Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season March-April 2016 | Page 36

everything still revolved around providing Mahler with peace and solitude for
his composing. Nevertheless, new feelings
of joy surely influenced the symphony’s
conclusion as he created the gorgeous
string-and-harp Adagietto (which his
friend the Dutch conductor Willem
Mengelberg believed was a love song to
Alma) and the exuberant Rondo-Finale.
With the Fifth, Mahler realized he had
created something “completely unlike
anything I have written before.” In the
broadest terms, it marked a break from
the three preceding symphonies, which
incorporated sung texts into the symphonic fabric. Though they still contain
melodic quotes from his songs, Mahler’s
three middle symphonies, the Fifth
through Seventh, are wordless, exclusively
instrumental compositions. The composer’s development and transformation
of themes become more imaginative, his
contrapuntal interweaving of lines more
complex, his harmonies more daring, and
his orchestration leaner and often harsher.
Yet, although the Fifth Symphony
contains no external program, it still intimately reflects the patterns of its creator’s
inner and outer life. Only the mercurial Mahler could juxtapose such wildly
conflicting moods as this work contains.
In the words of Deryck Cooke, “The
symphony might almost be described as
schizophrenic, in that the most tragic
and the most joyful worlds of feeling are
separated off from one another, and only
bound together by Mahler’s unmistakable command of large-scale symphonic
construction and unification.”
The symphony’s five movements are
grouped into a larger structure of three
sections. The death-obsessed movements
one and two, which share much of the
same thematic material, form Part I. Part
II is the Scherzo, the work’s longest movement. Part III comprises the Adagietto as a
slow introduction and the Rondo-Finale.
Movement one is a funeral march — a
favorite Mahlerian trope — in the dark
key of C-sharp Minor; its various sections
are linked by the searing solo-trumpet
fanfare that opens it. After the fanfare, the
strings in low register introduce the principal theme, a dry-eyed lament over the

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Movement one is a
funeral march—a favorite
Mahlerian trope
—in the dark key
of C-sharp Minor.
muffled tread of the cortege. When the
fanfare returns for the third time, it is immediately engulfed by a wild outburst of
grief from the violins introducing the first
trio section. Later a second trio takes a different emotional approach with consoling,
very Viennese music in the strings. But
this too builds to a climax of pain Mahler
labels “Klagend” (“Lamenting”).
Marked “Stürmisch bewegt”—“with
stormy motion”— movement two is the
angry working out of the themes and the
emotions largely kept under control in
the march. The strings open with a wild
paroxysm of grief, burdened by harmonic
and rhythmic struggle, that seems an
intensification of the march’s first trio
music. Then cellos introduce a contrasting
mood: a marvelous long-spun theme that
expands the consoling music of the march’s
second trio. Above them, high woodwinds tremble and cry out an important
motive— a wailing upward leap that
immediately falls back. These themes and
moods battle for control until an exalted
brass chorale in the brilliant key of D
major seems to proclaim triumph. But it
is too soon, and the music flickers out in
woodwind cries.
The symphony now undergoes a
schizophrenic mood swing from tragedy
to comedy. This buoyant dancing Scherzo

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{ program notes
in D Major — the symphony’s harmonic
goal — was the first music Mahler created
for the work, and it portrays the untroubled pastoral pleasures of his retreat
at Maiernigg. The scherzo music itself is
in the style of the Austrian country dance
known as the ländler, but its naiveté is
contradicted by the composer’s sophisticated rhythmic cross-play. It is succeeded
by a first trio section, a lilting Viennese
waltz for the strings, and a second trio, in
which the principal horn — which has an
important solo role throughout this movement— creates gentle, dreamlike music
with strings and woodwinds. Cooke calls
this Scherzo “a dance of life,” and in the
rest of the symphony Mahler will choose
life over death.
In Part III, the beautiful Adagietto for
strings and harp serves as slow introduction to the Finale. Often excerpted, its
sensuous beauty speaks for itself. Written
in the first summer of his marriage, it is, if
not a love song to Alma, surely an expression of the peace of his composing retreat.
Its music recalls his contemporaneous
Rückert song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden
gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”),
which ends with the words: “I live alone in
my own heaven, in my love, in my song.”
The ebullient Rondo-Finale in the new
home key of D Major follows immediately.
Solo woodwinds introduce a collection of
folksong-like themes that will propel the
movement, then the French horns spin out
the mellow rondo refrain. At this time,
Mahler was entranced with Bach’s contrapun