncertainty of Part I - suddenly all things are bright and beautiful. This is a double scherzo and trio, Mahler developing his themes in an (ABABA) pattern, although the sections are irregularly proportioned, and things get rather involved after the second [B]! [A], the Scherzo, contrasts Ländler and Waltz, while [B], the Trio, uses a single theme, firstly as horns communing with nature, secondly as a graceful waltz. Both are combined in the coda, a magnificent torrent of sound.
PART III
4. Adagietto (Sehr langsam): Mahler's re-working of the first movement's dreary dirge underlines the breathtaking beauty of this short, simple ternary movement. The theme unfolds in one long breath, ecstatically elaborated at the movement's heart. An almost literal reprise emerges from a modulation of miraculous serenity. Not bad, for what is "merely" a romantic interlude prefatory to the real business of Part III.
5. Rondo-Finale (Allegro - Allegro giocoso. Frisch): Hatching like chicks from the Wunderhorn quote (upward bassoon run), a clutch of related motifs becomes [A], a joyous, delirious but complicated fugal "cavalcade à la rondeau", with [B] (the Adagietto theme) providing luminous signposts in the formal progression of (A-B-A-B-A-B-A). This tour-de-force of cumulative invention is interrupted by doubt only once, after the third [A], only to emerge with renewed vitality, and yet more bounce injected into [B]. When the second movement's chorale theme, note for note, bursts triumphantly into the coda, it turns out to be none other than the last-born of the finale's "chicks". Ha! We have a "chicken and egg" conundrum, but no time to reflect as the music romps onwards, even slithering down a whole-tone scale for good measure. "In Praise of High Intellect", indeed!
After its first performance, Mahler famously said, "Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death." It's often been through my head during the last thirty, yet I feel that I'm still learning the ropes - and, come to think of it, isn't that exactly how it should be?
The Peabody Institute, a conservatory and preparatory school, was founded in 1857. It has a preeminent faculty, a collaborative learning environment, and the academic resources of one of the nation's leading universities, Johns Hopkins.
Classical Music | Orchestral Music
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 Play
Recorded on 02/01/2003, uploaded on 06/07/2010
Musician's or Publisher's Notes
At the turn of the century, Mahler’s career was firmly taking root with his appointments as director of the Vienna Court Opera and principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. Even his music, at this time, was beginning to be successful. With this new success, Mahler built a lakeside villa in the Austrian province of Carinthia in June 1901. That summer he also began work on his Fifth Symphony. Besides the successes of his professional life, Mahler’s personal life also underwent changes during this period. In February 1901, Mahler succumbed to serious health problems. According to his doctor, he nearly bled to death due to major hemorrhaging, and was a long time recovering. However, later that year, he met Alma Schindler, stepdaughter of the painter Carl Moll, and by the following March, they were married with Alma expecting their first child. Both incidents had an effect on the composition of the Fifth Symphony, while the former had a lasting effect on the composer’s output for several years. Mahler’s style changed with the composition of the Fifth Symphony, marking the beginning of his middle period. The lure of the voice and vocal music, which was featured in the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies, was abandoned for purely orchestral sonorities, and a greater interest in counterpoint emerged, inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. As for Alma, she inspired the beautiful Adagietto fourth movement, which has become Mahler’s most memorable piece of music, taking on a life of its own separate from the symphony itself.
In five movements, the Fifth Symphony is one of Mahler’s most conventional works, yet its length (which is over an hour) and its other peculiarities maintain his reputation as an unconventional composer. The first movement is an austere funeral march in C-sharp minor, an unusual selection for sure for the opening movement of a symphony. However, its relation to the succeeding stormy second movement in A minor, with which it forms Part I of the symphony, casts it in the role as an extended introduction to a much more conventional dramatic and tense movement. Following this opening duo, the Scherzo forms by itself the second part of the symphony, and is the work’s longest single movement. In the brilliant key of D major, it is a joyous movement somewhere between a rondo and sonata form. The famous Adagietto, in F major, then begins the third and final part of the work, and is followed by the lively Rondo-Finale in D major.
The first edition of the score appeared in 1904, yet Mahler continued to revise the work until 1911. These last revisions, however, did not appear in print until 1964 with the Complete Edition of Mahler’s music. Joseph DuBose
___________________________________________
Symphony No. 5 Gustav Mahler
Mahler underwent a profound change around 1901-2. Virtually all his earlier music inhabited the fantasy world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with musical form subservient to his literary imagination. Symphony No. 1 was symbiotically interlinked with Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, and Symphonies 2, 3 and 4 included sung texts whose meanings cannot be ignored. His song Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden (1892) was to have been the finale of his Third Symphony (1896), but instead became that of his Fourth Symphony (1900). Here, a blissfully serene lullaby fades like a child drifting into "bee-bo-land", but at the very end the slow pulsing darkens ominously. Was Mahler bidding farewell to his own youth? Then there's a trumpet call, appearing just once in the first movement, an enigmatic spectre which realises its destiny in the Fifth Symphony.
1901 saw the premières of the Fourth Symphony (to general ridicule - there's no pleasing some folk) and his early cantata, the gruesome Das Klagende Lied. He wrote Der Tamboursg'sell, his last and bleakest Wunderhorn song, then turned to more adult matters, writing four of the Rückert Lieder and working on Kindertotenlieder and the Fifth Symphony. Not only is the poetry in the contemporaneous songs more realistic than the "fairy tale" Wunderhorn, but also - an obvious kinship between the Adagietto and Ich bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (from the Rückert Lieder) apart - the Fifth Symphony is a completely new departure. Gone is that pervasive song/symphony relationship, and with it the explicit imagery of sung texts. Instead we have "absolute music", propelled by a new concentration on strict, though innovative, form.
That's some change. So, what caused it? Well, why does any man "grow up" suddenly? "Woman", maybe? This change matured around the time he met and married Alma Schindler, a woman of extraordinary beauty and intellect, and herself a composer. The truth is, he was already working on the symphony's first two movements. She must, nevertheless, have had some influence: the Adagietto is apparently a "love song" for Alma. But she was more than a passive source of inspiration: for example, in 1902, while copying the score of the Fifth, Alma showed Mahler a passage where she thought he had obliterated the melody with percussion. Mahler (a supreme orchestral technician!) promptly eliminated the offending parts.
In considering the structure of the Fifth Symphony, arguably his most complex and formally integrated, we need to be aware of a particular technique. Ever since Beethoven recalled themes from previous movements in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, composers have variously used idées fixes, motto themes, and leitmotifs to lend integrity to their increasingly complex structures. In his first four symphonies, Mahler developed a partiality for "feeding forward" materials within his structures, including (in the Third) feeding forward a "process" from the first movement to the last. In the Fifth, he applied this idea systematically, starting with the feeding forward of that trumpet call from the Fourth Symphony. Overall, he cast the five movements into three parts. The first and last pairs each form a part, the leading movement of each acting as exposition to the latter's development. Part I is funereal, turbulent, anguished. Part III is an Emergence into Light - through the Adagietto to the finale's unbuttoned joviality. The third movement stands alone, a vast celebration of both the Ländler and its offspring, the Waltz (Mahler's tribute to Johann Strauss Sohn). A key structural element is the chorale which evolves in the second movement. This re-emerges at the corresponding point of Part III, re-clothed in the thematic fabric of the finale, a device reminiscent of that stunningly effective one in the Third Symphony. The general impression is of stupendously original symphonic thought, music as tight as a drumskin.
By making the first and fourth movements "expositional preludes" to the second and fifth respectively, Mahler effectively released himself from the constraints of "standard" symphonic sonata-form, which is conspicuously absent. The first and fourth movements seem to follow the sonata pattern, with blatant simplicity. However, the first movement's themes are in constant flux, while with only one, exquisitely extended subject the fourth amounts to a simplified sonata-form. Their internal "development sections" are brief, because Mahler has freed himself to develop his materials in the open air of imaginatively extended ternary forms. The central scherzo goes the opposite way! The subjects are developed even as they appear, and the expected final "work-out" of the main subject is supplanted by a volcanic coda vividly amalgamating all the subjects. Should we be surprised that Mahler would next turn to the "classical" symphonic form?
Luckily, all this formality in no way dimmed the passions that inflamed his earlier works. Being both acutely sensitive and holding the toughest of jobs, Mahler must have regarded composing as therapeutic, releasing the stresses of his very stressful urban life (we, in our stressful epoch, use his music for much the same purpose!). Part I's dark torments are thought to reflect his fears, both concerning an intestinal haemorrhage and (I would add) those intimations of mortality which strike men on achieving the "Big Four-Oh". Love and Marriage brought a dramatic improvement in his fortunes which simply must have penetrated this music. The unforced jollity of the bucolic Ländler contrasts the haunted conclusion of Part I: did this symbolise a "honeymoon", with Mahler representing himself by the ancient folk-dance, and his young and beautiful wife by its "modern" progeny? The first movement's funeral march is transformed into the blissful subject of the Adagietto: does this symbolise a new beginning? What of the incredible finale? Having "put childish things behind him", he slips a quote from a Wunderhorn song into the clutch of motifs from which he will weave his most magical musical tapestry. Anybody prepared to guess why he should have chosen a theme from In Praise of High Intellect, where the cuckoo and the donkey make an ass of the nightingale?
PART I
1. Trauermarsch (In gemessenem Schritt - Streng - Wie ein Kondukt): The first subject, a stark, naked trumpet solo answered by massive brass and percussion, rings as hollow as it is loud. The continuously curling second subject meanders aimlessly. Leaden parody is the only constant in the exposition "repeat". A sudden outburst of rage gradually yields to the first subject's gloom, and the grim treadmill returns. The coda turns "Rage" to "Pleading", but the first subject's towering bulk grinds it down to a weary, sullen "plunk". One suspects that all is not well.
2. Stürmisch bewegt, mit grösster Vehemenz: (A-B-[A-B-C]-[A/B-C]-A) more or less sums up Mahler's deployment of materials in this complex movement. [A] is a development of "Rage", while the melancholy [B] develops "Pleading". During the movement two first movement themes are explicitly referenced. The first [C] sprouts the beginnings of a chorale, a striking, brassy two-note descent. Soon, there is dancing (!), from which the second [C] draws the full chorale theme. This dies in flower, bequeathing anguish and haunted uncertainty. In this mixture of hope, fear and brief promise, I fancy Mahler was "recounting" his first encounter with Alma.
PART II
3. Scherzo (Kräftig, nicht zu schnell): If this were a play, we might preface this with "Some months later". Gone are the anger and uncertainty of Part I - suddenly all things are bright and beautiful. This is a double scherzo and trio, Mahler developing his themes in an (ABABA) pattern, although the sections are irregularly proportioned, and things get rather involved after the second [B]! [A], the Scherzo, contrasts Ländler and Waltz, while [B], the Trio, uses a single theme, firstly as horns communing with nature, secondly as a graceful waltz. Both are combined in the coda, a magnificent torrent of sound.
PART III
4. Adagietto (Sehr langsam): Mahler's re-working of the first movement's dreary dirge underlines the breathtaking beauty of this short, simple ternary movement. The theme unfolds in one long breath, ecstatically elaborated at the movement's heart. An almost literal reprise emerges from a modulation of miraculous serenity. Not bad, for what is "merely" a romantic interlude prefatory to the real business of Part III.
5. Rondo-Finale (Allegro - Allegro giocoso. Frisch): Hatching like chicks from the Wunderhorn quote (upward bassoon run), a clutch of related motifs becomes [A], a joyous, delirious but complicated fugal "cavalcade à la rondeau", with [B] (the Adagietto theme) providing luminous signposts in the formal progression of (A-B-A-B-A-B-A). This tour-de-force of cumulative invention is interrupted by doubt only once, after the third [A], only to emerge with renewed vitality, and yet more bounce injected into [B]. When the second movement's chorale theme, note for note, bursts triumphantly into the coda, it turns out to be none other than the last-born of the finale's "chicks". Ha! We have a "chicken and egg" conundrum, but no time to reflect as the music romps onwards, even slithering down a whole-tone scale for good measure. "In Praise of High Intellect", indeed!
After its first performance, Mahler famously said, "Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death." It's often been through my head during the last thirty, yet I feel that I'm still learning the ropes - and, come to think of it, isn't that exactly how it should be?
©Paul Serotsky
More music by Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5, Part III, Adagietto. Sehr langsam
Symphony no. 6
Symphony No. 5 (Adagietto)
Symphony No. 4
Symphony No. 4
Symphony no. 2, 5th movement
3rd movement, Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen, Symphony no. 1
Symphony no. 6, 1st movement
Symphony no. 6, 3rd movement
Symphony No. 5, Part III, Rondo-Finale
Performances by same musician(s)
Daphnis and Chloé, Suite No. 2
Symphony no. 6
Scheherazade
Oberon Overture
Symphony No. 4
Symphony no. 6, 1st movement
Symphony no. 6, 3rd movement
Symphony No. 5 in c minor, Op.67
La Mer
Symphony no. 4 in F minor, Op. 36
Classical Music for the Internet Era™
The Peabody Institute, a conservatory and preparatory school, was founded in 1857. It has a preeminent faculty, a collaborative learning environment, and the academic resources of one of the nation's leading universities, Johns Hopkins.