Mahler Symphonies and Songs - Philip Barford

BBC Music Guides
Philip Barford Mahler

Symphonies and Songs
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BBC MUSIC GUIDES
Mahler Symphonics
and Songs
PHILIP BARFORD
BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

Published by the British Broadcast ing Corporation
35 Marylebone High Street, London wiM 4AA
ISBN o s63 o92 74 2
First published 1970

Reprinted 1973, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1982
© Philip Barford 1970
Printed in Great Britain by

Spottiswoode Ballantyne Ltd., Colchester and London
Contents
Introduction 7
The Songs II
Lieder eines fabrenden Gesellen I2
Kindertotenlieder IS
Symphony No. i in D I8
The Wunderhorn Symphonies 22
No. 2 in C minor 24
No. 3 in D minor 27
No. 4 in G 33
The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies 35
No. 5 37
No. 6 in A minor 40
No. 7 42
Symphony No. 8 44
The Last Phase $2
Das Lied von der Erde 54
Symphony No. 9 s8
Symphony No. 1o 6o
Introduction
In the music of Gustav Mahler romantic fecling and profound
lyrical sensibility are exalted to the highest degrec. He was a man
of philosophical culture, spiritual ideals and quite extraordinary
tonal sensitivity. The popularity of his music at the present time
raises interesting questions. After half a century during which
composers everywhere have reacted against the romantic spirit,
sometimes - like Stravinsky - with an almost polemical zeal,
Mahler enjoys something like a triumph; his vision of a lyrical and
symphonic synthesis of human aspirations appeals to an ever wider
audience. Alma Mahler, in retrospect, saw her husband's life almost
as a mission. At the end of her Memoriesshe writes: His battle for
the cternal values, his elevation above trivial things and his un-
inching devotion to truth are an example of the saintly life.'
Mahler was in every sense an individualist, with the inherent
otional instability of hypersensitive temperament. Jewish by
birth, he embraced Roman Catholicism not least, as Hans Redlich
points out in Bruckner and Mahler,* because baptism was a regret-
tably necessary passport to European culture. Although tempera-
mentally drawn to liberal ideals, he was later deeply attracted by
Christian mysticism. Basically, his philosophical and religious
attitudes took him beyond conventional frameworks of belief; and
to call him a humanist is to underestimate his spiritual vision. From
some points of view he emerges as a devotee of the free spirit, the
kind of man who must ever nd his own way under the prompting
of spiritual energies awakening in his own soul. Such devotees
easily antagonise the orthodox, especially when they give powerful
expression to their boundless aspiration.
Life was never easy for Mahler, not only because he frequently
found himself in con ict with outward circumstances, but also
because of unresolved con icts within himself. Alma Mahler, in a
moving passage in her rst book of recollections, describes the
death of her rst husband as a cruci xion. It seems an apt image.
For Mahler's musical temperament seemed to bring all romantic
tensions to a crucial focus. It isas if the nineteenth century emptied
itself into him, seeking a point of balance, a de nitive expression in
his work.
* Dent, I955-
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MAHLER SYMP HONIES AND SONGS
The overall tendency of German music, from Schubert through
to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, has been to heighten the
expressive burden not only of melody and chord-progression but
of individual moments of sound. With Schubert, the intensi cation
of lyrical progression is often achieved by a master-stroke of major-
to-minor modulation: it was also a favourite device of Mahler's, as
was also the reverse - minor to major. Schubert was also a lyricist
who wrote symphonics, and to some extent the two had common
problems, including the establishment ofa satisfactory relationship
between lyrical expression and symphonic structure.
The intensi cation of tonal values in Mahler's music arose from
progressive deepening of his lyrical impulse and an increasing
sensitivity to the world, a world he loved for its bcauty but to
which, in terms of human relationship, he could never adjust.
What exactly lay behind this deepening? In general terms, the
romantic century tried to exalt music as a religion of sensuous
beauty. It was Wagner, speci cally, who carried this attempt to
fantastic lengths, and made music carry the burdens of symbolism
(Tbe Ring), philosophical ideas (Tristan) and mystical ritual (Parsi-
fal). The unfolding of a Wagnerian music-drama is not something
which can be explained solely in the language of musical analysis.
For Wagner, thematic statement fuses tonal image and idea. The
development of themes, not only in terms of structure, but also
through exotic orchestral colouring and rich harmony, therefore
amounts to a tonal exploration of symbol, image and idea.
As the romantic century deepened its interior consciousness
through intensi cation of the sound-symbol, enrichment of the
orchestral palette and increasing harmonic resource, the psycho-
logical problem inherent in romanticism came to the fore. Roman-
tic music could convey supremely well the longing of nite man for
the joys of a boundless Eros; but having done this it could not
satisfy the soul's thirst for reality. Hence the music-dramas of
Wagner, the songs and early symphonies of Mahler now seem to
to exist in a rcalm of romantic dreaming. Later Mahler's idealism is
tempered by personal suffering. He became increasingly aware of
con ict between the ideal and the actual. The tragic note sounded
so often in his last songs and symphonies reveals his sense of
identity with the tragic theme of life, the endless frustration of
human aspirations.
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INTRODUCTION
Increasingly passionate emphasis upon the expressive values of
sound in order to convey theconsciousness of spiritual conditions
inevitably brought about a tonal break-through to the unconscious;
and it is against this background that the subsequent development
of German expressionism should be considered. The period coin-
cided with the emergence of Freudian psychology. Mahler himself,
towards the end of his life, was one of Freud's patients. Romantic-
ism ultimately exacerbatedthe planeof emotion; and it is frequently
through the intensi cation of emotion that various forms of
psychism, either neurotic or religious, eventually appear. For a
time Schoenberg himself was attracted by the visionary mysticism
of Swedenborg. The decay of romanticism and the new psycho-
logical awareness account for signi cant features of Mahler's
musical idiom which is by turns idealistic, ironic, tragic and death-
conscious.
Throughout his music, whether symphonic settings of idealistic
texts or earth-bound funeral marches which mourn all too
realistically the universality of human suffering and our common
end, the extreme sensitivity of his tonal expression invites des-
cription as ´tonal psychism'. This would apply to moments of
tremendous intensity, when the lyrical impulse is focused in
sounds which carry an expressionistic overload, a great burden of
meaning, signi cance and emotional pressure. Such moments are
found in theKindertotenlieder,the Chorus Mysticus of the Eighth
Symphony, even on the rst page of the First Symphony, to give
but three examples. Heightened tonal utterance is a hall-mark of
Mahler's style, a feature which deepens the sound of his orchestra
to a peculiar intensity; a telling example is the solemn and arresting
low C which opens Der Abschied', the last movement of Das
Lied von der Erde. It is coloured by double-bass, cello, harp,
tamtam, horn and double-bassoon, one of the most fertile strokes
of musical imagination in the whole work. To listen to a Mahler
symphony is to have not only a musical experience but to be
profoundly stirred in psycho-spiritual inwardness by an emotion-
ally highly-charged sound-pattern. There can be no doubt that
Mahler strove to achieve precisely this disturbing effect - a
shattering effect' as he once described it after a performance of the
Second Symphony. He wanted his listeners to apprehend the
depth of life in the way he experienced it, in joy and sorrow,
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MAHLER SYMPHONIES AND SONGS
aspiration, longing, resignation. A symphony by Mahler, as he

himself put it, is a world; and in Mahler's symphonic worlds all
kinds of elements drawn from diferent facets of human experience
nd musical expression. This is particularly true of the Second,
Third and Fourth Symphonics, where settings of religious songs
from Des Knaben Wunderborn, a famous collection of folk-poetry
made by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, are found side
by side with purely instrumental movements.
Mahler's concern with transcendence is apparent again andagain,
It is obvious, for example, in the Second Symphony, which begins
with a tragically coloured rst movement, and works through two
succeeding movements to a setting of Urlicht' from Des Knaben
Wunderborn, the gist of which is the af rmation of an inner light
which leads the lost soul of man to God. Following a tortuous
instrumental section, the Symphony ends with an overwhelming
choral setting of Klopstock's resurrection hymn, “Auferstehen',
which Mahler had heard at Hans von Bülow's funeral. Similar
'evolutionary' developments through a sequence of associated
movements can be traced in the Third, Fourth and Eighth
symphonies. This drive is not always consciously organised in
terms of systematic thematic manipulation. The mnovements tend
to be linked more by a technique of inspired image-association
reinforced by thematic cross-references. In the Second Symphony,
for instance, the third movement is really a symphonic enhance-
ment of the original accompaniment to an independently composed
song, 'St Anthony and the Fishes'. The irony of the poem is
transferred, by implicit association, to the orchestral transcription,
and is signi cant in the context of the symphony as a whole. In the
Eighth Symphony, thematiccrOSS-referencesunderline poetic and
philosophical interconnections linking the ancient hymn Veni
Creator Spiritus' with the lastscene of the Second Part of Goethe's
Faust.
There is, however, a far more subtle thread which links the
movements of Mahler's symphonics and which can be traced in
almost everything he wrote. Here is the archetype of a basic shape,
a characteristic curve of melodic ow which dominated Mahler's
lyrical inspiration:
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INTRODUCTION
Ex. 1
This shape is susceptible of almost in nite variation. It is found in

some of the songs and all the symphonies. It appears in simple,
uncomplicated structures, and is sometimęs, especially in the later
symphonies, masked by chromatic claboration. The parent gure
yields subsidiary shapes by inversion, retrogression and fragmenta-
tion, all of which play parts of thematic importance in Mahler's
works. A further point is that the basic shape as given in Ex. I is
contained in the chord of the 'added sixth', which plays an
important part in the closing pages of Das Liedvonder Erde:
Ex. 2
PPP
8D0.
8ta
morendo
These haunting sounds contradict the triumphant af rmations of

he Eighth Symphony composed only a short time before, and
ring the death-knell of romantic aspiration in Mahler's music.
Tbe Songs
Mahler's songs are among his best-loved compositions. They fall
into ve main groups, apart from a few separate pieces, and with
relatively few exceptions the more famous are characterised by
nostalgic and sombre re ection upon different facets of life.
The earliest group, Lieder undGesängeans der Jugendzeit, consists
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MAHLER SY MPHONIES AND SONGS
of fourteen songs for voice and piano, and was published in three
books in 1885 and 1892. These are youthful works; but they reveal
Mahler's love for DesKnabenWunderborn. This remained undimin-
ished for a great part of Mahler's life, and gave unending inspiration
for many ne songs. Indeed, so marked is this in uence that Des
KnabenYunderhorn provided ideas and programmatic associations
for symphonic movements, cspecially in the Second, Third and
Fourth Symphonies - which are consequently known as the
Wunderborn symphonies. There was an emotional and spiritual
kinship between the content of the poems, their mood and atmos-
phere, and Mahler's own romantic and mystical temperament.
Lieder und Gesänge are interesting mainly because they contain
thematic material used later in the Wunderhorn symphonies. Richard
Leander's German translation of Tirso de Molina's Don Juan
supplemented Wmderborn texts and provided poems for Book I,
together with Hans und Grete, a text written by Mahler himself. The
second and third books consist entirely of Wunderbornsongs.
LIEDER EINES FA HRENDEN GESELLEN

On a much higher level of artistic achievement are the Lieder eines
fabrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) for voice and orchestra,
composed between 1883 and 1885, and published in 1897. The
occasion for their composition was an experience very similar to
the romantic situation depicted in Schubert's Die lW interreise: a
lonely wanderer setting out for nowhere in particular after a des-
perately unhappy love-affair. The lady in the case was the actress
Johanne Richter, whose blue eyes captivated the composer and
gave him much pain. In the text of these songs, Mahler wore his
hcart upon his sleeve, and he later expressed anxiety lest his
verses should be thought too naive in their emotional fervour.
A quaintly mournful little phrase in D minor for clarinets
accompanied by harp opens the rst song. After two unembellished
statements, it appears for the third time, augmented, as the rst
vocal phrase. This interplay between the curling gure of accom-
paniment and its extension in longer notes by the singer is pro-
longed, and it forms the outer framework enclosing a contrasting
middle section. Despite the heavily-loaded expression of a lover
bemoaning the marriage of the beloved to someone else, the com-
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poser avoids what Hans Redlich* calls the sweltering harmonies of
late Wagner', and 'the psychological ponderousness of Brahms'.
Mahler's orchestral palette is organised here on chamber-music
lines, with plain harmonies and exceptionally clear colouring. The
overall mood is set by the simplest devices - a turn of ve notes,
repeated fths in the bass, and uncomplicated folk-like melody.
Quite marked in the rst song is the interval of the fourth, which
plays an important part in the First Syniphony, and which the
composer increasingly exploits for its astringent harmonic effects:
Ex. 3 Langsamer.
Allegro Wenn mein Schatz Hoch-zeit macht
The second song, 'Ging heut' morgens übers Feld', supplied

material for the rst movement of the First Symphony, and evolves
most beautifully from the descending fourth of the opening tune:
Ex. 4
Ging heut' mor-gens ü - bers Feld
Fourths also gure importantly in the harmony. Half-way through,

the key changes exquisitely to B major, throwing an ethereal
gleam over the pastoral bliss described in the rst lines of the song.
The world is full of light; but will the singer'shappiness return?
Unfortunately, no.
The third song, schell undwild, with its stark, almost brutal, note
of desperation, begins in D minor (I have a glowing dagger in my
breast'), but yields to a tender, characteristically Mahlerian inter-
lude in C major as the composer likens the blue of heaven above to
the eyes of the beloved. The tension of the rst section is increased
by a dramatic concdusion in E at minor. (This chromatic intensi-
cation of tonality is exploited to wonderful effect in the irst move-
ment of TheSong of the Earth.)
* Introduction to the Eulenburg score.
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No. 4 begins with a funeral march in E minor, and like the
preceding song ends a semitone higher (in F minor); and it will be
noticed that its opening key is a semitone higher than the ending of
the previous song. The vocal line is extremely simple throughout,
and phrased in slow, sad sections. The instrumental colouring of
the accompaniment is a wonderful stroke of imagination, the mood
being set by three low utes, cor anglais, clarinets and harp.
Towards the end a gentle folk-like melody, beginning in F major
and slowly yielding to the minor, is introduced with haunting
arpeggios. This section reappcars in the slow movement of the
First Symphony. Along with the 'wayfarer image in the nineteenth
century goes that of the lime tree. At this point the wayfarer, like
his predecessor in Schubert's WinterJourney, lics down to sleep, and
is gently covered by linden blossom. Flutes and harp return with
nal statements of the funereal opening rhythm.
Mahler's highly original and richly colouristic style of orchestral
song accompaniment is continued in twelve Wunderborn songs
published in 1905. These are a very varied selection, and two of
them are found in the Second Symphony. 'Urlicht', which was
originally conceived in the framework of the Symphony, sings of
man's 'nameless need', and of God who will give man a guiding
light leading him to unending bliss. The song rises to an ecstatic
peak of lyrical expression in its nal phrase, which is related to the
basic shape already mentioned (Ex. I). The entry of the contralto
voice after the instrumental third movement of the Symphony is
unforgettable; but the song is also wonderfully effective as a
separate piece. Perhaps it unites romantic longing with mystical
aspiration as perfectly as any other work in the composer's output.
'Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen' invokes a Housman mood in
its picture of the soldier malking his farewells bcfore leaving for
distant lands - there to nd his bed of greengrass within the sound
of shining trumpets. This songopens softly in D minor with melan-
choly fourths and a well-known trumpet call; but the mood is
wonderfully trans gured by a Schubertian switch to the major key
as the soldier addresses his sleeping beloved.
After abrief return to D minor there is another change, this time to
G at major for a central episode. The music returns once more to
D major before ending in the minor. What this moving piece
reveals is Mahler's characteristic method of structural association,
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whereby passages in different key-colours establish a deeply affect-
ing musical and emotional pattern. It is interesting to re ect how
far Mahler, who was always impatient of having his work analysed,
conceived the structural unity of his composition as a unity of
associated sound-images. He stands always at the emotional and
spiritual centre of groups ofsound-images, intuitively linking keys,
themes and harmonies in refreshingly original ways - although
Donald Mitchell remarks on possible precedents for this in the
songs of Schumann.* The archetype frequently found in Mahler's
textures (Ex. 1), quite apart from its structural force, symbolically
suggests an emotional and spiritual centre adopted almost instinc-
tively as a melodic stance. His sympathetic penetration of Wunder-
born texts is bound up with this.
KINDERTOTENLIEDER
In the Kindertotenlieder (Dirges for Children) we sense a deepened
psychological insight, intensi ed chromatic in ection, and a
fascinating orchestration which develops the chamber style of the
Wayfarer songs. The poems are by Friedrich Rückert, and Mahler
confessed, after the death of his clder daughter, that he had set
them "in an agony of fear lest this should happen'. Such music is
thus the fervent outpouring of one to whom every moment of
happiness is tinged with darkness, every moment of joy a threat of
future pain, and every optimistic promise dubious of realisation. It
exactly reveals the secret apprehensions of a mother anxious about
her children, and that Mahler should have been moved to set such
tragic pocms is evidence of his character. According to Richard
Specht, Mahler appeared to believe that his own artistic creations
amounted to a prophetic anticipation of future events. In a similar
vein of apprehension, he regarded his Ninth Symphony as a fore-
shadowing of his own death. The hammer-blows in the Sixth also
had prophetic force. To some this must seem a regrettable neurosis;
others may feel that composition and performance of such deeply-
felt music is indeed a sort of ritual pre-enactment. Whatever the
truth, these dark songs are a clue to the deepest levels of Mahler's
musical personality. Their melodic inspiration is more free fromn
the gravitational pull of Ex. I than most other compositions. For
* Gustav Mabler. Tbe Early Years (Rocklif, 195 8).
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the most part attention is xed by the subtle and profoundly
expressive use of chromatically in ected melody, supported by a
counterpoint of expressiveorchestral guration overwhelming in
its effect. In theKindertotenliederMahler does not shrink from the
most compelling use of tonal psychism. His music relentlessly
probes subconscious fears.
Contemporary with the Kindertotenlieder, composed between
I901 and 1904, were ve more settings of poems by Rückert. The
group has close emotional and thematic af nities with Das Lied
vonderErde, composed during 1907-o8, and the songs often follow
the basic shape of Ex. I fairly closely. The following example is
from Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen', which extols the joys
of life in the country given up to poetry and love - a life which
Mahler idealised in music but could never, as a musical director
committed to the pressure of endless travel and rehearsals, enjoy
for more than short spells in the summer. Notice the very character-
istic curve of these phrases:
Ex. 5
Ich Jeb' al - lein in mei-nem Himn - mel in mei-nem
Lie-ben in mei-nem Lie- ben in mei - nem Lied
and compare this vocal line from Der Abschied' in Das Lied von
der Erde:
Ex. 6
Es we - het kühl im Schatten mei - ner Fich - ten Ich ste- he
hier und har - re mei- nes Freun - des; ich har - re
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KINDERTOTENLIEDER
scin zum letz - ten Le be - wohl.
An anticipatory glance through the score of Das Lied at this

point will reveal how Mahler, in what is probably his greatest
work, committed himself wholehcartedly to this type of melodic
structure, for large sections are entirely based upon it. It is as if the
resignation to which all critics refer when discussing the psycho-
logical ethos of TheSong, and which is also a mark of the last songs,
was as much resignation to the inner force of a recurring thematic
motivation as it was to the collapse of the romantic consciousness
in its struggle to transcend itself in mystical realisation. Was this
basic shape the very essence of Mahler himself? Certainly Mahler
is never more at home with his material than he is in the vocal line
of Das Lied and the Rückert songs. These examples all show close
thematic af nities:
Ex. 7
()
Jch at - me leis im Duft der Lin de
(i)
O nidht mich Lie - be ! Lie - be die Son - ne
(ii)
Menschheit dei - ner Lei den
The theme of resignation is made explicit in the sad but beauti-

ful 'Um Mitternacht'. No strings are used in this song, and the
dark-toned colouring of the orchestra is enhanced by bass tuba,
trombones, oboe d'amore and double bassoon. The poet sings of
his desolation during the midnight hour when, after contemplation
of the sufferings of mankind, he resigns all power to God. For
Mahler this must have been a deeply signi cant song. Midnight
darkness always awakened powerful emotions. Earlier he had been
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stirred by the midnight warning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra which

he had given a central position in the Third Symphony.
To know Mahler's music it is necessary to know his songs
intimately, and to appreciate the interplay between vocal line and
orchestral accompaniment. This accompaniment is not guration
alone but a subtle, ever-shifting structure of planes of colour. The
vocal line is frequently interrupted by short orchestral 'interludes';
but these are basic to the wholeness of the form, which is expressed
in a pattern ofassociatedimages. The poctry of the sung line is thus
offset by sound-clusters which surround and colour the melodic
phrases with haunting overtones of purely orchestral expression.
When the voice is silent, the orchestra explores its soul.
On the other hand, Mahler proclaimed that he always reached a
stage in purely instrumental composition when the need to bring in
the voice became imperative. The fact seems to be that his creative
urge was essentially lyrical, and some of his most satisfying
symphonic writing paradoxically grows out of this lyrical impulse.
To sing is to utter images and ideas; and images and ideas have
their own interior logic of association and structural implication.
Mahler nourished his musical invention on images and world-
embracing ideas, and in this way discovered fascinating sound-
structures.
SympbonyNo. I in D
The First Symphony in D major is Mahler's rst enduring con-
tribution to the repertoire of major concert works. It was begun in
1884 in Kassel, completed in 1888 at Leipzig, and rst performed
at Budapest in 1889. Aiming as always at the utmost clarity, Mahler
revised the instrumentation before it was published in Vienna in
I899. Originally the Symphony had ve movements, the extra one
being anandante between the rst movement and scherzo. This was
later dropped, together with a programme very freely derived from
Jean Paul Richter's novel The Titan:
Part I. From the days of youth, youth, fruit- and thorn-pieces.
I. Spring and no end. The introduction depicts the awakening of
nature at earliest dawn.
2. Flower chapter (andante).
3. Full sail (scherzo).
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SYMPHONY NO. I
Part I. Commedia umana.

4. Shipwrecked. A funcral march in Callot's manner (The
Hunter's Funeral: Weimar). The following may, ifnecessary,
serve as explanation: the external impulse to this piece was
given the composer by the parodistic picture, "The Hunter's
Funeral', well known to all children in South Germany from
an old book of fairy-tales: the forest animals follow the
hunter's cof n; hares carry the pennon, a band of Bohemian
musicians goes in front, accompanied by cats, toads, crows,
etc., playing instruments, and stags, roe-deer, foxes and other
four-legged and feathered creatures of the woods follow the
procession in comic attitudes. Here this piece is to be thought
of as theexpressionof a mood sometimes of ironical merriment,
sometimes of sinister brooding, followed immediately by
s. Dall' inferno al Paradiso(allegrofurioso), the sudden expression
of a heart wounded to its depths
The Symphony is programmatic in that it evolves an experience
through explicit stages. Part I expounds youthful hopes, memories
and the promise of bliss. Part II depicts what happens after an
emotional crisis. In the slow movement there is tragedy; and in so
far as irony, cynicism and self-mockery can be imputed to patterns
of sound, these are also present. The triumphant nale overcomes
them with what some might feel to be a rather desperate and
simple-minded heroism. The Symphony's relationship to the
Wayfarer cycle has already bcen noted. In fact, the work has a
complex background of emotional entanglement. The Wayfarer
songs, on which Mahler was working whilst composing the
Symphony, refer to the affairvwithJohanneRichter ; but in 1886, in
Leipzig, he also fell passionately in love with the wife of Weber's
grandson, a much older woman. In an emotional sense, the
Symphony is essentially a 'wayfarer' symphony, with every tradi-
tional aspect of the 'wayfarer' image underlined in music of
tremendous variety and colour.
The beginning of the rst movement is one of the loveliest
symphonic openings in romantic music - a sustained high-octave
A which sets a mood of cthereal pastoral contemplation. Mahler's
A is the as yet unformed space of a spring dawn, and it gradually
unfolds a sequence of descending fourths. These anticipate the
descending fourth of 'Ging heut' morgens übers Feld', which
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emerges from the texture with a delicious sense of uninhibited
freedom. They also provide 'cuckoo' motives, although Mahler's
cuckoo sings in perfect fourths and not, like Delius's, in minor
thirds. Eventually, with the help of hunting fanfares, and orches-
tration abounding in sheer joie de vivre, the morning song breaks
out into ebullient ecstasy. Throughout the movement it supplies
much of the melodic material; but the vitality and fascination of the
structural scheme owe much to short subsidiary gures - horn
calls, the cuckoo motive, and repcated curling sequences which
oat inconsequentially about the score. Perhaps the most beautiful
and affecting part of the movement is the recapitulation. Here the
high A is sustained for many bars, and gradually wanes out to
PPPD before descending gently down the arpeggio of D major to
the accompaniment of bird calls (Aute) and distant horn chords.
Mahler must have liked this effect because something very
similar recurs in the rst movement of the Third Symphony,
sparked off, no doubt, by the common association of elemental
life.
The nale is thematically related to the rst movement, and
after preliminary shrieks of despair soon settles down to develop
a gure developed from it:
Ex. 8
) Firstmovement
A
A
(iü) Finale
-f>p f p Ef-p
A
The three upward steps become the foundation of assertive,

muscular counterpoint later on. Also important is the triumphant
chorale theme, nally blasted out on trombones. This obviously
derives from the descending fourths of the rst movement, and
reveals the underlying unity of invention linking the beginning
and ending of the Symphony. For many listeners the most affecting
part of the nale may well be this sentimental interlude:
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SYMPHONY NO. I
Ex. 9
Sehr langsam
8.
Pp rit. Ppsubito
Cello expressively
An exuberant waltz-scherzo and a slow movement, based upon

Frère Jacques', played in canon in D minor, and the folk-like
melody heard in the last Wayfarer song, constitute the two central
movements. There is much play upon the tonic and dominant
notes which are foreshadowed in the descending fourths of the
rst movement. These set the dance rhythm of the waltz and the
plodding tempo of the funeral march; they also feature
in the last Wayfarer song.
The strange-sounding, highly original music of the funeral
march retains its fascination today. It contains cynical parodies of
the sound of a marching band which enhance the grotesquerie of
the whole movement. Apparently Mahler, as a child, was fre-
quently wheeled in his pram to a neighbouring barracks where his
nurse had a soldier sweetheart; military fanfares and rhythms
would thus be among his earliest musical impressions. It is entirely
likely that the association with Frère Jacques' occurred simply
because his nurse used to sing the tune while waiting outside the
barracks. In any case, the sound of the marching band was a very
familiar one in nineteenth-century Austria, and all popular com-
posers of dance music churned out military marches by the dozen.
Right at the end of Mahler's piece the bassoon quotes a gure which
plays a prominent part in the song 'Wo die schönen Trompeten
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blasen'. English listeners who have served in the forces will nd it
has a familiar sound. Plodding fourths have the last word.
The Symphony was never really popular in Mahler's lifetime.
To many musicians at the turn of the century it must have seemed
backward-looking, relying too much upon outdated romantic
gestures, heroic postures, and the well-worn theme of the hero
winning through against odds. There are certainly tedious moments
in the fnale, which is naive in its quotations from the rst move-
ment, its repetitious assertion of triumph, and curiously trite on its
last chord. Even so, its poetry and tone-painting and its store of
romantic themes have established it as a favourite.
The Wunderborn Symnpbonies
In the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies Mahler explored a

world of sound to which the voice adds dimensions of explicit
meaning and association. These con rm Mahler's belief, once
expressed in a letter, that the man of letters, the philosopher and
the painter are all integrated in the musician. Mahler himself had
been a student of philosophy, and he also wrote poetry. Such a
belief foreshadowed Schoenberg's subsequent af rmation that
music expresses the unconscious nature of this and other worlds'.
It is signi cant that Schoenberg, a devoted admirer of Mahler, was
also a painter with a great interest in the relations between images,
ideas and sounds, an interest supremely vindicated in his un nished
opera Moses und Aron. In that great work images are governed by
ideas, and the framework of ideas is ordered by a single 'master-
concept symbolised in a tone-row. Grant you now,' says Moses
to Aron, 'the power of idea over word and image?' Much the
same could be said of Mahler's Wunderborn symphonies. They are
rich in associated imagery; but the images convey ideas, and the
ideas are arranged according to an overall guiding concept. This
gives rise to what might be called 'philosophical listening' - an
enjoyment of the tonal structure in the light of the concept. An
insight into the guiding concept may take some time to develop.
In my own experience, the sound-patterns, fused with associated
imagery and ideas, always point forcefully to the ruling concept,
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THE WUNDERHORN SYMPHONIES
so it becomes important to assess what was obviously an inspira-
tional motivation in the composer.
The three Wunderborn symphonies were all furnished with pro-
grammatic explanations withdrawn after their rst performances.
Understandably, Mahler wished to be known as a composer who
worked with notes, who was independent of non-musical material,
whose symphonies were tonal structures and not mere sound-
frameworks for images and ideas. The relation between images,
philosophic content and sound can be argued endlessly, raising
problems which nobody has nally settled. It is a very live issue in
contemporary music. What we could bcar in mind is that the
quality and range of a composer's experience are bound to nd
some sort of expression in his works. Between purely abstract pat-
terns which have no explicit relation to any de nable idea or
visual image, and themes or progressions which carry an explicit
symbolic burden, there are many grades of subtle relationship.
Perhaps we could accept that whereas some composers work at a
great distance of albstraction from those life-experiences which are
inspirational to their work, others instinctively transmute the
vibration of everypassing mood, emotion or aspiration into sound-
patterns.
Mahler exposed his musical faculty to anything in human experi-
ence which moved him emotionally, although we can detect certain
constant preoccupations - the great issues of life, death and love,
and the possibility of transmuting one state of consciousness into
another. In the background of his mind there seems always to be
the image of a ladder up which humanity can climb to heaven. Such
an image was given a particular slant by Schoenberg in Die
Jakobsleiter. External conditions were all experienced by Mahler as
part of what Jung later called ´the psychic continuum", It is inter-
esting that Ernst Kurth (1886-1946), whose theoretical writings
had a close relationship to his experience of romantic music,
stressed the importance of theunbeardmusical function, the subject-
ive force which alone gave life to 'dead' sounds. Mahler's best
music always sounds as if a powerful ow in his psychic being has
turned itself into sound. It is precisely this aspect of 'Aow' which
nds an important place in Kurth's theories. Recognising the
powerful subjective forces Aowing through Mahler's music, the
young Schoenberg wrote enthusiastically to Mahler after a
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performance of the Fourth Symphony to say that he had 'seen his
soul'. Modern English listeners may have some diffculty in under-
standing the enthusiasm with which German romantics discussed
their souls. The fact remains that we cannot enter into Mahler's
musical world unless we are prepared to come to terms with his
encompassing aura of belief, doubt, aspiration and emotional
reactions. The inner world was a relentless pressure upon him, the
hidden scaffolding of his musical ow, the foundation of his
symphonic structures. And it may well have been the case that
without the emotional drive of an overwhelming experience, the
potent suggestion of images, or the force of a philosophical
scheme, Mahler would have lacked the vital dimension of his
creative genius.
The Wunderborn symphonies are all other-worldly. They
unashamedly proclaim faith in love, redemption and the life in
heaven. In each case spiritual optimism is expressed in a song from
the Wunderhorn anthology. The Second Symphony adds a setting of
Klopstock's Auferstehen' (Resurrection Ode), and the Third a
passage from Zarathustra, which somewhat offsets the overall mood
of con dence to reveal what Bruno Walter called 'the nocturnal
element in Mahler.
SYMPHONY NO. 2 IN C MINOR
The Second, or ʻResurrection' Symphony as it is now known, was

the work which convinced Walter that he had found a vocation in
conducting Mahler's music. Its effect upon him was overwhelming.
It can be equally overwhelming today. Mahler always requires, and
nowhere more than in this massive work, that the listener should
give himself up completely to the tapestry of sound and idea which
the Symphony weaves around him. The overall scheme is not
unlike Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, although its psychological
atmosphere is different, being deepened by Mahler's uncanny
evocation of subjective states associated with death and a passion-
ately individualistic view of resurrection, made explicit by additions
to Klopstock's lines. If Beethoven's rst movement seems to scan
the cosmic drama of life unfolding from a bare, vibrating fth,
Mahler's, erupting from a vicious tremolo, portrays the funeral
rites of a hero. In fact, the composer referred to the rst movement
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SYMPHONY NO. 2
as funeral rites', and the hero as the Titan of the First Symphony.
He also claimed that this movement raised the question: "To what
purpose have you lived? and that the last movement gives the
answer. The Symphony (completed on 25 July r894) is thus a
death-and-trans guration drama. Understandably it interested
Richard Strauss, whose tone-poem Death and Trans guration had
been composed in 1889, and who cohducted the rst three move-
ments in Berlin before the rst complete performance of the
Symphony under Mahler himself.
The next two movements are both in triple tempo, the rst being
a sophisticated Ländler, the second an orchestral transcription of
the song 'St Anthony and the Fishes'. The Ländler is extraordinarily
beautiful and far more delicately precise in its rhythms than the
Ländler of Schubert and Josef Lanner, the spirit of which it evokes
and symphonically transmutes. It is held to be a memory of the past;
but its wistful mood is cynically dispelled by St Anthony's experi-
ence with the sh. The Viennese illusion fades and life reveals its
bitterness, the orchestra providing cynical background noises.
How, it seems to imply, can we linger with the mnemories of care-
free youth when life has to be redeemed and regenerated? In this
movement the associations of the song penetrate the musical
experience. The whirling of the texture and the acid colouring of
the score lead, as Mahler intends that they should, to feelings of
restlessness and disillusion.
After the scherzo has died away with hollow, cheerless sounds,
Mahler introduces the voice with the song Urlicht'. The entry of
the contralto on the words 'O Röschen rot' is unforgettable, and it
serves as a pivotal point trans guring the symphonic scheme with
light and depth. The poem is a strange one, naïve in symbolism
and profound in implication. It can be read in the light of Psalm 18,
verse 28. Is the mystical rose an allusion to the Rose of Sharon, or
the rose in Christian symbolism which has traditionally been
associated with both Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary? A German
title of Mary is Marien Röselen'. Dante, in the Paradiso, Canto
XXII, refers to the Rose in which the Logos became incarnate. The
symbolism is clear: there is an inner light of the soul which will
lead mankind out of death into the light of God. The orchestra
accompanies the words with solemn, sustained brass harmonies and
angelic tinklings.
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Immediately after the song, which ends with the voice climbing
ccstatically to the tonic through Mahler's favourite ascending
curve, there is a tempestuous outburst of orchestral sound. Here
the parallel with Bcethoven's Ninth is unmistakable - con dent,
spiritualistic aspiration shattered by dissonant harmonies and
strident orchestration. The agonised orchestral development
which follows is very dif cult to conduct, being susceptible of
endless variety of interpretation. Klemperer's different recordings
of this part vary astoundingly. This is because the texture weaves
together an elaborate kaleidoscope of tonal images, quoting the
march theme from the rst movement, and anticipating passages
from the chorale on Klopstock's 'Auferstehen' which is to follow -
and all with striking dynamic contrasts and uctuations of tempo.
An example is the passionate, even agonising, gure associated in
the nale with the solo contralto singing O glaube, mein Herz, O
glaube' (O believe, my heart, believe). Against a background of
tremolo utes, English horn and oboe declaim the vocal phrase
with passionate in ections anddesperate urgency - exactly as if the
dif culty of belief and yet its vital necessity are experienced as an
emotional religious crisis. Least satisfactory in the whole long
transition to the chorale is the naive-sounding march music based
on Thomas of Celano's famous sequence Dies irae'. In due course
an ascending stepwise gure heralds the entry of the chorale.
Before the voices enter, horns and brass, positioned outside the
orchestra, suggest Gabriel's summoning of the legions of the
dead. There are strange twitterings on ute and piccolo, and
rhythmic movement is suspended in awe-inspiring contenmplation
of the abyss between earth and heaven. The choral nale is com-
pletely convincing, and it reaches a tremendous climax with orches-
tra and voices mounting wave on wave to their nal chord. Here
again Mahler's basic shape serves as a structural and thematic back-
bone, and nds one of its greatest expressions as a theme of
aspiration, faith and spiritual triumph. The culmination of this
movement should be compared with the Chorus Mysticus of the
Eighth Symphony, which employs the same technique on an even
grander scale.
There is much ne music in this work, and especially in the
rst movement, which introduces a fertile succession of themes as
the basis of an extended sonata-form scheme. The rst themes,
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SYMPHONY NO. 2
centred on C minor, are bound together by common structural

features, as well as by their sombre, even sinister, mood, and they
are introduced by the strings with protean strength. The second
subject is an ascending curve (compare the end of the transition
leading to the resurrection hymn) and has some similarities with
the trans guration theme in Strauss's tone-poem. It subsequently
reappears in E major with broadening effect. The same remote key
also emerges signi cantly in later movements, and cspeciąlly in the
third where it isassociated witha lyrical, expansiveand anticipatory
theme. It is in the rst movement that we hear rst the Dies irae'
march music. Structurally the entire work is cross-referenced with
themes which have symbolic force, so it coheres very well in
the experience of those who detect the gradual unfolding of the
resurrection motive in the programmatic context of death and
man's need of God. The sound of a large choir whispering
(Auferstchen' is pure inspiration. Being on a different plane from
the march music, which sounds almost simple-minded to modern
ears, it is tremendously impressive in its strange intensity. We may
remember that the Symphony antedated the horrors of the First
World War by only a few years. Mahler's passionate, wish-ful lling
vision of resurrection and his identi cation with suffering man-
kind throw prophetic light on the whitened bones of human experi-
ence in the twentieth century. From this standpoint, and quite
apart from concluding expressions of faith and optimism, it is one
of the greatest death-symphonies ever written, especially as it
retains a universal reference lost in the agonised introspection of
the Ninth Symphony, in which Mahler contemplates his own
approaching end.
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN D MINOR
The Third Symphony, perhaps more than any other work by

Mahler, shows his Gestalt approach both to human experience and
to symphonic structure. Musically it fuses different stylistic levels.
Programmatically it knits together a wealth of ideas and asso-
ciations. It was published in 1902 and rst performed complete,
under the composer's direction, at Krefeld in June of that year.
Weingartner had previously conducted three movements in
Berlin, where they had not been well received.
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The Symphony was rst entitled The Joyful Science (after
Nietzsche's book, Die fröblicbe Wissenschaft), and subtitled A
Summer Morning's Dream', and there is reference to it in a letter
of 29 August 1895. The work was nished on 6 August 1896, and
in its original form it included as its seventh movement the setting
of a Wnderborn song, 'Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden',
which later became the nale of the Fourth Symphony. Much of
the material in the Fourth is foreshadowed in this concluding song;
and this throws interesting light upon Mahler's creative processes.
It suggests that composition grew out of a continuous chain of
interwoven tonal and philosophical fantasy in such a way that one
work could begin where another left off. Subconsciously the
Gestalt tendency in Mahler's mind underlay a predisposition t
experience the world whole, to see patterns and connecting links
everywhere. In philosophy this same tendency found expression in
the nineteenth century in Hegel's metaphysical idealism; but it is a
binding-thread in the religious mysticism of all ages.
There is uncertainty about the chain of ideas associated with the
Symphony's six movements, and Mahler never publicly divulged
its innermost meaning. Lawrence Gilman refers in a programme
note* to a conversation he had with his friend Willem Mengel-
berg, to whom Mahler had once made known the Symphony's
'real programme'. According to Mengelberg, the Symphony has
deep humanistic content and sets out to project something of the
vision of brotherhood expressed in Beethoven's Ninth. However,
as Hans Redlich pointed out,† there are at least ve different
drafts of the programme. Quite apart from wishing to be known as
a 'pure musician', Mahler evidently had some dif culty in rational-
ising his scheme after the event. His Summer Morning Dream, as we
now know it, is in six movements, which have the following titles:
I Summer marches in.
II What the owers of the meadow tell me.
III What the animals of the forest tell me.
IV What night tells me (contralto solo, setting words from
Zarathustra).
V What the morning bells tell me (choir of women and boys
*Orchestral Music (Oxford, 1951).

t BrucknerandMabler (Dent, 1955).
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SYMPHONY NO. 3
with contralto solo, setting words from DesKnaben Wunder-

born), and
VI What love tells me.
Mahler indicated that these titles are 'small pointers'.
The rst movement is extremely long, and it begins with an
exhilarating theme blasted out on eight horns - one of the most
exciting beginnings in any nineteenth-century symphony:
Bx. 10
According to Alma Mahler, the movement, which swirls with

elemental feeling, depicts the composer's reactions to the awaken-
ing of Pan, which he experienced at noonday outside his hut above
the house where the family lived at Steinbach during the summer
months, and where the composer gave himself up to creative work
after the stress of concert-direction during the winter. It was when
he stood before this hut, which was characteristically furnished
with piano, volumes of Kant and Goethe, and music of Bach, that
the inspiration for the Symphony welled up in a rush of sound-
images. The experience seems to have been a deeply moving one,
and the internal evidence of the music suggests that he felt a
mystical unity with the elemental forces of the earth in every nerve
and cell. Bruno Walter went to stay with Mahler shortly after
completion of the work. When he glanced round at the glorious
scenery on his way to the house, the composer said: No need to
look. I have composed all this already !' Walter was deeply
impressed by the music, and it is worth quoting his rst reactions:
Thanks to our talks, full of the over ow of the creative frenzy of his
morning's work, I was familiar with the spiritual atmosphere of the
Symphony long before I knew its musical content. Yet it was a shatter-
ing experience to hear him play it at the piano.... This music made me
feel I recognised him for the rst time; his whole being seemed to breathe
a mysterious af nity with the forces of nature. I had already guessed its
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depths, its elemental quality; now, in the range of his creativity, I felt it
directly. ...I saw him asPan. At thesametime, however - this in the
last three movements – I was in contact with the longing of the human
spirit to pass beyond its carthly and temporal bonds. Light streamed
from him on to his work, and from his work on to him.*
Much of the rst movement, after the splendid opening and the
impressionistic stirrings of the introductory pages, is carried by an
cbullient march which co-ordinates in its vigorous rhythms the
protean cnergies of a wealth of thematic material. Unfortunately, as
in the Second Symphony, the introduction of march music is not
always convincing. Despite its length, the music does not require
feats of concentration; yet this is not to deny its power and
momentum. Above all, the car is casily won over by the beauty of
the orchestration. Most impressive are the deep brass chords
which followappearancesof the initial horn theme.
The movements which follow the conquest of summer over the
volcanic eruptions of elemental nature fall casily on the ear also;
but they reveal more than ever Mahler's mastery of sound. This is
superbly apparent in the delightful fos campi music of the second
movement, the nostalgic and magically evocative post-horn solo in
the third, and the deep-toned colouring of the contralto setting of
Nietzsche's words: "Take heed, O man! The night is deep, and
deeper than the day thinks', which are taken from Zarathustra's
Second Dance Song where each line in the original is separated by
a note of the bell striking the midnight hour. Mahler refrains from
depicting this effect literally, substituting instead a sustained and
profoundly moving melody to a simple accompaniment. The
contralto sings the words Gib Acht!' (Take heed) to a falling step,
F sharp -E (Ex. 11, i). As the music is in D major, the next down-
ward step would be to the tonic; but this step is not taken, and so
the voice hangs suspended, on a note of irresolution. Exactly the
sameeffect occurs in the opening bars of the Ninth Symphony, the
rst theme of which, also in D major, quotes the same sounds – F
sharp - E (Ex. 11,ii). This self-quotation,deliberate orunconscious,
reveals much about the symbolic aspect of germinal thematic
motives in Mahler's melodies. A further point is that the step of a
falling tone also features importantly in setting the word 'Ewig' in
* Bruno Walter, GustavMabler, trans. Lotte Walter Lindt (Hamish Hamilton,
1958).
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SYMPHONY NO. 3
the nal bars of Das Lied von der Erde. The associations in all three
cases give food for thought. Nor is this all. Immediately after the
Nietzsche setting comes the song of the morning bells, and the
cheerful Bimm bamm' of young voices resounds to a simple
four-note gure (Ex. II, ii) which also recurs, though in retro-
grade, in the opening bars of the Ninth Symphony (Ex. 1I, iv):
Ex. 11
(0) Symphony II, fourth movem
ement
Contral:o
Gib Acht ! Gib Acht!
(i) Symphony IX, rst movement

2nd Violins
(ii) Symphony III, fth movement
Bimm bamm bimm bamm
(iv) Symphony IX, rst movement

Harp
It forms an ironic counterpoint to that Symphony's openingtheme.

The way such thematic fragments cross the boundaries between
different works, either as literal echoes or mocking self-quotations,
is of the greatest musical and psychological interest.
The song of the morning bells is a setting of the Wunderborn
poem Es sungen drei Engel'. The midnight bells omitted
setting Zarathustra's dance song are here sublimated into the joyful
suggestion of light prevailing overdarkness - the Johannine light
which the higher pessimism' associated with Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer does not comprehend. In setting Nictzsche in the
context of this Symphony, Mahlerseems to be at once attracted -
like so many romantic artists - by the metaphysical symbol of
darkness, and by the warning that things are not what they rcally
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seem. In the midst of life we are in death, and the sorrow and
tragedy with which it is associated.Nevertheless, the drift of the
Third Symphony, clearly implied by the order of the movements
(in which we should consider the original placing of the song
´Heavenly Life' which now ends the Fourth Symphony), is to exalt
light above darkness, and universal love above the elemental
forces of nature. The keynote of Mahler's spiritual optimism is
sounded by the morning bells. God is not dead. Love ultimately
crowns the pageant of life which began in the primeval stirrings of
the carth. In the last movement a ood of glorious music majestic-
ally unfolds a magni cent paean of love. It begins with an exquisite
instrumental adagio deepening and rounding off the entire musical
and philosophical conception.
The key-scheme correlative with the order of the movements is
interestingly organised. As the Symphony now stands, it begins in
D minor and ends inD major. The original conception required it
to end in E major, an example of progressive tonality'. The
unfolding of the formal structure, and the development of
the philosophical or religious content step by step to a level of
trans gured consciousness in heavenly life nds musical expression
in the ascent of one tone. The Symphony was well named when
Mahler called it The JoyfulScience.It is a visionary dream of world
harmony, like the one which led Kepler to place the Sun, as the
"throne of God', at the centre of a geometrical system consisting of
the ve regular Euclidean solids which de ned the relative orbits
of the planets. For geometrical gures Mahler substituted states of
life and consciousness, and even made room for the Abyss, the
-being hinted at in Zarathustra's Night Song. Yet, like Kepler,
the composer symbolically elevated the Sun as an ordering prin-
ciple. It is the solar forces of summer which 'march in' to impose
harmony upon the chaos of the elements. To deepen the symbol, it
is the divine in man which ultimately masters the ux of creative
energies in his soul. Looked at from this point of view, the Sym-
phony offers not only a wonderful pageant of orchestral sounds,
but a signi cantly related series of 'foci' for meditative listening.
Also it offers a clue to Mahler's inner preoccupations at this,
perhaps the happiest, time of his life. How much these owed to
study of Kant and Gocthe, whose works provided intellectual food
at Steinbach, we shall perhaps never know. We learn from Alma
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SYMPHONY NO. 3
Mahler that her husband knew the name of every plant and tree in
his garden. Did he,perhaps, know Goethe's theory of the 'archetypal
plant which, signi cantly in relation to the titles of the Third
Symphony, lays great stress upon the inwardness of universal
formative forces and their oneness with the power of creative
imagination in man? And the conclusion of the Symphony with a
stream of orchestral polyphony expressing What Love tells me' is a
suggestive anticipation of the underlying idéa of the Eighth, the
Symphony of Love, which is based on one of Goethe's seed-ideas,
faith in redemption through love. The Third Symphony is a
wonderful example of how a richly inspired piece of music can
grow from a varied background of images and ideas.
SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN G
The Fourth Symphony (completed in 1900)is the last in which Mahler

gave free rein to images associated with the world of the Wunder-
born, although these recur rather strangely, and without much
conviction, in the middle sections of the Seventh Symphony. The
Fourth was published in 190I and, like all the others, later revised.
In terms of texture and structure it marks an advance in musical
thinking and symphonic conception. Mahler's melodic gift owers
again, and with wonderful spontaneity, in the deceptively innocent
rst movement, which is a masterpiece of delicate counterpoint,
Mozartian lucidity and sensuous beauty. The second movement, a
Ländler, is the rst example of a type of structure which the
composer developed in later works with more acid emphasis. We
have alrcady noted his feeling forLändler tempo in the second move-
ment of the ´Resurrection' Symphony. Here it makes its nostalgic
point by emphasising an uncomplicated rhythmic accompaniment
to the melodic ow. In the Lāndler of the Fourth, the underlying
rhythm is not chained to an over-emphatic one-two-three in the
bass but distributed through interwoven parts. The result is one
of contrapuntal subtlety, coloured by tightening the strings of the
solo violin a whole tone. The composer calls for an effect wie eine
Fiedel, an evocation of the sound ofa street ddler scraping dance
music. The slow movement deepens and digni es the Symphony
with music of profound, meditative beauty. It is one of Mahler's
loveliest inspirations, and in moments of impassioned yearning it
C
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recalls the climbing curve of Ex. I Which is trcated in rising
sequences. The last movement has alrcady been mentioned in
relation to the Third Symphony. Its most remarkable feature is the
modulation to E major near the end. Thus a work which begins in
G major is concluded a minor third lower; but the magnetic pull
of E is already felt in a theme common to both this Symphony and
the Third, where it is heard in the setting of Es sungen drei Engel'
(Ich hab' übertreten die zehn Gebot'):
Ex. 12
die Eng - lein, die ba - cken das Brot.
Cross-references between the rst movement and the last are

found in the chirping fths with which the work opens, and a
similar passage which marks off the strophic divisions of the
Wunderbornsong. More interesting is the inconsequential tune in the
rst movement :
Ex. 13
FI. 8ve higher
p -p
which not only recalls the falling shape of Ex. 12 but provides the
thematic basis of an cmotional outburst – also in E major - at the
end of the adagio. This theme has elements of the subsequent
melody of the concluding song. Close listening reveals many subtle
and charming interconnections throughout the entire work, and it
is easy to see that the mood and thematic motivation of the nale
inspire the Symphony from its rst cheerful sounds, a point rst
noted by Paul Bekker. The strophic song, 'Wir geniessen die
himmlischen Freuden', offers a view of celestial life which cannot
seem very convincing today. However, the music is delightful.
Mahlerapproachedthe world of childhood's dreaming armed with
sophisticated musical resources, and to a great extent the beauty of
the music outstrips the Wnderhorn simplicity of the words so
comple e'y that an element of contradiction arises between the
Symphony and the images which originally inspired it.
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SYMPHONY NO. 4
It is poctically appropriate that Mahler's last Wunderborn

symphony ends in E major - a key shared by such peaceful works
as the Nocturne in Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music,
the two E major Preludes and Fugues in Bach's 48, and the
slow movement of Beethoven's Op. go and Op. IO9. The world of
the Wunderborn, richly idealised in Mahler's musical imagination, is
left quietly behind. There are no more explicit references to or set-
tings of the poems; but Mahler's musical mentality seems always
to be motivated by a lyrical impulse which shaped itself again and
again in melodic terms rst consciously associated with the
visionary world of Brentano and Arnim's collection. In the next
three symphonies, Mahler entered upon a dialectical struggle, when
he wrestled with musical conceptions which he tried to dissociate
from non-musical conceptions. If theWunderbarnphase re ects, on
the whole, happiness, aspiration and Mahler's personal brand of
humanised catholicism, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies
project the pain and stress of a sensitive mind tried in the re of
mental suffering.
The Fiftb, Sixth and SeventhSympbonies
Almost all Mahler's creative work was done during the late
summer, when he enjoyed temporary freedom from the pressure of
his professional duties as conductor. Considering the length and
complexity of the symphonies, he must have worked at fever pitch
merely to get the notes down on paper. However, having com-
pleted a score, he was unable to leave it alone. An inherently anx-
ious, introverted temperament led him into endless revisions.
There may have been an element of ruthless perfectionism in this;
but it is equally likely that the composer's sensitivity to adverse
criticism, his basicsense of insecurity exacerbated by unfavourable
critical notices in Berlin, and dif culties with professional relation-
ships all overfowed into anxieties about the quality of his work and
made it impossible for him to leave a piece with a feeling of nal
satisfaction. The Fourth Symphony, for example, was published
in 1901; but the composer was still revising it nine years later. The
Fifth was revised again and again between 19o7 and 1g09. In the
Sixth Mahler changed his mind about the relative positions of slow
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movement and scherzo. The Seventh was issued in a reasonably
de nitive form as late as 1962 in the Eulenburg edition.
The growth in maturity evident in the symphonies is tremendous,
considering that they were all compressed into a relatively short
period of time. The First was composcd in 1894. Only ten years
later Mahler was working on the Seventh, a composition of vastly
different character in a much more advanced idiom. The Tenth was
sketched in the summer of 1910, but left un nished at his death.
Between the years 1894 and 19IO Mahler therefore completed nine
long symphonies and Das Lied vonder Erde. During this period his
musical style deepened in intensity, to mature into orchestral
textures of wonderful colour, contrapuntal complexity character-
ised by strong, sinewy lines, astringent harmony frequently com-
pounded of fourths and bare, pungent progressions, and unrivalled
expressive power. His major works are largely free of obtrusive
Wagnerian traits. Particularly striking are the clarity and strong
colouring of his part-writing, and a kind of chromaticism which,
although remarkably free in reaching out beyond implied basic
harmonies, never loses itself in thick, wandering tonality. For
Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Mahler was both an inspiration and a
pointer to new developments, notwithstanding his wry self-
criticism to the effect that he knew he was an old-fashioned
composer. Mahlerian traits are obvious in the music of Shostako-
vich; and the in uence upon Britten is well known, and openly
nowledged by him.
Despite Mahler's open disavowal of programmatic content
there areassociations. The rst movement of the Sixth Symphony
contains a theme (Ex. 16) which is supposed to be a portrait of
Alma Mahler. The three hammer blows in the nale of the same
work are said to ʻlay the Titan to rest', although he had already had
his funeral rites in the 'Resurrection' Symphony. The Fifth conforms
suspiciously to the 'tragedy-despair-consolation-triumph' pattern,
and the Seventh introduces thematic fragments from earlier
Wunderhornsongs. The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies arouse strong
reactions, either of admiration or dislike, as they did in Mahler's
own day. The Seventh makes its way slowly and cannot be con-
sidered popular. Redlich remarked shrewdly that Mahler failed to
convince even himself in this work'.
Symphonic wholeness, in Mahler's view, expressed in a con-
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SYMPHONY NO. 5
versation with Sibelius, who thought in terms of thematic inte-

gration and logical development, means the wholeness of a world.
We have already noted thematic cross-references in the carlier
symphonies; but Mahler's symphonic worlds are built up of tonal
images which each re ect some aspect of experience. The primary
unifying principle is psycho-spiritual, the subjective, suffering
self, exploring heights and plunging into depths. It is precisely
because the Seventh fails to achieve a uni ed world of tonal images
that it remains relatively unconvincing as a whole. We might say
that the Fifth and Sixth, for all their excursion into the realm of
'absolute music, with extended thematic development and
transformation, succeedbecause they still conform to the world'
conception. This is not to deny that the Seventh contains forward-
looking music ofgreat power and interest.
SYMPHONY NO. S
The study of thematic structure in the Fifth Symphony (1902)

immediately reveals familiar shapes related to Ex. I, and these tend
to recur increasingly in Mahler's later work. The rst section is a
funeral march, beginning with a 'fate' motive somewhat resembling
the opening of Becthoven's Fifth. Its middle section (Leiden-
schaftlich. Wild.) is a tremendous outburst of desperation. The next
movement, directed to be played with great vehemence, is really a
fantasia upon the march - an elaboration recalling the long section
linking Urlicht' with 'Auferstehen' in the SecondSymphony. This
is stormy music of disturbing force, exploiting and nally exhaust-
ing the mood of tragedy and desperation set in the opening
movement, and ending in a chorale destined to nd triumphant
apotheosis in the nale. The scherzo is an intense though gro-
tesque evocation of both Ländler and waltz. Viennese waltz melodies
reveal great ingenuity in breaking up triple metre into standard
rhythmical formations. In this movement Mahler explores all the
standard patterns of triple dance-structure; but he concedes little
to customary Viennese sweetness, infusing the rhythmic patterns
with endish vitality and distorting the melodic linë with awkward
intervals, all the time drawing out thematic motives in a forced,
asymmetrical extension. Until Mahler invented this kind of
symphonic 'parody-Ländler', no Austrian could have heard his
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favourite rhythms treated so brutally. The frenzied, hectic effect
arises from the fact that the associations of Viennese rhythm are
thrown out of joint when traditional melodic and harmonic con-
ventions are dislocated. In earlier Viennese dance music we nd
sequences of formally symmetrical tunes, frequently of great
beauty and rhythmic subtlety; but the Strausses, and notably Josef,
later developed the idiom by inventing asymmetrical melodies
considerably extended by developmental and subsidiary gures
and enhanced with adventurous modulation. Mahler was well
aware of this, and had a deep, although concealed, admiration for
Austrian waltzes and the world of operetta. However, he rein-
terpreted the idiom according to his own symphonic logic. The
result, as Cardus picturcsquely puts it, is that 'waltz rapes Ländler',*
although it might be truer to say that Mahler raped both.
The celebrated adagio for harp and strings, sometimes taken out
of context and played as a separate piece, is probably Mahler's
best-known movement. It has frequently been used as incidental
music for lms and radio plays, and always at moments of romantic
sorrow. The Rückert songs ʻICH bin der Welt abhanden gekommen'
and 'Nun seh' ich wohl' contain melodic material found here. There
is much dramatic infection in the main theme which, however,
repcatedly opens out in broad sweeps supported by solemn dia-
tonic triads.
The popular rondo- nale begins with horn calls, answered by
the bassoon which quotes a phrase from the Wunderborn song
'Lob des hohen Verstandes':
Ex. 14
suggesting, incidentally, that although thelWunderhornis supposedly

out of the symphonic scheme, it can never be ignored. This points
the irony of the movement. As the song is about a singing contest
presided over by an ass, the polyphonic structure, which uses many
contrapuntal devices, is placed by association in a strange context.
Mahler here reveals his mastery in the world of pedants. Overall
there is an abundance of thematic material, expounded in twenty
* Neville Cardus, Gustav Mabler (Gollancz, I965).
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SYMPHONY NO. S
preludial bars with much emphasis upon the ass's tail' - the
falling gure at the end of Ex. I4. This appears in augmented form
in many other thematic fragments, and is indeed a binding thread.
It is used in retrograde formation and is virtually ubiquitous.
Moreover it dovetails well into an important theme, alluding to the
adagio, which follows preliminary contrapuntal exposition:
Ex. 15
zart, aber ausdrucksvol!
Violin parts only quoted
Pp
The structure of the movement is extremely complex, and the

combination of themes produces a busy texture. However, Mahler's
muscular counterpoint generates considerable momentum and its
powerful cffect is supported by lucid orchestration highlighting
different melodic strata. These strata are bound together in a fugal
scheme and set in perpetual' motion by an iresistible march
rhythm. Taken in isolation the separate themes may seem to lack
distinction; but they embody just the kind of guration which
lends itself to contrapuntal development. The movement reaches
an uplifting conclusion in a transformed version of the chorale
theme rst heard near the end of the second movement.
An overall feeling of tension in the Symphony arises from its
progressive tonality. It begins in C sharp minor, and ends in D
major; but it gets there via A minor (second movement) and F
major (adagio), the scherzo being also in D. If these centres are
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synthesised in a chord, they produce a full major seventh with D as
root. This is not to say that the Symphony grows out of this chord;
but it is a striking symbol of the tension implicit in the whole
scheme.
SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN A MINOR
The Sixth Symphony (190ș), much revised since its performance at

Essen in 1906, has not yet achieved the recognition it deserves.
This may partly bebecause it stirs gloomy emotions without purg-
ing them. It worried even its composer, in whom it provoked
deep agitation and melancholy introspection. It is in no sense an
optimistic piece, and is perhaps all the greater as a work of art
because it does not set out to propound facile solutions to the
emotional stresses intensi ed in Mahler by the contemplation of
life. Instead it works out thesestresses in binding itself to logical
symphonic procedures, and there is genius in the way these are
developed to a conclusion.
The storm and stress of Mahler's Sixth Symphony arose from a
deepening anxiety, an enduring spiritual concern which trans-
muted his intimate personal worries into sombre visions of the
human condition. Such a transmutation explains the juxtaposition
anguished melody with detached interludes, emotional land-
scapes' where the panorama of feeling is temporarily held at arm's
length and contemplated with an almost mystical detachment. It
would be going much too far to suggest that Mahler ever really
achieved Wordsworthian 'recollection of emotion in tranquillity
for more than short periods, if, indeed, at all; even his mystical
detachment quickly ows into a bitter-sweet introspection. But in
this Symphony he repeatedly withdraws from the more intense
levels of subjective involvement. This withdrawal, which is cer-
tainly necessary in order to alleviate the more extrenme rigours of
emotional expression, is assisted by the use of cowbells, an imagin-
ative colouristic device. All wanderers on the Alpine heights know
this sound. The higher one ascends, the more remote the tintin-
nabulation, and the greater one's sense of detachment from the
every-day world. According to temperament it can symbolise
either amnystical freedom of the spirit, a closeness to God, or merely
a feeling of loneliness and desolation. Throughout the work moods
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SYMPHONY NO. 6
interpenetrate, con ict or combine, to be expresscd in a vast

structure of impressive proportions.
There are four movements, closely linked by common thematic
elements and the major-minor chord relationship already invested
with symbolic force in the Resurrection Symphony. The rst
movement begins with savage attack and presents material which
assumes new importance in the scherzo. Here is the theme from the
rst movement which Alma claimed to be a musical portrait of
herself:
Ex. 16
mf f f
The andante is a lyrical interlude, a stream of drcaming
f
melody
recalling the familiar Mahler, the ecstatic song-writer who soon
took up his romantic lyre again in the Eighth Symphony and The
Song of the Earth. In the nale, thematic material is distorted by
chromatic in ection and octave displacement:
Ex. 17
mf- f
but most disturbing of all are the three hammer blows, each of
which comes at the height of a developmental section.
This tragic work is perhaps Mahler's nest purely instrumental
piece. Its central tonality, A minor, is clearly established and this,
together with closely integrated thematic structure, reinforces its
dynamic form. It is the most ´classical' of the composer's works.
Both Schoenberg and Berg were deeply impressed by it, and Mah-
ler's individual way of stretching out themes in asymmetrical lines
and wide leaps anticipated later trends in expressionism.
It can be argued that classical tonality is a projection of the
experiences of the self unconsciously identi ed with the tonic
principle, and that in Mahler's music the 'hero', the suffering self of
the emotional action, is identi ed also with certain harmonic and
thematic nuclei. Hence the emotional vicissitudes of the hero'
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become one with recurring basic shapes, their distortions,
transpositions, extensions and often tortuous contrapuntal develop-
ments, and with the ever-recurring major-minor antithesis which
paradoxically ofers a kind of harmonic indetermination as the
ultimate centre of structural function and the correlative symbol
of the divided consciousness so penetratingly described in Hegel's
Phenomenology.*These musical sounds are indeed symbols, and the
musical logic of the form is inseparable from the symbolic logic of
the inward, psychological drama in which Mahler's own con-
sciousness is always the central character, a soul divided between
its own trials and purgations and its concern for the suffering
human spirit. Sympathetic understanding of Mahler's deepening
psycho-spiritual sensitivity is important in appraisal of his later
work. Moreover, serious consideration of the idea just pro-
pounded can throw light upon the subsequent development of
expressionism and Schoenberg's later twelve-note theory. In
Schoenberg's development, the psycho-spiritual centre of the self
- the ´suffering hero' of earlier romantic music – is progressively
identi ed rst with recurrent chromatic patterns, and nally with
shapes originating in an archetypal series, the series being rstly
theirunconsciousdynamic force and only secondly their conscious
rationalisation. The force and persistence of shapes related to
Ex. I in Mahler's music illustrates a primitive phase of this process.
The basic shape as given is really a rationalisation of Mahler's
dominant thematic drive. This must represent a correlative,
subconscious urge with which his inner self was identi ed.
Equally interesting, of course, is the fact that similar shapes appear
elsewhere in romantic music, often with some common under-
lying association, and this suggests a signi cant preoccupation of
late-romantic composers with a basic feeling archetypal in relation
to the deepest levels of the romantic impulse itself.
SYMPHONY NO. 7
Concerning the Seventh Symphony (also completed in 190),

* In ThePhenomenologyof Spirit Hegel wrote illuminatingly of dasonglicklicbe
Bewusstsein (the unhappy consciousness') which is divided between self-
knowledge of its own spiritual imperfections and an intuition of its divine
destiny and selfhood.
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SYMPHONY NO. 7
Redlich notes that Mahler's tendency to self-repetition 'becomes

apparent for the rst time'. In fact, as we have seen, Mahler's
reliance upon basic shapes used either more or less literally or
incorporated as seed-elements in longer statements, or twisted and
teased by chromatic extension into elaborate sentences anticipating
the freer style of expressionism, suggests that Mahler had been
quoting himself before this. If, in the Seventh Symphony, he was
indeed reworking earlier inspirations, then there may well have
been some psychological blockage, a weakening of inspiration
evident to himself. In which case the deliberate invocation of
inspiration in the Eighth Symphony is very signi cant.
Mahler himself had doubts about the Seventh. By the time it was
ready for its rst performance in Prague on 19 September 1908, the
Eighth and Das Lied von der Erde were virtually complete, and the
world of the Seventhhad been left behind. Redlich points out in his
introduction to the 1962 edition of the Eulenburg score that
Mahler's doubts arose mainly from his own sense of stylistic
syncretism. There is a tendency nowadays to extol the work for its
forward-looking tendencies. Undoubtedly it contains splendid
music; yet it does lack cohesion, because its three central move-
ments do not agree stylistically with the rst mnovement and
nale. There is no real formal synthesis: the diferent movements
do not, in sum, constitute a symphonic world according to the
composer's own standards. The tonal scheme is unusual. The rst
movement begins Langsam (slowly) in B minor, to be followed by
an allegro confuoco beginning in E minor and ending in E majo.
The second movement - Night Music (allegromoderato) - is
pitched in C major and followed by a 'shadow-like' scherzo in
D minor. The fourth movement, another Nachtmusik (andante
amoroso),is in F major, and the rondo- nale, much resembling the
rondo of the Fifth Symphony, is in C major.
The two outer movements of the Symphony clearly belong to
the same world as the corresponding movements of the Fifth, and
there is an analogous tonal relationship between them. The Fifth
begins in C sharp minor, and the rondo in D major. In the Seventh,
Mahler begins (at least) in B minor and ends in C major. Allowing
that the tonal centre of the allegro is really E minor and major, then
the second piece of Nachtmusik, in F major, has the same so-called
Neapolitan' relation to it. The rst Nachtmusik in C major is,
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like the concluding rondo, 'Neapolitan' to the B minor opening,
and dominant to the second; while the scherzo in D minor is in
the relative minor key of the second Nachtmusik. These semitonal
relations loom strongly in the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and
are also much exploited in theandanteof the Sixth. When they occur
between movements they create a sense of stress throughout an
entire work. They are always haunting and dramatic.
Tonality apart, stylistic problems – arising from the fact that the
three middle movements belong to a diferent world from that of
the two outer ones make the Seventh a somewhat bizarre experi-
ence. The affective tone of the Nachtmusik is that of the Wunder-
born, although Mahler's retrospective glances have here a neurotic
tỉnge, and there are no compelling links with the outer movements.
Mahler described his dif culties to Alma in a letter dated June r91o.
The Nachtmusik movements had already been written in the
summer of 1g04. A year later, after a summer void of inspiration,
Mahler had an idea for the rhythm of the rst movement, and soon
had the rst, third and fth movements down on paper. The point
here is that these sections are the result of a creative act quite
separate from the inspiration of the Night Music.
Yet in the rst movement, especially, there are visionary
moments. The opening melody for tenor horn is one of the
composer's most potent inspirations and it is magni cently worked
up by other instruments into a prelude of symphonic grandeur. In
the end, however, there is no escaping the sense of hiatus when the
Night Music begins. Indeed, the second movement lasts too long
for its slender, and indeed tedious, thematic material. Add to this the
use of an important theme in the rst movement which closely
resembles the main theme of the rst movement of the Sixth
Symphony, reliance upon the overworked device of major-minor
transformations, and protracted developmental procedures in the
nale, and the conviction grows that this work fails to sustain a
consistent level of interest.
Sympbony No. &

The Eighth Symphony, sometimes also called "The Symphony of
a Thousand' because of the huge resources it requires, is the last
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SYMPHONY NO. 8
work Mahler ever conducted. It was composed in the summer of

I906, a year before he knew about the heart disease which even-
tually killed him. The task of composition took cight weeks pre-
cisely. The full signi cance of the work has still to be appreciated,
even though the musical idiom presents no dif culties and in many
places makes use of somewhat conventional, and even deliberately
archaic, material, and it is very possible that Mahler's visions and
aspirations anticipate a spiritual reawakening which still lies in the
future of mankind. For in this tremendous choral symphony
Mahler af rmed and deepened the Christian experience of faith and
the Goethean image of the Feminine as a redemptive aspect of God.
In doing this he abandoned the ideal of 'absolute music' and re-
turned to the concept of sound as bearer of the idea. This means that
performance of the Symphony is a ritual act, confronting the
listener's mind with mystical images and concepts relating to the
inner life of the soul.
Before the composition of the Eighth, Mahler had undoubtedly
felt somne diminution of inspiration. He hit upon the idea of
symbolically invoking it by setting the medieval hymn of Hrabanus
Maurus, Veni Creator Spiritus', which is not only beautiful in its
Latin but heart-stirring in its direct and impassioned address to the
Creator. In this famous prayer, more than a thousand years old,
inspiration is invoked in the mind and heart, the two centres of our
being associated with intellect and emotion through which
Christians have sought illumination and mediated love. Mahler's
musical utterance is here no merely passive contemplation of an
idea: it is a strongly willed plea for a renewal of the inward re
from the source of all life and light. Moreover, and signi cantly, it
is made against negative forces at work in himself. There are
passages in the rst movement which clearly indicate the collapse
of faith, the bitterness of spiritual failure. It often seems that the
closer Mahler came to doubt, and the more he suffered a general-
ised feeling of insecurity and anxiety, the more he exalted the
notion of salvation for himself and mankind in transcendental
visions.
The second movement, of enormous length, sets the last scene
of the Second Part of Goethe's Faust. This famous scene is wholly
symbolic, and it culminates in a vision of the Mater Gloriosa,
Margaret's pardon and her insight into the true nature of the re-
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deemed and regenerated Faust, and the culmination of their
relationship when she is enjoined to lead Faust on to the higher
spheres of being. The Symphony ends with Mahler's superb setting
of the Chorus Mysticus, in which the symbolic nature of carthly life
and the true signi cance for mankind of the feminine image are
revcaled. As Bayard Taylor, an early translator of Faust, com-
mented:
Love is the all-uplifting and all-redeeming power on Earth and in
Heaven; and to Man it is revealcd in its most pure and perfect form
through Woman. Thus, in the transitory life of Earth, it is only a symbol
of its diviner being; the possibilities of Love, which Earth can never
ful l, become realities in the higher life which follows; the Spirit, which
Woman interprets to us here, still draws us upward as Margaret draws
thesoul ofFaust)...
In a letter to Alma, written in June 1910, Mahler discusses
Platonic love:
The essence of it is really Gocthe's idea that all love is generative,
creative, and that there is a physical and spiritual generation which is the
emanation of this 'Eros'. You have it in the last scene of Faust, pre-
sented symbolically . ..
In the same letter he revcals his carlier interest in Plato's Synposium.
Throughout his creative life he had been aware of the central doc-
trine of that work, which is crowned with the wonderful words of
Diotima reported by Socrates, to the effect that love may be pro-
gressively sublimated until it manifests in the highest conscious-
ness of the philosopher's contemplation of beauty. Mahler's letter
is profoundly interesting in the context of his life at that time, for
in the summer of 1910, after returning from America, he had
visited Freud. He had also become tragically aware of the young
Walter Gropius's interest in his wife, after reading a letter from him
addressed in error. Freud accused Mahler of projecting love for
his mother upon Alma, and pointed out that Alma, who had
been devoted to her father, was attracted to Mahler precisely on
account of something Mahler most feared – his age. Alma claimed
that Freud was right in both cases. However, although on the
surface there appears to be substance in Freud's diagnosis,
Mahler, 2ccording to Alma, 'refused to acknowledge his xation
* SeeGoethe'sFaust I & II (Oxford, World's Classics).
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SYMPHONY NO. 8
upon his mother. He turned away from notions of that kind.' It

may well be that Mahler could not look truth in the face. On the
ither hand, it is possible that the Freudian explanation was ulti-
nately no explanation in the light of what he already knew about
himself. Relevant to this subject, the jargon of which has passed
into facile usage in our own time, is Jung's theory of the archetypal
feminine, taken up again by Owen Bar eld in a discussion of 'the
intellectual soul':
One might almost say that the Ego in Central Europe lives always at the
point ofincarnation,and the Intellectual Soul is that point.... And it is
to the culture of Central Europe that we in the West must look if we
would nd the actualconcretemeaningof life- the living heart of nature-
the Eternal Feminine.*
In the Eighth Symphony Mahler perfectly manifests this
consciousness of the intellectual soul'. Yet, through the very force
of emotional attraction on the one hand, and spiritual insecurity on
the other, he seemed to fall back from the innermost mcaning of
that which both his musical imagination and philosophical in-
tuition had grasped. After the vision of the Mater Gloriosa, which
he ecstatically enshrined in ravishing music, he reverted to the
passionate idealisation of his own wife, often in the most touching
letters and pocms:
Freud is quite right - you were always for me the light and the central
point! The inner light, I mcan, which rose over all; and the blissful con-
sciousness of this - now unshadowedand uncon ned - raises my feelings
to the in nite.t
But Christian mysticism and Jungian psychology are at one in
recognising the deviation from psychological stability inherent in
such projections upon others. Eros itself has to be transcended.
Even the image of the Mater Gloriosa is but a symbol, a gateway -
the 'Eastern Gate' as Roman Catholic mysticism has called Her -
through which consciousness passes to an ineffable mystery.f For
Mahler the nal confrontation with reality came through sorrow
and loss, superbly expressed in the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies
and in Das Lied von der Erde.
* RomanticismComesof Age (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1944).
t Letter dated 4 September191o.
i The Book of Ezekiel, Ch. 44, V. 2.
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It is essential to listen to Mahler's music in the context of the

basicidea which underlies the inspiration of the Eighth Symphony.
This is conveyed in the remarkable juxtaposition of the Veni
Creator Spiritus' with the Faust scene. The old prayer invokes
inspiration, brings it down, so to speak, into mind and heart, and
even literally into the physical body as a generative agent, which
Mahler clearly understood. Yet spiritual psychology recognises
that the force which has descended must reascend. What has come
down to carth as grace has to be raised up to heaven through a
progressive sublimation of encrgies. The physical life is transmuted
through the heart's aspiration and a spiritual rebirth follows the
transmutation of Eros. The sign of this rebirth is a vision of the
Mater Gloriosa, Goethe's composite image of Isis and the Virgin
Mary. Mahler's Symphony is a proclamation of faith in the trans-
mutation of Eros into its highest spiritual expression, and the
music unfolds as a procession of symbols pointing the way to an
ideal concept of love. The culmination of its vision, the appearance
of the Mater Gloriosa, and the choral setting of Goethe's nal
statement that all our experience here on earth is symbolic, both
point unmistakably to a redemption of human sexuality and a
regeneration of human life. In the Eighth Symphony, Mahler
rejects that interpretation of Freudian psychology which denigrates
the highest religious and poetic insights achieved in western
civilisation. The Symphony tacitly proclaims and expresses the
composer's life long ideal, the unity of art and revelation. When he
joined the two texts in a single musical conception, Mahler added
the force of artistic genius to a prophetic rejection of what passes
for the sexual 'enlightenment' of our own era.
The Symphony is scored for a vast collection of instruments,
including harmonium and mandolin, and for double choir, boys'
choir and eight soloists. It is bound together by thematic cross-
references and gures often showing family resemblance to Ex.I.
There are pages, especially towards the end, where such gures
seem to permeate every bar, and the music of the Mater Gloriosa
gives them ecstatic expression. We may feel that they constitute
sound-symbols everassociated in Mahler's subconscious mind with
emotional aspiration and spiritual yearning.
Part I is approximately in sonata-form, with a condensed recapi-
tulation. The development section eventually builds up into a
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SYMPHONY NO, 8
massive double-fugue. The polyphonic structure is conceived along

archaic lines matching the Latin text, and its overall cfect is austere,
with the exception of a passage in D minor, at the end of the expo-
sition and continued into the development, which returns to
Mahler's familiar vein of tortured introspection.
The work opens, allegro impetuoso, with tremendous force,
fortissimo, on the following statement:
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Ex. 18
Ve ni, Ve - ni, Cre - a - tor Spi - ri - tus!
and this is followed immediately by trombones playing a variant:

Ex. 19
and violins with a gure inverting the important opening intervals,

although with some freedom:
Ex. 20
Special notice should be taken of the dotted gure setting the

word 'Spiritus', for it is a rhythmic element reappearing in other
important themes. Further gures are contributed by tenor and
soprano in a con dent lyrical ow; but it is at the words In rma
nostri corporis' that this con dent mood collapses into Mahlerian
depression, as the composer contemplates human frailty. The
passage turns to bitterness and despair; but a dramatic change occurs
with modulation to E major (associated in the Second Symphony,
it will be remembered, with an emotional clearing of the air) and
D
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the whole orchestra and all the singers then give out the following
ccstatic theme in the plea for light and love:
Ex. 21
Ac - ccn - de, ac- cen -de lu - men sen- si- bus lu -
men sen - si - bus, sen- si - bus, ac - cen - de sen - si - bus.
After this the boys' choir sings Infunde amorem cordibus' to yet
another theme revealing familiar elements - 'a carol-like song of
joy', as Deryck Cooke has called it. As the texture evolves, earlier
material derived from Ex. 19 acts like a binding thread. This
evolution takes in vigorous march rhythms (Hostem repellas
longius') and the powerful double fugue, also in march tempo. In
the condensed recapitulation the mood of spiritual optimism is
preserved and themovement reaches a triumphant and breathtaking
conclusion.
Part II makes a tremendous attempt to encompass in musical
terms the ascent of consciousness through terraces of mystical
apprehension. Goethe indicates a scene somewhat resembling the
Dantean Mount of Paradise, with its heights reaching into the
empyrean. All the singers are symbolical characters, 'singing ideas',
and they correlate in the main with the progressive unfolding of
spiritual awareness through penitence (Margaret), forgiveness and
redemption (the three Marys), ecstasy (Pater Ecstaticus), intellec-
tual insight (Pater Profundus), and that special vein of spiritual
idealisation nding expression in the song of Dr Marianus, who, as
his name implies, is dedicated to the Mater Gloriosa.
The music in which the unfolding grades of awareness are
expressed falls into three substantial sections: adagio, allegro (with
frequent variations of tempo) and nale. If the allegro is regarded as
a scherzo, the Symphony approximates to the conventional four-
movemcnt outline. There is, however, a noticeable difference of
stylebetween Part I and the three-section Part II which, considered
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SYMPHONY NO. 8
overall, is composed in a loose rhapsodic manner. The formal

structure of the allegro is extremely free, and not entirely satisfactory
in effect. Mahler had the problem of integrating choruses of boys
together with solo music for Dr Marianus into a purposive, for-
ward-moving texture. The problem recurs with the music for the
three Marys in the nal part. But the beautiful theme associated with
the Mater Gloriosa (Ex. 22 below) gives the unifying inspiration
which enables Mahler to knit everything together. The chorus
swells wave upon wave in slow, measured rhythm to unfold some
of the loveliest music he ever wrote.
Part II opens with sounds related to the Accende' theme depict-
ing the symbolic mountain of anchorites. Its melodic extension is a
prominent feature throughout. Related to it is an anticipation of the
music of Pater Ecstaticus; and there are new gures later to be
associated with Pater Profundus. The movement unfolds with a
chorus of anchorites and solos for the two Fathers. Pater Pro-
fundus brings his song to a climax of expressive declamation with
material derived from the 'Accende' theme which, with subtle
transformations, subsequently forms the basis of the nale. The
symbolic cross-referencing is clear. The original 'Accende' theme is a
plea for love and illumination. With much the same gure, Pater
Profundus prays in thedepths of anencompassingdarkness for light
and love. Finally, re ned still further into a melody of ethereal
beauty, this root gure is linked with a vision of the Mater
Gloriosa.
The middle section brings angels into view carrying the immortal
part of Faust. 'Blessed boys', who appear to symbolise innocent,
because unincarnated, consciousness, add their chorus of praise,
and 'younger angels' introduce a new theme and symbolic refer-
ences to 'roses' which have the power to repel evil. This, and a
cryptic reference to Asbestos' in the song of the more perfect
angels', reveals, like many other mysterious allusions in Faust, a
depth of symbolism in Goethe's work which it is possible that
Mahler himself did not understand. The likelihood is that he did
not; and it is certain that these strange lines did not call forth his
most convincing music.
The climax of the Symphony is initiated by a beautiful violin
theme heard above an E major chord on harp and harmonium
after the enraptured song of Dr Marianus:
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Ex. 22
Adagissimo
Pp vibrando espr. Pp
This marks the beginning of the nal section, which now intro-
duces the chorus, the three penitents, Margaret's address to the
Mater Gloriosa, the chorus of the 'blessed boys' and the Mater
Gloriosa herself. Perhaps the most beautiful moments in the entire
work are when Dr Marianus greets the Queen of Heaven, urging
the penitents to gaze aloft as the chorus beckons them - and, by
implication, the whole of mankind - onwards and upwards to the
highest spheres of being. It is an injunction of inexhaustible sig-
ni cance, and Mahler responds to it with soaring melody which
touches the highest peaks of romantic art.
The famous Chorus Mysticus, af rming the mystical trans-
cendence of the Feminine - which is, after all, God apprehended
through the grace of the feminine image instead of that of the
wrathful Jehovah - begins with a whisper and ends in a blaze of
glory.
Mahler's masterstroke is to bring back theVeni Creator Spiritus?
theme at the end of the instrumental coda; but its initial interval of
the seventh is now transformed into a major ninth by trumpets and
trombones blazing through E fat harmony like a triumphant
fame. Thus, they seem to say, that which descends into the
substance of man must reascend through man to complete the
work of the manifesting spirit.
The Last Pbase

The year 1907 was a major turning-point. In July of that year, after
the death of his elder daughter, a visiting doctor revealed to Mahler
that he had contracted a fatal heart disease. The inevitable efect
was a plunge into despair; yet it was from the very substance of
bitter and tragic premonitions that Mahler conceived his greatest
work, Das Lied von der Erde, and the Ninth Symphony which, in
part at least, is music of sombre power and grandeur. Das Lied was
nished in October I909, and the Ninth Symphony in March rg10,
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THE LAST PHASE
when Mahler was in New York. Another symphony, the Tenth, was
begun in 1910 but left un nished.
These last works were composed against a background of travel
and emotional disturbance. Following intrigue at the Vienna
Opera, Mahler relinquished his post there and accepted a con-
ductorship at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. During the
last four years of his life he made four visits to Ameriça, on the
second of which (1908-9) he was appointed conductor of the new
Philharmonic Society of New York. After his third trip he visited
Freud at Leyden; and it is entirely due to theresearches of Donald
Mitchell that some of the facts of that interview have come to
light. It must have been one of the most interesting conversations
in the history of psychiatry. But the developing illness - and it was
now a question of both physical and emotional imbalance, com-
bined with deteriorating relations with his American orchestra
- brought about a fatal collapse. Mahler was brought back to
Europe in April 191I. He died in Vienna on 18 May during a
a thunderstorm. Alma records that he read philosophical works
to the end, the last being E. von Hartmann's The Problem of Life.
Mahler scaled tremendous heights in the Eighth Symphony. Yet
shortly afterwards the pendulum swung to the other extreme.
Earlier he had mysteriously, if superstitiously, suspected a
connection between the subjective energies of musical composition
and events in the outer world. The Kindertotenlieder had been
composed at a time when he had nothing to fear but fear itself.
Then his elder daughter had died, choked with diphtheria. In a
similar spirit, and with more reason, Mahler felt himself doomed,
and shied away from performance of Das Lied and the funereal
Ninth Symphony. He considered Das Lied, which is really an
orchestral song-cycle, a symphony, to persuade himself that the
true Ninth was really his Tenth. Schubert, Beethoven, Bruckner
and Dvořák all died after composing nine symphonies. So,
tragically, did Mahler. The Tenth remains an inspired fragment,
although Deryck Cooke has made a complete version which
brilliantly develops the implications of the sketches with a deep
insight into Mahler's style and methods.
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DAS LIED VON DER ERDE
The literary inspiration for TheSong of the Earth derives from Hans
Bethge's German translations of old Chinese poetry. Bethge's
anthology appeared in 1go8, and from it Mahler selected seven
poems, two of which were fused in the last movement of the cycle,
Der Abschied' (Farewell). Their overall theme is familiar enough:
the transitoriness of all things, the passing joys of youth and beauty,
the loneliness of the soul confronting life in all its mystery, con-
solation in nature and wine, the wraith-like, fading moods of the
soul, and a general feeling for quiet lakes, mists and distant hills.
The far horizons of the beautiful Earth are intimations of a vision
ever unful lled in the sad enigma of human experience. The hap-
piness of earlier days becomes a memory, a pain, a wound in the
heart, a receding horizon promising nothing. For most listeners,
the music is most eloquent in the heart-breaking 'Abschied'. Here
consciousness itself dissolves in a blue remoteness. The wanderer
leaves Earth and life for ever, and the joy of the seasons is no more.
Analysis of the thematic material reveals signi cant cchocs of
the Eighth Symphony, the spiritual optimism of which has now
been darkencd by the confrontation with death. Here the recent
exaltation of 'Accende lumen sensibus' falters in the dreaming
sadness of the last farewell:
Ex. 23
Molto moderato
Die Er - de at - met voll von Ruh' und Schlaf.
4 Al - le Sehn-sucht will nun träu - men,
Ecstatic visions of the Eternal Feminine have not found carthly

expressions in the composer's life. The ideal beckoned, the
intellectual soul' glimpsed heights of spiritual grandeur; but for
many listeners it must seemn that despair and hopeless nostalgia
made worse by an increasing anxiety state and excessive intro-
spection are the predominant characteristics of the last works, and
especially the Tenth Symphony, the score of which is marked by
hysterical scribblings.
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Das Lied expresses resignation to loss. Does Mahler, perhaps,

achieve maturity as a composer in precisely this? The nal mood of
resignation calls forth his nest and most enduring music. And as a
man, whose creative energies had previously been expended to a
great extent in the expression of ideals and aspirations, he now
emed to nd some peace in relinquishing them. Behind the mel-
ancholy of The Song lurks a new conscióusness, a psychological
perception which had hitherto found no musical éxpression.
Inspired by Bethge's translations, Mahler, like Bethge himself,
brings through a quality of awareness truly re ecting a signi cant
aspect of the Oriental mind. It has been said that whercas the West-
ern mind is orientated towards consciousness, the Eastern is
centred in the unconscious. The unconscious everywhere pervades
Das Lied von der Erde. The very state of conscious attention
engendered by the music paradoxically refects the ocean of
unconsciousness. Everything is heard and experienced as if it is
being remembered. The sounds themselves, especially the seem-
ingly disembodied contralto voice at the end, all polarise the mind
in a world of stillness, shadowy images, a mirror emptying itself of
all forms. The very sound of Mahler's orchestra dissolves the ow
of images.
All this nally condenses into the pathos of the word 'ewig
which Mahler sets to the falling step E-D in the closing bars. We
have already noticed his signi cant use of the falling step in
connection with the Nietzsche setting in the Third Symphony, and
in the rst movement of the Ninth. Hans Redlich has also drawn
attention to symbolic use of the same device in the Ninth, and
likened it to Beethoven's ʻLebewohl' in the piano sonata, Op. 81a.
Mahler's quotation, if such it is, seems to be explicit at the end of
the rst movement in the Ninth Symphony; but his pathos is
immeasurably deeper. In his case there was to be no return. The
falling tone also recurs in a heartfelt passage of bitter irony about a
third of the way through the same movement, where Mahler refers
to a waltz by Johann Strauss the younger, called Frent ench des
Lebens (Enjoy life'), Op. 340:
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Ex. 24
Strauss
Mahler
Vn.
Indeed, the falling step, whether expressed as a whole tone or

bridged by a chromatic note, is a hallmark of Mahler's musical
style. It is often associated with an incomplete, unful lled feeling,
most clearly conveyed in the fnal 'ewig' of Der Abschied', and it
aptly reverses the characteristic upward curve of melodies in other
works associated with aspiration and optimism.
Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde' (Drinking song of the
sorrow of the carth') is one of Mahler's nest musical structures.
It is set for tenor, and the orchestra is large, though frequently
broken down into small, colourful groupings. The opening horn
call has a note of urgency and desperation, soon developed by the
singer. The most impressive stroke is Mahler's setting of the
phrase: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod' (Dark is life, dark is
death'). It appears three times, raised a semitone in its second and
third utterances. The last statement restores the tonic A minor.
Der Einsame im Herbst' (The lonely one in autumn'), played
'somewhat dragging, wearily', and sung by contralto, is based
upon gures drawn from a simple pentatonic shape and a drifting
quaver accompaniment. Its apparentshapelessness, although both
the melodic and harmonic movement are worked out with sure
insight, magically evokes the spirit of loneliness, desolation and
nality. Loveliest of all is the episode in D major Ich komm zu
dir, traute Ruhestätte !', which is an inverse form of the basic
shape quoted in Ex. I.
In the three middle movements, Von der Jugend' (Of Youth),
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sung by tenor, Von der Schönheit' (Of Beauty), sung by contralto,

and 'Der Trunkene im Frühling" (The drunkard in spring), tenor,
the mood is livelier but certainly not happy. The images evoked are
images of states past so far as Mahler is concerned, mere shadows in
the unconscious which holds them motionless in contemplation.
And the miracle of the music is that throughout the interplay of
rich colours and subtle rhythms, sound merely deepens the sense of
contemplative stillness in the mind's ear. Nothing really moves. All
is retrospective.
The true spiritual centre of the work, the unconscious abyss of
the soul which contemplates its inevitable withdrawal from the
world, is deeply and nally af rmed in 'Der Abschied'. From A
major, the key of the previous song, the harmony shifts to C
minor. Deep, solemn tones reverberate in the void, and a plangent
oboe plays a turn, a simple but telling device with an affective tone
binding the whole movement together. The harmony is stark, and
the scoring merely opens up hollow vastnesses, creating a sense of
spiritual emptiness distantly recalling the effect of the shepherd's
tune at the opening of the Third Act of Tristan. Repeated thirds
have a remorseless, measured tread. The voice enters like a
stranger adrift in in nite space, after a solitary low C has sounded
its message of dissolution. As previously mentioned, there is
thematic connection with the song Ich bin der Welt abhanden
gekommen'.
A new section begins with a shift to F major, when the oboe
sings a sad melody above an expressive harp and clarinet accom-
paniment characterised by a subtle rhythmic counterpoint:
Ex. 25
Oboe
f P
dolce
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Harp and Clarinet
There is a very similar passage in the slow nale of the Ninth

Symphony which, although purely orchestral, echoes the overall
feeling of Der Abschied'. Here again harp and clarinet are used
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MAHLER SY MP HONIES AND SONGS
in much the same accompaninmental gure, resounding through a

passage of heart-stirring sadness and beauty:
Ex. 26 Flute
Eb Clarinet
PP espress.
Pp espress.
Cor Anglais
pespress.
Harp and Clarinet
D. Bass
Pp
It is worth remembering that the same musico-poetic idea was

embodied in the fourth Wayfarersong and in the slow movement of
the First Symphony. In the last pages of The Farewell', the nal
sounds of what is Mahler's most perfect work, the contralto voice
oats in an ethereal space, poised like the moon above silent seas.
Its long-drawn melody proclaims that Mahler has found a de nitive
mode of lyrical expression.
SYMPHONY NO. 9
Alban Berg wrote enthusiastically to his ancée of the death-
conscious music of the Ninth Symphony, and revealed much
insight into it. The ne rst movement is sombre and terrifying.
Redlich has pointed out that it mirrors a psychological struggle
with death, depicted in the alternation of slow, plangent textures
with passages of feverish tension. Mahler's life-long ambivalent
relationship with Richard Strauss is illuminated by a comparison
between this movement and the rst part of Strauss's Death and
Trans guration. Strauss's imagination plays on the physical factors,
and the outcome of the death-struggle seems naive; Mahler's
music is in nitely more profound, for the struggle, after all, is an
experienced one taking place in the substance of his own spirit.
The next movement, a tedious and far too expansive Ländler,
does not rivet the listener's attention like the rst. Its main
thematic substance is a trivial commonplace of the Viennese
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SYMPHONY N0. 9
idiom, and it is not redeemed by the burden of development it has

to bear. The massive extension of the movement, through deriva-
tive and subsidiary material, seems an artistic miscalculation.
The Rondo-Burleske is savage and uncompromising, even vicious
in its contrapuntal acerbity. The pace is remorseless and it reveals
the burning creative energy locked up in Mahler's symphonic
conception. Some of the material on which the lovely concluding
adagio is based already occurs here. The adagio itself is a hymn-like
soliloquy ending in a mood ofsadnessand remotencss.
In mood and structure the two outer movements echo Das
Lied, and the slow movement particularly has close af nities with
The Farewell' (Ex. 26). The Symphony deepens introspective
meditation to an overwhelming pitch, and the almost claustro-
phobic melancholy of the rst movement, unlike Das Lied, offers
no panoramic images, no text to broaden the horizon of con-
templation beyond the narrowing pcrspective of an acutely suffer-
ing soul. There is even an inverse mysticism here, an ecstasy of
despair, a unity not with the creative fullncss and richness of life -
as in the Third Symphony - but with the abyss in which all forms
dissolve. The disintegrative proccss contemplated by the composer
within his own being is mirrored in the structure of the rst move-
ment, which introduces halting, broken phrases, fragmented
gures, hesitant rhythms.
Quotations from the rst movement and nale have already been
given (Ex. II (i), 24 and 26). The texture is complex. A great deal
is going on, and only careful listening and repeated hearings will
reveal its subtleties. Particularly noteworthy are the plangent
sounds of the harp in the opening bars, which show an unconven-
tional but wonderfully effectiveuseof that instrument; whereas the
menacing drum rolls constantly darken and rumble through the
orchestral tapestry. The ironic quotation from Johann Strauss (Ex.
24)exhibitsa familiarshape -rising sixth from dominant to mediant
followed by gradual descent to the tonic. The dying fall mediant-
supertonic – tonic is a common element in German romantic
melody frequently exploited for nostalgic and melancholy effects.
Compare, for example, the Lebewoh! (Farewell') theme from
Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, and, in this symphony, the
nal adagio, where the opening melody introduces it twice in two
profoundly expressive bars. The diatonic steps of the hymn-like
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rst theme, introduced by a curving preludial phrase on unison
violins, are quickly subjected to chromatic intensi cation, as if to
prepare for a second, heavily in ected theme, which heightens the
mood of desperatesadness. As the movement unfolds, the preludial
turn becomes more important, and is used as a key gure
binding the texture together. It is given to the viola in the
last whispered bars. Subjective reactions to this haunting music
must inevitably differ; but the passage in the middle of the move-
ment beginning with Ex. 26 is surely one of Mahler's loveliest,
if saddest, inspirations.
SYMPHONY NO. 10 (UNFINISHED)
The andante-adagio of the Tenth Symphony is often played as a

parate piece. It is the rst of the planned ve-movement work.
Also, it is the only movement completed by Mahler in full score.
There were to have been at least three scherzo-like movements
developing the savage, Mephistophelian style of the scherzo of the
Fifth and theRondo-Burleskeof the Ninth Symphonies. None of
these movements reached a musical conception beyond the sketch
stage, and even the famous slow movement would certainly have
been thoroughly revised by the composer, who always continued
revising his work long after the rst publication. As Erwin Ratz
points out, in his introduction to the 1964 edition, Schoenberg,
Berg, Webern and Kienck, all of whom knew Mahler's sketches
well, declined to touch them. In their view, the work had not
reached a stage in Mahler's conception when others could con-
dently predict his intentions. However, Deryck Cooke has
attempted to do so. And it may well be that when one tries to
penetrate the mind of a dead composer, subconscious energies and
insights can guide one's pen.
The deep anguish in which Mahler began work on the Sym-
phony is clearly apparent in the allusions scrawled on the score,
and of course in theadagio, which is music of strange and terrifying
intensity. The title of the sketched third movement was to have
been Purgatorio", which gives a literary clue to the Dantean visions
and apprehensions which overwhelmed Mahler's imagination
during his last hours of creative work. It could be argued that
despite evocative movements in carlier music which convey
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SYMPHONY No. IO
impressions of blue skies and green clds (though scldom without
a touch of nostalgia) Mahler had all his life sought to use the world
of sound to penetrate beyond the veil of earthly life. Again and
again, in many a nostalgic song, in religious aspiration to resur-
rection and redemption, in heavenly visions, in dark-toned
funeral marches, or in premonitory lamentations and shattering
symphonic assaults, Mahler had tonally envisaged death. In
Lawrence Gilman's telling phrase, Mahler had literally 'feasted and
banqueted on death'. Now death stood before him; and there are
moments in the adagio when he achieves an expressionistic break-
through, when the 'tonal psychism' rcaches such a pitch of appal-
ling intensity that the power of sound aloneseemsto shatter the veil
between life and death. No form of words can convey anything of
the experience locked up in the terrifying shrieks which erupt fff
from a ppÞ background at the climax of this movement. In this
music emotional crisis proves its power to awaken psychic appre-
hensions, even if these are tonally and not visually experienced.
Scribbled on the original sketches pathetic exclamations (Mercyl
O Lord! Why hast Thou forsaken me?') and despairing references
to his wife ('Farewell, my lyre') reveal a mind already separated
m the living, in which spiritual consolation has been occluded by
terror and agonising emotions arising from ahopelesssense of loss.
Mahler's mind, in extremis, is a microcosm of the romantic-
expressionistic crisis in the early years of the twentieth century, a
crisis suffered also by Schocnberg, and to some extent by Berg and
Webern. From it emerged the aesthetic of twelve-note music
which reimposed order upon the chaotic ux of raging emotions
expressed in a disembodied chromaticism – disembodied because
the positive force of the old tonal centre, the classical centre of
gravity in which the musical consciousness had hitherto found its
creative identity, had dissolved in free harmonic clusters and
wandering chromatic in ections.
The rst sounds of the Symphony, fteen andante bars for
violas unaccompanied, are prophetic:
Ex. 27
PP
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The melody is drawn out in virtually free chromatic rhapsody,

whereas the main theme of the adagio :
Ex. 28
Violins
is subsequcntly inverted and played in counterpoint against itsclf.

This inspircd and forward-looking movement inevitably provokes
Deculation. What would the nished work have been like ? The
fact remains that its remarkable musical idiom was born of the
immediacy of confrontation with death. Had this sense of im-
mediacy not been the keynote of Mahler's consciousness at this
time, the raw nerves of his last music could not have been so
painfully exposed.
To savour fully the substance of the Tenth Symphony, and the
amazing musical development it represents, the listener should
look back to the Wunderhornsymphonies, comparing their diatonic
melodies with the chromatic expressionism of Mahler's un nished
score. Musical and psychological development should be con-
sidered together.
The adagio is music of astounding intensity, expanding aware-
ness to the abyss in which all our thoughts, actions, hopes and
aspirations seem diminished to the status of idle fantasy. For any-
one who loves the Mahler of the Wunderborn music, it is a
profoundly uncomfortable experience, almost a study in the
disintegration of consciousness expressed in the disruption of
tonicity, groping chromaticism and spine-chilling sound-colours
which awaken turbulent apprehension. There is nothing remotely
consoling about this music, despitepassages of concentrated sweet-
ness which seem to parody the composer's earlier lyrical manner.
It may be doubted whether even the later expressionists made
instrumental sounds carry such a powerful burden. The essence of
the texture is a long-drawn-out thread of melody characterised by
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SYMPHONY NO. Io
the intuitive association of chromatic intervals. Points of sound are
tenuously linked by chromatic relations dictated by intense feeling,
and they do not require justi cation as 'enhancements' of conven-
tional progressions. Linear construction, motivated by an intense
emotional drive, and not at all by purely abstract or mathematical'
calculation in the manner of more recent experiments, is here
freeing itself from the familiar steps of the seven-point scale and
the more familiar modulatory and chromatic claboration of that
scale characteristic of romantic harmony generally. Hence arise
patterns and shapes characterised by angular 'corners', unexpected
twists and octave displacement giving rise to wide leaps. The
effect of octave displacement in particular is to isolate melodic
notes within their linear context, and to emphasise their intrinsic
value as intense stabs of feeling. Through such highly imaginative
developments Mahler, in the context of his own time, seems no
longer 'an old-fashioned composer', but one who takes his place
in the history of twventieth-century music. He opened up new and
signi cant worlds of musicalexperience, bringing the listener into
a confrontation with musical vistas arising from contact with inner
levels of thought and feeling which carlier phases of romanticism
had scarcely touched. Today his music is more than ever relevant,
because it achieves a powerful synthesis of tonal movement with
the life of the mind and emotions. It belongs to a mental world
which modern man knows now only too well.
There is plenty of internal evidence in the carlier works that

Mahler was acutely sensitive to the human condition in a way
characteristic of an intensely religious mind which found dif culty
in accepting conventional frameworks of belief. He seemeddeeply
aware of the need for a new dispensation, a new consciousness, a
newer insight into the mystery of the universe than that offered by
traditional Christianity as he knew it, or the romantic-religious
mysticism diffused through German philosophy after Hegel.
Above all, his mind had seized upon the terrifying fact that the
context of human experience is really limitless - that is, it is not
bounded by the immediately visible world of everyday things.
Our 'here' is, in truth, the everywhere of space; our situation, the
real context of our life and action, is a moment in what Hegel,
deeply moved by the panorama of human suffering, had called 'the
63
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BBC Music Guides

Philip Barford Mahler

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

ISBN o s63 o92 74 2

First published 1970

© Philip Barford 1970

Printed in Great Britain by

aspiration, longing, resignation. A symphony by Mahler, as he

This shape is susceptible of almost in nite variation. It is found in

These haunting sounds contradict the triumphant af rmations of

LIEDER EINES FA HRENDEN GESELLEN

The second song, 'Ging heut' morgens übers Feld', supplied

Ging heut' mor-gens ü - bers Feld

Fourths also gure importantly in the harmony. Half-way through,

Ich Jeb' al - lein in mei-nem Himn - mel in mei-nem

Lie-ben in mei-nem Lie- ben in mei - nem Lied

Es we - het kühl im Schatten mei - ner Fich - ten Ich ste- he

hier und har - re mei- nes Freun - des; ich har - re

scin zum letz - ten Le be - wohl.

An anticipatory glance through the score of Das Lied at this

Jch at - me leis im Duft der Lin de

O nidht mich Lie - be ! Lie - be die Son - ne

Menschheit dei - ner Lei den

The theme of resignation is made explicit in the sad but beauti-

stirred by the midnight warning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra which

Part I. Commedia umana.

The three upward steps become the foundation of assertive,

An exuberant waltz-scherzo and a slow movement, based upon

The Wunderborn Symnpbonies

In the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies Mahler explored a

SYMPHONY NO. 2 IN C MINOR

The Second, or ʻResurrection' Symphony as it is now known, was

centred on C minor, are bound together by common structural

SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN D MINOR

The Third Symphony, perhaps more than any other work by

*Orchestral Music (Oxford, 1951).

with contralto solo, setting words from DesKnaben Wunder-

According to Alma Mahler, the movement, which swirls with

Gib Acht ! Gib Acht!

(i) Symphony IX, rst movement

(ii) Symphony III, fth movement

Bimm bamm bimm bamm

(iv) Symphony IX, rst movement

It forms an ironic counterpoint to that Symphony's openingtheme.

The Fourth Symphony (completed in 1900)is the last in which Mahler

die Eng - lein, die ba - cken das Brot.

Cross-references between the rst movement and the last are

It is poctically appropriate that Mahler's last Wunderborn

The Fiftb, Sixth and SeventhSympbonies

versation with Sibelius, who thought in terms of thematic inte-

The study of thematic structure in the Fifth Symphony (1902)

suggesting, incidentally, that although thelWunderhornis supposedly

Violin parts only quoted

The structure of the movement is extremely complex, and the

SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN A MINOR

The Sixth Symphony (190ș), much revised since its performance at

interpenetrate, con ict or combine, to be expresscd in a vast

Concerning the Seventh Symphony (also completed in 190),

Redlich notes that Mahler's tendency to self-repetition 'becomes