Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 6
When he was a young boy, Gustav Mahler was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. The child,
who would become the most famous conductor of his time, equally infamous for his passionate and
misunderstood compositions, is said to have replied, "A martyr."
Certainly Mahler seemed willing to martyr himself professionally to his own musical causes over
the course of his career. His dramatic flair and vision as a conductor helped him to move steadily
from positions at regional operatic and theatrical companies in his native Bohemia and in Germany
to music director of the Vienna Court Opera (1897), the Vienna Philharmonic (1898), and later the
New York Metropolitan Opera (1907) and New York Philharmonic (1909). Yet the same commitment to his
vision seemed inevitably to bring about some crisis between him and his employers. Viennese papers
published cartoons of the temperamental music director flailing his arms or surrounded by blaring
horns and broken bass drums, and today's stereotypical caricature of the autocratic conductor has
its roots in part in the Viennese public's love/hate relationship with Mahler.
The son of relatively poor Bohemian parents who supported his musical training as best they could,
Mahler was able through the gift of a patron to study at the Vienna Conservatory (1875-1878), where
he met one of his early heroes, composer Anton Bruckner. Mahler was also influenced by the operas of
Weber and Wagner, and made his first splash as a composer by completing Weber's unfinished comic
opera Die drei Pintos (1888). That same year Mahler completed his Symphony No. 1, which was
met with complete incomprehension by its premiere audiences in Budapest (1889) and Vienna (1901).
This was to be the general response to most of his symphonies, which he wrote during his summer
holidays between conducting duties. For Mahler, though embracing the familiar Romantic philosophy of
expression of self through music, chose to express even more than his predecessors. Earlier composers
might have used themes from folk tunes or other popular music, but always transformed into classical
structure. Mahler wanted nothing less than to describe life itself in his music, and he quoted everyday
music directly, with Bohemian peasant tunes, Yiddish klezmer, student songs, and snappy military
marches making their appearance with no pretense at being other than what they were: the sort of music
that critics found "vulgar." This, coupled with the passion and broad scope of Mahler's own composition
and his willingness to expand the boundaries of the orchestra to encompass whatever instruments he felt
were required, no matter how surprising (Symphony No. 6 includes birch twig switch,
and a hammer), left Mahler's audiences simply scratching their heads. Though conductors like Bruno
Walter championed Mahler's music over the years, it wasn't until Leonard Bernstein began promoting
Mahler's symphonies that they became widely known and recorded.
Mahler composed his sixth symphony during the summers of 1903 and 1904. He had just passed through
another difficult period in 1901, when disagreements about his reorchestrations of Beethoven in
performances with the Vienna Philharmonic, coupled with the derisive reception his first symphony
received, caused him to resign as conductor. Following this storm, in 1902 his life took a happier
turn: he met and married Alma Schindler, and by the summer of 1903 they had a year-old daughter and
Alma was pregnant with their second child. Yet against this sunny background Mahler wrote the last
two songs of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children) and the darkest,
most despairing of all his symphonies. The sixth begins and ends in A minor, with little respite
from its relentless pulse; Mahler described the hammer blows in the final movement as "three hammer-blows
of fate, the last of which fells [the hero] as a tree is felled." In the summer of 1907, a year after
the symphony's first performance, Mahler himself suffered three such blows: his oldest daughter Maria's
death from diptheria, his bitter parting with the Vienna Opera, and the diagnosis of his severe heart
disease. Alma believed he had tempted fate by composing the sixth symphony and the Kindertotenlieder,
but Mahler felt that an artist might sense his own future, and that the works were simply the prescience
of true inspiration.
Whatever his source, Mahler's sixth is the most thematically united of his symphonies, with three of the
four movements in A minor and unified by a repeated motif of a major triad moving to minor. The first
movement, marked Allegro energico, ma non troppo, begins ominously with a crescendoing, tramping
march that permeates the movement. This evolves into a fervent second subject, whose melody, Alma Mahler
writes in her biography, represented her. The development segues to quiet, mysterious chords in the divided
violins and celesta, answered by the distant rattling of offstage cowbells. (Mahler brought a special set
of cowbells for use at each venue where he per-formed the symphony.) The composer described this section
as "the last greeting from earth to penetrate the remote solitude of the mountain peaks." We do not tarry
long in the mountains, however, and both the march and the "Alma" theme return in the recapitulation,
the movement ending with a triumphant statement of Alma's melody.
Mahler changed his mind several times about the order of the second and third movements. Although in
his own public performances and in the second published edition he placed the andante before the scherzo,
Mahler's autograph and the first pub-lished edition place the scherzo before the andante, and he is said
to have wished his original order restored in later years. It is in this order, scherzo followed by andante,
that the symphony is generally presented, as it is in today's concert.
The Scherzo seems to pick up where the march of the first movement left off, but the A-minor theme
is now transformed into a stamping dance with braying woodwinds. The quick dance is interrupted twice by a
trio full of rhythmic irregularities, which Alma Mahler described as the "play of little children," and
which the composer marked Altväterisch: old-fashioned. These interludes fade, however, as if the innocent
play of children is unable to halt the sardonic dance of fate.
The third movement, Andante moderato, is the only respite from the driving A minor, presenting a
calming, melodic theme in E-flat major with a soaring counter-melody in the violins. The theme is passed
from woodwinds to brass to strings in the re-statement, and the movement climaxes in a luminous E major
with the cowbells heard again in the distance.
We are interrupted from this reverie to meet our fate in the Finale, the longest and weightiest of
the movements. A low C with swirls of celesta and harp glissandos is followed by impassioned phrases from
the strings and then a chilling, blaring chord from the brass that returns to a low A. The A-major to
A-minor motif from the previous movements has returned, with marching tunes attempting a confident major
but each time struck down, this time literally with hammer blows that Mahler wanted to sound "like the
stroke of an ax." (He originally scored three of these blows, but in his final revision removed the third
blow.) The movement ends with fragments of funereal tunes in the lowest brass over a long drum roll, a
blast of the A-minor chord, and the last grim beats of the timpani. Fate has overcome our hero, and Mahler
offers no vision of resurrection or hope - we must face our doom alone, without comfort.
November 18, 2001
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