After having incorporated the human voice (chorus and/or soloist) in his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies, it was in the Fifth that Gustav Mahler returned to a purely instrumental format. The scoring, however, is lavish and features an expansive percussion section (including Holzklapper, or clappers), four flautists (all of whom play the piccolo at one point), six horns, four trumpets, three trombones and a bass tuba. Mahler also calls for three oboes, three clarinets, and three bassoons (rather than the usual two), and employs the strings in möglichst zahlreicher Besetzung (with the largest number of players possible).

Favourable circumstances

For Mahler, 1901 was a favourable year. Indeed, his friend, the conductor Bruno Walter, recalls in his book on the composer that ‘[he was] feeling strong and equal to life…. Thus the Fifth Symphony is born, a work of strength and sound self-reliance, its face turned squarely towards life, and its basic mood one of optimism…. In the Fifth the world has now a masterpiece which shows its creator at the summit of his life, of his power, and of his ability.’ Mahler composed the first three movements in Maiernigg that summer, enjoying being able to work on new music amid the woods and alpine meadows of his villa-cum-composer’s cottage on the Wörthersee – an activity for which he normally lacked the necessary peace of mind when performing his duties as conductor and director of the Vienna Hofoper (later Staatsoper) during the concert season. That same summer he also wrote the five Rückert songs and his final Wunderhorn song, Der Tamboursg’sell, a soldier’s farewell march whose instrumental intermezzo can be heard in the funeral march of the Fifth Symphony. Although as late as July Mahler had described the work as ‘a rule-abiding symphony in four movements’, it would ultimately consist of five grouped into three large parts (Abteilungen).

The progression of the five movements

The symphony opens with a trumpet signal, soon accompanied by muted drum rolls, then alternates with melancholic, even unsettling, string melodies, with the addition of a good deal more brass. The numerous march rhythms and brass signals in Mahler’s œuvre can be traced to his earliest musical memories as a child in Iglau (now Jihlava), a Bohemian garrison town where he would hear the military band play and observe soldiers on parade. The march music in the Fifth Symphony is that of a funeral procession (Kondukt). Mahler reintroduces elements of the funeral march in the turbulent second movement, thereby creating great cohesion between the movements. At one point in the second movement, he explicitly writes the indication ‘im Tempo des ersten Satzes, Trauermarsch’ (in the tempo of the funeral march of the first movement). After a series of sparkling upsurges, the second movement eventually fades away inconclusively. 

The first movement of the symphony Mahler completed was the middle one – a voluminous Scherzo underpinned by two quintessentially Austrian dances, the waltz and the ländler. Brimming with changing tempos and characters, it features a prominent horn solo, of which Mahler once remarked, ‘It is a human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his life.’ Serving as a turning point, the Scherzo bridges the foregoing, predominately darker, music with the final Abteilung, in which light and a lust for life unequivocally prevail.

In November, during the early part of the 1901–2 opera season, Mahler – a ba­chelor of forty-one – met the twenty-two-year-old Alma Maria Schindler at a dinner party. Alma, then the student and lover of the thirty-year-old composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, captured Mahler’s heart. The Adagietto – the yearning fourth movement of the Fifth Symphony – would be his love letter to her: Mahler sent her the sheet music with no further explanation. The notes would tell her everything she needed to know, as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s chief conductor Willem Mengelberg would later write in the score: ‘She understood him and wrote back, “Come!” Both of them told me this story.’ Accordingly, Mengelberg heard in the Adagietto ‘a love as it is born’. Gustav and Alma married on 9 March 1902, and their first daughter was born on 3 November. Although it would prove to be a tumultuous marriage, his union with ‘the most beautiful woman in Vienna’ was an initial boon to Mahler.

First performances

Scored solely for harp and string orchestra, the Adagietto leads attacca (without pause) into the Rondo-Finale for full orchestra. Together, they form what Mahler conceived as a single Abteilung. The many contrapuntal passages are a testament to Mahler’s close study of the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Another defining element in this triumphant final movement is the distinctive brass chorale – an apparent homage to Anton Bruckner, with whom Mahler had studied harmony and counterpoint at the conservatory. With its radiant fanfares, the sparkling finale decisively prevails over the sombre mood with which the work opened.

Mahler himself led the Gürzenich Orchestra in the premiere of his Symphony No. 5 in C‑sharp minor in Cologne on 18 October 1904. Aware of the groundbreaking nature of his latest work, he wrote to Alma, ‘The public – oh, heavens, what are they to make of this chaos of which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble in ruin the moment after?’ The Dutch premiere was given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Scheveningen in 1905, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra soon followed suit in March 1906. Mahler travelled from Vienna to attend these performances, staying with the Mengelbergs at 107 Van Eeghenstraat as he had on his previous two visits to Amsterdam. The composer himself led the first performance of the Fifth at the Concertgebouw, with Mengelberg conducting seven more concerts – in Amsterdam, as well as Rotterdam, The Hague, Arnhem and Haarlem. Mahler would continue to revise the instrumentation of the Fifth Symphony until the year he died.

Translation: Josh Dillon