Gustavo Dudamel conducts Mahler’s Seventh Symphony

About the Work

Mahler wrote his Seventh Symphony from the inside out. In the summer of 1904, at his lakeside villa at Maiernigg in Carinthia, he was finishing the Sixth, the darkest of his symphonies. In the same weeks he also wrote two slow, mysterious movements that he called Nachtmusik (night music), with no idea yet of what would surround them.

The following summer he returned to Maiernigg and found he could not go on. By his own account, the block lifted only when he was being rowed across the lake to his villa: with the first strokes of the oars, the rhythm and character of the introduction to the first movement came to him. He later claimed that the three remaining movements, the first, third and fifth, were then written in four weeks, though scholars think it took somewhat longer. The result is a symphony in five movements, laid out symmetrically: two large outer movements, the two night pieces inside them, and a shadowy scherzo at the centre.

Mahler finished the orchestration in 1906 but waited two more years to perform the work. He conducted the premiere himself on 19 September 1908 in Prague, at a festival marking the sixtieth year of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign.

The Seventh remains one of the least familiar of Mahler’s symphonies. It has no programme and tells no obvious story, and the brassy C major finale, coming after so much darkness, has puzzled listeners from the start. Arnold Schoenberg, who heard the symphony in 1909, was among the first to admire it. He wrote to Mahler praising the new direction it took, and singled out the second Nachtmusik in a lecture a year after Mahler’s death. The nickname “Song of the Night” is sometimes attached to the work.

Gustavo Dudamel, who conducts these performances, has called the symphony “cosmic” and a “book of life”. “There is simply everything here,” he says in the Berliner Philharmoniker’s introduction to the concert: “a funeral march, sarcasm, grandeur, chaos, beauty.”

What to Listen For

I. Langsam, Allegro risoluto. Over a dragging, dotted rhythm in the low strings, the stroke of the oars, a tenor horn plays the opening call. It is an instrument rarely seen in a symphony orchestra, and its hollow, penetrating tone colours the whole introduction. The fast main section drives hard in E minor. Its second theme, a long, yearning violin melody, later opens out into the stillest passage of the movement, a hushed chorale that swells to a luminous climax.

II. Nachtmusik I. Two horns call to each other, one answering like an echo, and a night march begins, with woodwind birdcalls and cowbells heard from offstage. Mahler is said to have thought of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which he had seen in Amsterdam. Major and minor keep changing places, so that the march never quite settles into cheerfulness or gloom.

III. Scherzo. The marking is Schattenhaft, shadowy. Timpani and low strings trade single notes, scurrying strings fill in a haze, and a waltz twice tries to get going and falls apart. This is the centre of the symphony, and its strangest music.

IV. Nachtmusik II. Marked Andante amoroso, this is a serenade for a much smaller orchestra, with a guitar and a mandolin strumming among the strings. A solo violin sets the tone with a tender little refrain. Alma Mahler connected the movement with the poetry of Eichendorff and its murmuring springs.

V. Rondo-Finale. A volley of timpani throws the doors open on daylight. The main theme, in blazing C major, nods to the festive music of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, and it keeps coming back between abrupt changes of scene, in what has been heard both as celebration and as parody. Near the end the main theme of the first movement returns in the brass, bells and cowbells join in, and the symphony finishes in a blaze of noise.