In 1895, Gustav Mahler told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ‘To me…, a symphony means building a world by all available means which technique offers.’ Indeed, his first four symphonies were very colourful worlds incorporating military and funeral marches, sounds from nature, folk and Gypsy music, and his own Wunderhorn songs, with critics frequently accusing him of indulging in mere ‘banalities’. Mahler’s subsequent three symphonies show a certain restraint in his use of ‘all available means’, however. He does away entirely with vocal parts, while the lush warmth of Wunderhorn-inspired Romanticism yields to a sharply defined contrapuntal style, and the earlier ‘banalities’ are gradually relegated to the background. Of his Fifth Symphony in C‑sharp minor, Mahler once remarked, ‘There is nothing romantic or mystical about it; it is simply an expression of incredible energy. It is a human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his life.’ These same words could be said to apply to his Symphony No. 6 in A minor – completed in 1904 and nicknamed the ‘Tragic’ (a term coined by Mahler himself, according to his friend, the conductor Bruno Walter) – though here, man, despite being in the full light of day and in his prime, is ultimately undone by fate.

Mahler’s wife, Alma, recounts in her (not always reliable) memoirs that the Sixth was his most personal work, revealing intimate biographical details relating to the symphony: ‘After he had drafted the first movement, he came down from the wood to tell me he had tried to express me in a theme: “Whether I’ve succeeded, I don’t know; but you’ll have to put up with it.”… In the third movement he represented the unrhythmical games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand.… In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, his hero: “It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.”’ 

The Sixth has four movements that are the­matically interrelated, with the exception of the Andante. The first movement is in sonata form, and Mahler calls for the exposition to be repeated. The first theme opens with a coercive march which, after reaching a climax, dissolves into low trills in the woodwinds. The subsequent drum roll and thunderclaps from the timpani introduce the tragic, or fate, motif that recurs in the other two fast movements. It is a tragedy in miniature: an A major chord in the trumpets and oboes gives way to A minor, while the timbral emphasis shifts from the trumpets (decrescendo) to the oboes (crescendo). This move from major to minor culminates in a brief chorale in the woodwinds. A graceful theme in the strings follows – Mahler’s musical portrait of Alma. In the development, the march and the Alma theme (in the bass tuba!) are heard in succession, and the cowbells make their entrance in an idyllic episode, combined with both the chorale and the Alma theme in the solo horn.

The order in which the two middle movements were to be performed vexed Mahler considerably. At the premiere in Essen on 27 May 1906, and in subsequent performances, he invariably placed the Andante before the Scherzo. Yet in the manuscript and in the first edition of the score published prior to the premiere, the Scherzo is followed by the Andante. Mahler never offered a final opinion on the matter, and it was primarily as a result of Alma’s influence that the Scherzo–Andante order persisted in Amsterdam for such a long time. 

In the Scherzo, the spirit of Mephistopheles reigns supreme, embodying a rejection of all that is regarded as conventionally beautiful or ‘natural’ in music. Instruments are heard in extreme registers, producing distorted timbres including shrieking harmonics in the violins, barking appoggiaturas in the horns and screeching woodwinds. The Scherzo proper concludes with the fate motif in the trumpets. Mahler described the following Trio as altväterisch (old-fashioned), which would seem to be at variance with Alma’s description of the unrhythmically playing children. The somewhat archaic minuet alternates between bars of three and four beats, which lend a certain stiffness to the whole, evoking the image of elderly dancers awkwardly recalling a long-forgotten minuet, rather than that of children at play. Both the Scherzo and Trio are repeated. In the coda, fragments of the old-fashioned minuet are accompanied by the fate motif, always sounding a note lower, in the flutes and trumpets.

The Andante opens with a long-spun-out theme in major mode in the violins. Although the fate motif with its characteristic major-to-minor shift is not heard in this movement, Mahler seems almost systematically to subject the theme to every conceivable minor-key gradation, lowering not only the third, but also the second, sixth and seventh scale degrees. A childlike five-note motif in the flutes – which will be omnipresent in the further development of the music – leads to a passage for the woodwinds in which the alto oboe presents a secondary theme. A harmonic in the violins brings a momentary halt to the musical progression, after which a horn restates the secondary theme, which this time is propelled to a climax. Once again, Mahler calls for cowbells, yet this is no ‘alpine pastorale’, as in the first movement. After a second restatement of the first theme (in the oboe and horn), an astonishing modulation transitions into an episode marked ‘misterioso’, featuring a chorale in the flutes and clarinets embellished by fragments of the first theme. The Andante concludes with a repetition of the secondary theme and its subsequent climax. The bass tuba states the first theme one last time amid the tinkling of cowbells.

For the Finale – in which ‘it is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate’ – Mahler commissioned a special hammer and accompanying wooden box, described in the score as producing ‘a short, powerful, heavy-sounding blow of non-metallic quality, like the stroke of an axe’. The precise number of hammer blows has been the subject of debate. At one point, there were five; in the first edition of the score, there are three, but in the revised second edition issued at Mahler’s request following the premiere – when the order of the middle movements was changed – the final blow was omitted. In the Finale, the conflict between major and minor tonality is magnified to gigantic proportions. The movement opens with a mysterious slow introduction that will return three more times. An ecstatic phrase in the violin is abruptly interrupted by the tragic motif from the first movement, after which fragments of five themes and a complete chorale are presented. Prominent among these is a horn melody accompanied by low bells which returns in a more elaborate form following a chorale for horns and woodwinds, and an ensuing wind melody that emerges after the first two hammer blows. The introduction gradually accelerates into an Allegro energico, a march based on the horn theme, which can be divided into two main sections and a coda on the basis of the recurring introduction. The first section consists of a march and a lyrical episode. In the second, the first two hammer blows abruptly cut off the build-up to a redemptive climax in major mode. The third section opens with bells and charming solos for the oboe and violin – another ‘alpine pastorale’. In the ensuing triumphant march in major mode, victory seems within the hero’s grasp. Yet the final return of the introduction and its tragic motif, culminating in a possible third hammer blow, shatters that illusion. Final respects are paid to the hero in a coda in the trombones, as the solemn ceremony is brutally curtailed by the tragic motif – now solely in minor. The major mode has been rendered meaningless.

Translation: Josh Dillon