Gustav Mahler Symphony No.5
Adagietto Sehr langsam
Part2-2
=======================
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Part2
In Vienna Mahler was
surrounded by radical young
composers, including
Schönberg, Berg, Webern
and Zemlinsky, whose work he
supported and encouraged. His
propagation of his own music,
however, arou
more

Gustav Mahler Symphony No.5
Adagietto Sehr langsam
Part2-2
=======================
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Part2
In Vienna Mahler was
surrounded by radical young
composers, including
Schönberg, Berg, Webern
and Zemlinsky, whose work he
supported and encouraged. His
propagation of his own music,
however, aroused opposition
from a section of the Viennese
musical establishment, and
when the campaign against him,
led by an anti-semitic press,
gained momentum he was again
forced to look elsewhere. This
time he turned to New York,
where he spent his last
winters as conductor, first of
the Metropolitan Opera and,
from 1910, of the New York
Philharmonic Orchestra. He
continued to spend the summers
in Europe, where he undertook
further conducting and
completed the valedictory
Ninth Symphony and Das Lied
von der Erde. This last, a
setting of six Chinese poems
in German translation, took
the shape of a large-scale
symphony for two voices and
orchestra; but Mahler, whose
fear of death and sense of
fate had been intensified by
the diagnosis of a heart
condition in 1907, refused to
number the work 10, citing
Beethoven, Schubert and
Bruckner. He did, however,
start work on a tenth
symphony, but died before he
could complete it.

Although as a conductor Mahler
achieved fame primarily in
opera, his creative energies
were directed almost wholly
towards symphony and song.
Even in the early Das klagende
Lied, there are stylistic
features to be found in his
mature music, for example the
combining of onstage and
offstage orchestras, the
association of high tragedy
and the mundane, the drawing
on folksong ideas and the
dramatic-symbolic use of
tonality. This last reappeared
in his early masterpiece, the
Lieder eines fahrenden
Gesellen, which has an
evolutionary tonal scheme
paralleling the changing
fortunes of the travelling
hero. In the 1890s Mahler was
much influenced by the
Wunderhorn poems, in his
symphonies as well as his
songs, for he often used song
to clarify an important moment
in the structure of a
symphony, for example
'Urlicht' in Sym.2, which he
found himself unable to
continue after writing the
imposing first movement. Sym.3
is more idiosyncratic; again,
its dramatic scheme evolved
with recourse to song and
chorus. Sym.4 retums to
tradition, in a first movement
of rare wit and subtlety; here
the poetic idea is the
progress from experience to
innocence (with a Wunderhorn
song finale). While Sym.2,
'The Resurrection', moves from
c Minor to E-flat, Sym.4 goes
from G Major to the 'heavenly'
E Major. Parody, irony and
satire are important in
Mahler's thinking during these
years, with popular invention
(like the children's round in
Sym.1 and the march tunes of
Sym.3) and elements of
distortion.

Symphonies 5, 6 and 7 are
sometimes regarded as a
trilogy, although Sym.5 is a
heroic work, with a narrative
running from its opening
funeral march through the
agitated Allegro to a Scherzo
and a triumphant conclusion.
The symphony moves from
c-sharp Minor to D Major.
Sym.6, a tragic work - and in
many musicians' view, his
greatest symphony for its
equilibrium between form and
drama - begins and ends in A
Minor; the finale makes it
clear that there is no escape
for the implied hero and
indeed his death is
symbolically enacted in the
movement's shattering climax.
The shape of Sym.7, which
moves from e Minor to C Major,
is less satisfying; possibly,
with its dark, nocturnal
middle movement, it is
consciously built round the
poetic concept of darkness
moving towards the light of
the finale. The largest-scale
of Mahler's symphonies is
Sym.8, the so-called 'Symphony
of a Thousand', in which the
second part is a vast
synthesis of forms and media
embodying the setting of the
final scene of Goethe's Faust
as an amalgam of dramatic
cantata, oratorio, song cycle,
Lisztian choral symphony and
instrumental symphony. This
public pronouncement was
followed by one of his most
personal, Das Lied von der
Erde, influenced in its vocal
writing and woodwind
obbligatos by Mahler's new
interest in Bach. His last two
symphonies return to the
four-movement scheme of the
middle-period ones,
incorporating extensions of
the character movements of his
earlier works with the new
type of slow first movement
(followed up in the unfinished
Tenth) and ending with an
Adagio in a mood of profound
resignation. Mahler's
extension of symphonic form,
of the symphony's expressive
scope and the use of the
orchestra (especially the
agonized timbres he obtained
by using instruments,
particularly wind, at the top
of their compass) represent a
pained farewell to
Romanticism; different aspects
were followed up by the Second
Viennese School, Shostakovich
and Britten.
Ref:
Extracted with permission
from
The Grove Concise Dictionary
of Music
edited by Stanley Sadie
Macmillan Press Ltd., London.

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