Symphony No. 5

Program notes

About the Work

In February 1901 Gustav Mahler suffered a sudden haemorrhage and came, as his doctor later told him, very close to death. That summer, recovering at his new lakeside villa at Maiernigg in Carinthia, he began his Fifth Symphony. In November he met Alma Schindler, the daughter of a well-known landscape painter; they married in 1902, and by the following summer, when Mahler finished the draft, she was expecting their first child. The symphony’s journey from a funeral march to an exuberant finale has often been read against this background: a brush with death, then a new life.

At the time Mahler was director of the Vienna Court Opera, and he could compose only during the summer holidays. The Fifth marks a turn in his output. His Second, Third and Fourth symphonies all use voices and draw on his songs; the Fifth is purely instrumental and comes with no published programme. It also shows a new passion for counterpoint. Mahler had been studying Bach intensively, and the finale in particular weaves several lines together with a density that surprised early listeners. Mahler went on revising the orchestration for years afterwards.

The five movements are grouped into three parts. Part I (the first two movements) is dark and violent; Part II is a single enormous Scherzo, the longest movement; Part III joins the famous Adagietto to the Rondo-Finale. The overall shape is an arch, with the Scherzo at its centre.

The Adagietto has had a life of its own. It is often played separately, and Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the funeral of Robert Kennedy in 1968, which has given it a reputation as music of mourning. But the conductor Willem Mengelberg, who knew Mahler, reported that it was meant as a declaration of love to Alma.

What to Listen For

Part I. A solo trumpet opens the symphony with a fanfare whose rhythm recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. The funeral march it introduces alternates with sudden, wild outbursts. The second movement, marked “Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz” (stormy, with the greatest vehemence), picks up that turbulence. Near its end a brass chorale in D major breaks through like sunlight, only to collapse. Remember that chorale: it comes back.

Part II: Scherzo. Four horns set off a whirl of Austrian country dances and Viennese waltzes. The solo horn is so prominent throughout that its part is almost a concerto in miniature. In the quieter middle section, listen for the horn calls echoing across the orchestra, as if in open country.

Part III: Adagietto and Rondo-Finale. The Adagietto is scored for strings and harp alone, after the huge forces of the previous movements. Mahler marks it “very slow”. A single held horn note links it to the Finale, which bursts in with cheerful, bustling counterpoint. Fragments of the Adagietto reappear at a quicker tempo, and at the climax the brass chorale from the second movement returns, this time complete and triumphant.