Symphony No. 4 in G major

Program notes

About the Work

Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony grew backwards from its ending. In 1892 he wrote a song for voice and orchestra, “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), on a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of German folk poetry that fed much of his early music. The poem is a child’s picture of heaven: there is dancing and singing, the saints look after the kitchen, and nobody goes hungry. For a time Mahler meant the song to close his enormous Third Symphony. He took it out again, although traces of it remain in that work, and kept it for something else.

That something else came in the summers of 1899 and 1900. Mahler had been director of the Vienna Court Opera since 1897, and the summer holidays were the only time he had to compose. He began the new symphony in July 1899 at Bad Aussee and finished it in August 1900 at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee, a few weeks after his fortieth birthday. He wrote three movements that lead towards the song, so that fragments of it are heard along the way and the finale sounds like a destination reached. He thought of the song as both the source of the symphony and its goal.

The Fourth is the last of the three symphonies that draw on the Wunderhorn songs, and it is much the smallest of them. It lasts under an hour, and the orchestra has no trombones and no tuba. Mahler uses a large ensemble for colour and almost never all at once.

He conducted the first performance in Munich on 25 November 1901 with the Kaim Orchestra and the soprano Margarete Michalek. The audience, which had expected something like the monumental Second Symphony, did not know what to make of it, and the press in the German cities where it was played that winter was largely hostile. Mahler went on retouching the orchestration for years afterwards.

What to Listen For

The symphony begins with sleigh bells and flutes and then relaxes into an easy-going melody for the violins. The first movement keeps to a classical outline, and the tunes come one after another, light on their feet. The sleigh bells return several times as a kind of marker, and they will come back in the finale.

The second movement is a scherzo that Mahler first headed “Freund Hein spielt auf”: Friend Hein, a folk-tale name for Death, strikes up on his fiddle. The leader of the orchestra plays a second violin tuned a whole tone higher than normal, which gives it a thin, harsh edge, like a village fiddle. Alma Mahler connected the idea with Arnold Böcklin’s self-portrait, in which Death plays the violin at the painter’s ear. The effect is more uncanny than frightening, and twice a gentler trio pushes the fiddler aside.

The slow movement, which Mahler thought the best he had written, is a set of variations on a calm melody, interrupted twice by a lament in the minor. The variations get shorter and more restless until, near the end, the whole orchestra bursts out in a blaze of E major, as if a door had been thrown open. Then the music settles again.

The finale follows quietly. The soprano sings the Wunderhorn song with the simplicity of a child telling a story, and between the verses the sleigh bells rush in again, now with some bite. The last verse, about the music of heaven, turns to E major, and the symphony ends there, very quietly.