Mahler: Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
In a letter to the music critic Max Kalbeck, staunch opponent of the Wagnerian coalition of “program music” composers, Mahler argued, “From Beethoven onwards, there is no modern music that has not its inner program.” Were it more widely known, Mahler’s assertion would be controversial even today. Just as Kalbeck and his crony Eduard Hanslick were quick to draw sharp boundaries between the so-called “absolute music” of Brahms and Beethoven versus Wagner’s “Music of the Future” with its extra-musical associations, so too do modern scholars often treat Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as an abrupt departure from the programmatic framework of his earlier, voice-bound symphonies. It is true that Mahler confined his Fifth Symphony to the purely instrumental canvas, whereas his earlier works in the genre announce their meanings in words — whether actually sung in performance, or alluded to through musical quotation. But with his vivid web of cross-movement relationships, Mahler achieves in the Fifth Symphony such a clear sense of a linear progression over the course of the work as to suggest an inner drama of its own. For the Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell, it is not that the programmatic symphony has vanished, “it has gone underground, rather, or inside.”
It is telling that Mahler would invoke Beethoven in his letter to Kalbeck; the battlefield that frames the drama of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is the tonal progress from the C-sharp minor of the opening to the Finale’s triumphant D major — a triumph not unlike the journey from C minor to C major over the course of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony. Mahler seems to conjure Beethoven’s Fifth even more explicitly with the trumpet call that opens the present work and bears rhythmic resemblance to Beethoven’s knocking “fate” motive.
Mahler’s remarkable variety of orchestration is one of the ways he distinguishes between characters in this self-contained symphonic drama of sorts. Indeed, solo voices are strikingly prevalent throughout this work scored for such a bloated orchestra of quadruple winds with robust brass and percussion sections. After the first movement’s lone trumpet erupts into a short-lived fanfare, the movement oscillates between snarling brass and a plaintive funeral march that calls on a familiar Viennese lilt. The vacillation between forces of varying sizes — spitting solo trumpet utterances or a mass of strings dragging the procession along — raises questions of who exactly is speaking at any given time.
The echoes of Beethoven come to life again in the Stürmisch bewegt (“Moving stormily”) second movement, whose flashes of brass and rumbling strings recall Beethoven’s literal depiction of a storm in his Pastoral Symphony. Toward the movement’s end, the clouds seem to peel away to reveal a glimpse of heaven in a glorious brass chorale — our would-be climax, if only it didn’t recede into the distance as suddenly as it arrived. We are cruelly left behind in the storm, which itself dissipates amid a pitter-patter of winds and brass, then the hushed tiptoe of sinking pizzicato, before finally, a lone timpani cooly punctuates the end of the movement.
The middle movement Scherzo serves the greater arc of the symphony as sort of macro development section. The movement highlights a solo, obbligato horn part throughout, reminding us of the earlier issues of a part versus a whole. The Scherzo also brings to the fore the idea of space as it rocks between the provincial Ländler dance with its heavy steps and horn calls, and the daintier waltz of ballrooms and sophisticates.
In another striking move of orchestrational discipline, Mahler reserved the liquid gold lyricism of his Adagietto for harp and strings alone, offering a breathtaking sense of intimacy after the raucous conclusion of the previous movement. Words pale in the face of this portrait of Mahler’s love for his wife Alma; the composer himself could only come up with this short verse that he left his beloved to accompany the movement:
"In which way I love you, my sunbeam,
I cannot tell you with words.
Only my longing, my love and my bliss
can I with anguish declare."
A naked horn call heralds the start of the Finale, music of the outdoors. Woodsy chattering in the winds gradually joins in and confirms our location, more evidence of Mahler’s expert manipulation of the musical mis-en-scène without ever making it explicit. For a composer so habitually fixated on death, this movement stands out as a rare example of unfettered joy. When the gleaming brass chorale that was defeated in the second movement finally triumphs in this movement, the ominous world of C-sharp minor where our journey began seems but a distant memory.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
In a letter to the music critic Max Kalbeck, staunch opponent of the Wagnerian coalition of “program music” composers, Mahler argued, “From Beethoven onwards, there is no modern music that has not its inner program.” Were it more widely known, Mahler’s assertion would be controversial even today. Just as Kalbeck and his crony Eduard Hanslick were quick to draw sharp boundaries between the so-called “absolute music” of Brahms and Beethoven versus Wagner’s “Music of the Future” with its extra-musical associations, so too do modern scholars often treat Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as an abrupt departure from the programmatic framework of his earlier, voice-bound symphonies. It is true that Mahler confined his Fifth Symphony to the purely instrumental canvas, whereas his earlier works in the genre announce their meanings in words — whether actually sung in performance, or alluded to through musical quotation. But with his vivid web of cross-movement relationships, Mahler achieves in the Fifth Symphony such a clear sense of a linear progression over the course of the work as to suggest an inner drama of its own. For the Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell, it is not that the programmatic symphony has vanished, “it has gone underground, rather, or inside.”
It is telling that Mahler would invoke Beethoven in his letter to Kalbeck; the battlefield that frames the drama of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is the tonal progress from the C-sharp minor of the opening to the Finale’s triumphant D major — a triumph not unlike the journey from C minor to C major over the course of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony. Mahler seems to conjure Beethoven’s Fifth even more explicitly with the trumpet call that opens the present work and bears rhythmic resemblance to Beethoven’s knocking “fate” motive.
Mahler’s remarkable variety of orchestration is one of the ways he distinguishes between characters in this self-contained symphonic drama of sorts. Indeed, solo voices are strikingly prevalent throughout this work scored for such a bloated orchestra of quadruple winds with robust brass and percussion sections. After the first movement’s lone trumpet erupts into a short-lived fanfare, the movement oscillates between snarling brass and a plaintive funeral march that calls on a familiar Viennese lilt. The vacillation between forces of varying sizes — spitting solo trumpet utterances or a mass of strings dragging the procession along — raises questions of who exactly is speaking at any given time.
The echoes of Beethoven come to life again in the Stürmisch bewegt (“Moving stormily”) second movement, whose flashes of brass and rumbling strings recall Beethoven’s literal depiction of a storm in his Pastoral Symphony. Toward the movement’s end, the clouds seem to peel away to reveal a glimpse of heaven in a glorious brass chorale — our would-be climax, if only it didn’t recede into the distance as suddenly as it arrived. We are cruelly left behind in the storm, which itself dissipates amid a pitter-patter of winds and brass, then the hushed tiptoe of sinking pizzicato, before finally, a lone timpani cooly punctuates the end of the movement.
The middle movement Scherzo serves the greater arc of the symphony as sort of macro development section. The movement highlights a solo, obbligato horn part throughout, reminding us of the earlier issues of a part versus a whole. The Scherzo also brings to the fore the idea of space as it rocks between the provincial Ländler dance with its heavy steps and horn calls, and the daintier waltz of ballrooms and sophisticates.
In another striking move of orchestrational discipline, Mahler reserved the liquid gold lyricism of his Adagietto for harp and strings alone, offering a breathtaking sense of intimacy after the raucous conclusion of the previous movement. Words pale in the face of this portrait of Mahler’s love for his wife Alma; the composer himself could only come up with this short verse that he left his beloved to accompany the movement:
"In which way I love you, my sunbeam,
I cannot tell you with words.
Only my longing, my love and my bliss
can I with anguish declare."
A naked horn call heralds the start of the Finale, music of the outdoors. Woodsy chattering in the winds gradually joins in and confirms our location, more evidence of Mahler’s expert manipulation of the musical mis-en-scène without ever making it explicit. For a composer so habitually fixated on death, this movement stands out as a rare example of unfettered joy. When the gleaming brass chorale that was defeated in the second movement finally triumphs in this movement, the ominous world of C-sharp minor where our journey began seems but a distant memory.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music