Gustav Mahler: Adagietto from Symphony No. 5
“On what dark subsoil our life is built!” Gustav Mahler once exclaimed in a letter. “Where do we come from? Where does the way out lead? Why do I believe myself free, and yet am wedged into my character as into a prison? What is the purpose of suffering? How can I understand cruelty and malice in the creation of a kindly God? Will the meaning of life finally be revealed in death?”
To those questions, Mahler sought answers psychological and spiritual. He consulted for treatment no less a personage than Sigmund Freud: unsurprisingly, Freud told him that the root of his angst lay in his early childhood. And he sought the answers in religion, drifting from the secular Judaism in which he was raised to an unorthodox Christianity before finally converting officially to Catholicism in 1897.
And he sought to work out the answers himself in music. Mahler’s musical aspirations were as lofty as any: his nine monumental completed symphonies were among the grand total of just 16 pieces he finished, and every one of them is shot through with the composer’s quest for spiritual and metaphysical truth.
“My music is lived!” he exclaimed in another letter. “What attitude should those people take who do not ‘live,’ who feel no breath of the rushing gale of our great epoch?” Indeed Mahler was insistent that every note he set down was both an expression of his spiritual quest and a distillation of his life’s experiences. His training, in Vienna and Prague, was in conducting as much as composing, and it was as a conductor that he was best known during his life. A rapid rise through the opera houses of the German-speaking world culminated in his assumption, in 1897, of the directorship of the Vienna State Opera – doubtless the opera world’s most prestigious position at the time – and one year later took command (such as it was) of the fractious Vienna Philharmonic. In 1907, disenchanted with the continual squabbles and the overt anti-Semitism he was subject to in Vienna, he moved to New York, where he directed the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan opera. A heart attack, brought on by a bacterial infection, took his life in 1911.
Mahler and Wife Alma. The composer wrote his Symphony no. 5 as a musical love letter to her during their courtship.
Mahler’s conducting was famed for his obsessive attention to detail, and his compositions share the same quality. He composed painstakingly during summer vacations from conducting in his small cabin in the Austrian Alps. His symphonies demand huge orchestras and in several cases require them to share the stage with choir and vocal soloists, but he orchestrated with the delicacy and intimacy of a chamber musician. The five-movement Fifth was written over the summers of 1901 and 1902; it begins with a funeral march and ends in a triumphant blaze of glory. This fourth-movement Adagietto – which the composer authorized for use as a standalone piece, and which, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, formed the centerpiece of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 funeral – exhibits all the considerable finesse of which its composer was capable. Scored for strings and a crucial harp, the Adagietto is nothing less than celestial in its ineffable tenderness, a sublime musical foretaste, perhaps, of heaven.
See a performance
Hear Mahler’s Symphony No. 5
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.