After conducting Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Vienna Court Opera on the night of February 24, 1901, Gustav Mahler almost died. He suffered a severe internal hemorrhage and lost a third of his blood. Although Mahler had seen ten of his brothers and sisters die, had seen both his parents die, and had written a funeral march into every work he had so far composed except the Fourth Symphony, death, his own death, had never seemed quite real to him before that night. Nor would it be too much to say that the experience changed his life.

That summer was the most prolific he had as a composer: eight songs plus the first two parts of the Fifth Symphony. Almost all the songs were sad; indeed, three of them would become part of his cycle of songs called the Kindertotenlieder. And the music for the Fifth was predominantly somber: a severe and anguished Funeral March in C sharp minor, a nearly nihilistic Allegro in A minor, and a D major Scherzo with a pizzicato void at its center. But, as yet, Mahler had no idea how the Fifth should conclude.

The conclusion of the Fifth came from out of nowhere. Invited on November 7 to dine at a friend's home, he met the "most beautiful girl in Vienna," Alma Schindler. She was 22 to his 41, vivacious and gregarious to his introverted and isolated. She had by this time already had as suitors Max Burckhard, the director of the Imperial Theater, and Gustav Klimt, the leader of the group of avant-garde artists known as the Secession, and was currently involved with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. She was brilliant, beautiful, and young, and Mahler fell almost instantly in love with her.

Within two months, they were engaged. At some point during that time, Mahler composed the movement that was to become the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony and sent it to Alma as a sort of musical love letter. She immediately understood: after all, it included not only a quotation from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, but also a passionate text by Mahler himself. But the Adagietto needs no quotation from Wagner nor any text to make its meaning clear. In simple three-part form and set for string orchestra and harp, its opening melody is full of endless and ineffable longing. Its central section increases in intensity until its sublime and quiet climax. The return of the opening melody builds to a climax of earth-shattering passion and then subsides into a long, lingering coda of profound contentment.

Through modulations and suspensions, through chromatic nuances and appoggiaturas, Mahler composed a musical act of love. Of course Alma immediately understood.

© All Music Guide

###

Mahler kept revising the orchestration of this work until his death. He conducted the first performance with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne on October 18, 1904. It is scored for quadruple winds, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, tympani, three other drums, metal and wood percussion, harp, and string choir.

He'd begun the Fifth Symphony at Maiernegg in 1901—writing the third, first and second movements in that order, after a death-obsessed song, "Der Tamboursg'sell," and the Kindertotenlieder cycle ("on the death of children"). After nearly bleeding to death the previous winter (from an intestinal hemorrhage), Mahler's symphonic orientation underwent a profound change. During his recovery he immersed himself in the complete works of Bach.

A new appreciation of counterpoint was born, but not yet a mastery of orchestral balances or effects—as subsequent events were to prove. Beginning with No. 5, he applied this new passion (which he called "intensive counterpoint") to five purely instrumental symphonies without Wunderhorn associations. Like the Resurrection Second and the first version of No. 1 (with the Blumine slow movement later abandoned) Mahler cast his Fifth Symphony in five movements that fall naturally into three parts.

The first begins in C sharp minor with a funeral march, of measured tread and austere (Movement I). A sonata-form movement follows, marked "Stormily, with greatest vehemence" (Movement II), which shares themes as well as mood with the opening.

The second part (which Mahler composed first) is a scherzo: "Vigorously, not too fast" (Movement III)—the symphony's shortest large section, but its longest single movement. This emphatically joyous, albeit manic movement puts forward D major as the work's focal key. Although its form has remained a topic of debate since 1904, rondo and sonata-form elements are both present.

Part Three begins with a seraphic Adagietto: "Very slowly" (Movement IV). This is indubitably related to the Rückert song Mahler composed in August 1901, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" (I have become lost to the world...I live alone in my heaven, in my loving, in my song). A Rondo-Finale: "Allegro giocoso, lively" (Movement V) concludes the symphony, although Mahler devised a form far removed from classic models. While sectional, in truth episodic, this too has elements of sonata form. To weld its diverse components into a unity he wrote four "fugal episodes," with a D major chorale just before the final Allegro molto.

Mahler's search for a new vocabulary caused him no end of orchestration problems. Before his death in 1911 he had made several versions, the original of which was published in 1904. C.F. Peters failed, however, to emend either mistakes or revisions in the first pocket score, although they re-engraved orchestral parts (at Mahler's expense) to include his first set of corrections. Not even Erwin Ratz's "first critical edition" of 1964 was the last word. Revisions Mahler made just before his terminal illness didn't come to light until the "second critical edition," by Karl Heinz Füssl, published just around 1989.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.