Mahler finished his “first period” with his Fourth Symphony right at the end of the nineteenth century. The music he wrote at the beginning of the new century pointed in a new direction. The first four symphonies are all inspired by or based on songs, especially the songs of the collection of folk-poetry known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn). By the turn of the century, Mahler had stopped drawing upon that source for good, though with perhaps one last glimpse in the Fifth Symphony. His next songs were settings of the poet Rückert, including his finest cycle, Kindertotenlieder, three songs of which were completed before he began work on the symphony. The songs make themselves felt here and there in the Fifth by way of brief reminiscences, but the symphony as a whole—like its two successors—is a purely orchestral work with no vocal parts and no hint of musical shapes dictated by song.

The group of three instrumental symphonies—5, 6, and 7—belong together in another respect. Mahler’s orchestration is notably different from that of the earlier works. The parts are now often more independent of one another in a highly contrapuntal texture, and he more frequently uses small subsections of the orchestra, as if the entire ensemble consisted of an immensely varied series of chamber groups. At first the novelty of this approach gave Mahler considerable trouble. At a reading rehearsal in Vienna before the Cologne premiere of the Fifth, he was horrified to discover that he had seriously over-orchestrated large sections of the score. He took a red pencil to his manuscript and crossed out many parts. Still unsatisfied after the official premiere, Mahler continued touching up the scoring of the Fifth Symphony almost until the day he died.

The distinction between works written before and after the turn of the century is not cut-and-dried, to be sure. The Fourth Symphony already shows more independent instrumental writing. The scoring of the Kindertotenlieder and other Rückert songs grows out of it and leads as naturally into the instrumental style of the Fifth. The novelty is more a matter of degree than of kind. Still, the Fifth marks a perceptible turning point in Mahler’s output, a determination to avoid programmatic elements (at least those of the kind inherent in the setting of a text or proclaimed to the public in a printed program note) and let the music speak for itself.

Mahler anticipated the contrapuntal character of the Fifth in some conversations with his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner while recuperating, in March 1901, from surgery for an intestinal hemorrhage that very nearly killed him. He talked to Natalie about the late Beethoven string quartets, describing them as “far more polyphonic than his symphonies.” He was obsessed with the idea of different themes that would combine and “develop freely, side by side, each with its own impetus and purpose, so that people will always be able to distinguish them one from another.” And he plunged into hours of study of the Bachgesellschaft edition of Bach’s complete works.

His illness, he decided, had been caused in large part by the strains of conducting the rebellious Vienna Philharmonic, with many of whose members he had deep-rooted differences of opinion on matters of musical interpretation, and by the need to withstand the endless attacks of an anti-Semitic press. On returning from a holiday on the Istrian peninsula, he submitted his resignation to the committee of the Philharmonic, retaining the music directorship of the opera, which brought him quite enough headaches.

But as summer approached, Mahler was able to look forward to a summer vacation dedicated largely to composing in a newly built retreat all his own, a large chalet at Maiernigg, a resort town in Carinthia on Lake Wörth. He had selected the site before the 1899–1900 season and followed the construction of the house whenever he was not actually working on the Fourth Symphony in the summer of 1900. By 1901 it was ready for occupancy. Villa Mahler was situated between the forest and the water, arranged so that all the rooms had panoramic lake views. He worked several hours a day in a tiny cottage not far away but completely isolated, to give himself total silence while composing.

He brought the Bach edition with him and spent hours studying in particular one of the eight-part motets. “The way the eight voices are led along in a polyphony which he alone masters is unbelievable!” In addition to Bach, he studied some songs of Schumann, whom he regarded as second only to Schubert in that genre, and he arranged evening musicales in the house. At first he didn’t worry about composition. By July he started composing a few songs—the last of the Wunderhorn group and the first of his Rückert songs. He determined to give himself two weeks of complete rest, and ironically, just at that point, he found himself immersed in a large project that was to become the Fifth Symphony.

There were others in the household—his sister Justine; the violinist Arnold Rosé, with whom Justine was having an affair and whom she later married; and Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a musician friend who kept an informative journal of her encounters with Mahler and who clearly suffered pangs of unrequited love (she disappeared from his life within days of his engagement to Alma Schindler). To them he said nothing about the new work. But as he spent more and more hours in the cottage, no one doubted that he was involved in something extensive. In fact, he was composing two movements of the Symphony (one of them the Scherzo, which gave him an enormous amount of trouble), and turning now and then to further songs, including the finest of all, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” All too soon the summer was over, and the Symphony had to remain unfinished as he took up his operatic duties in Vienna.

Mahler was not able to return to work on the Symphony until the following summer, but in the meantime a casual encounter at a dinner on November 7 changed his life. Seated opposite him at the table was a young woman of spectacular beauty and considerable self-assurance. Her name was Alma Schindler, and she had been studying composition with Alexander Zemlinsky. After dinner Alma and Mahler got into a heated argument about a ballet score that Zemlinsky had submitted to Mahler for possible production. Mahler had never replied to the submission, and she taxed him with rudeness.

Before the evening was over Mahler was clearly enchanted with the girl’s beauty, but also by her wit and her fiery disposition. He made her promise to bring samples of her own work to the Opera. In less than two weeks it was clear to all concerned that something serious was in the wind. By November 27, Mahler was already talking of marriage and almost against her will Alma was realizing that “He’s the only man who can give meaning to my life, for he far surpasses all the men I’ve ever met.” Yet she was still confused, having recently been convinced that she was in love with Zemlinsky. But by December 9, when Mahler left for ten days in Berlin to conduct his Second and Fourth symphonies, she had made up her mind.

Before Christmas they officially celebrated their engagement. When they married on March 9, Alma was already pregnant. It was only the least of the complications in their life together. In some respects two people can hardly have been less well suited to each other, whether by age, temperament, character, or interests. Mahler was passionately in love with her, but was overbearing in his demands that she entirely devote her attention to him, even to the point of giving up her study of composition. Alma was capricious, flirtatious, and conceited, though she was also very intelligent and witty, musical, capable of both great generosity and petty meanness. Yet virtually everything Mahler wrote for the rest of his life was composed for her, beginning with the conclusion of the Fifth Symphony. And whatever difficulties they may have experienced in their life together, there is little question that she inspired him to vast compositional achievements—seven enormous symphonies (counting Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth) in less than a decade, during the first five years of which he was also in charge of the Vienna Opera and later the New York Philharmonic.

Apparently Mahler wrote the famous Adagietto movement of the Fifth during the period before his marriage. At any rate, the conductor Willem Mengelberg wrote this note in his score:

NB: This Adagietto was Gustav Mahler’s declaration of love to Alma! Instead of a letter he confided it in this manuscript without a word of explanation. She understood it and replied: He should come!!! (I have this from both of them!) W.M.

Though Alma’s diary fails to mention such a musical missive, it is possible that the movement served, in fact, as a love letter (Mahler wrote her plenty of other letters, too, especially when he was away in Berlin). Since she was a musician and composition student herself, she could be expected to be able to read the music and sense its emotional import, especially since its scoring—just strings and harp—is the sparest of any symphonic movement Mahler ever wrote.

After their wedding, Mahler and Alma took their honeymoon in Russia, where he conducted some performances in St. Petersburg. Then, after a short time in their Vienna apartment, they went to Krefeld, where Mahler conducted the first complete performance of his Third Symphony on June 9. This performance, a great success, was the beginning of Mahler’s fame outside of Vienna. Elated, he and Alma went to Maiernigg for the summer, where they enjoyed swims and long walks. He worked on completing the Fifth in the seclusion of his cottage, while she remained in the house preparing a legible copies of the finished pages of score. The work was completed in short score by autumn. Mahler wrote out the detailed orchestration during the winter by rising before breakfast and working on it until it was time to go to the opera house.

One unusual aspect of the Fifth—the complete absence of a text or descriptive explanation from the composer—seems to have been motivated by the unhappy reaction of the audience at the premiere of the Fourth Symphony in November 1901, when Mahler conducted it in Munich, to almost universal ridicule and misunderstanding, completely undoing the recent success he had achieved with the Second. He attributed the critics’ lack of perceptions to their inability to follow an abstract musical argument. It was all the fault of Berlioz and Liszt, he said, who began writing program music (though theirs had genius, he admitted, unlike the music of some later composers) so that the “plot” of the score had become a necessary crutch to listening.

One result of this experience was Mahler’s determination to avoid giving any explanation of the “meaning” or “program” of his next symphony. Even when supportive musicians asked him for some guidance, he remained silent. He expressed himself with far greater vigor on the subject at a dinner in Munich following a performance of the Second Symphony. When someone mentioned program books, Mahler is reported to have leaped upon the table and exclaimed:

Down with program books, which spread false ideas! The audience should be left to its own thoughts over the work that is performed; it should not be forced to read during the performance; it should not be prejudiced in any manner. If a composer by his music forces on his hearers the sensations which streamed through his mind, then he reaches his goal. The speech of tones has then approached the language of words, but it is far more capable of expression and declaration.

He is then reported to have raised his glass, emptied it, and cried, “Pereat den Programmen!” (“Let the programs perish!”). (When the Boston Symphony performed the Fifth for the first time in 1906, Philip Hale wrote in his program book essay, “Let us respect the wishes of Mr. Mahler”—a decision that saved him a great deal of study of the new score.)

Following such an outburst, the annotator proceeds with trepidation. Still, Mahler’s pique was aimed at first-time listeners whose reaction might be prejudiced one way or another by an explanation. Eventually listeners may desire some consideration of the music, especially because Mahler’s music is no less expressive for all his eschewing of programs, and in some respects it is a good deal more complicated.

The Fifth Symphony is laid out in five movements, though Mahler grouped the first two and the last two together, so that there are, in all, three “parts” tracing a progression from tragedy to an exuberant display of contrapuntal mastery and a harmonic progression from the opening C-sharp minor to D major. The keys of the intervening movements (A minor, D, and F) also outline a chord on D, which would therefore seem to be a more reasonable designation for the key of the Symphony, with the opening C-sharp conceived as a leading tone. Nonetheless, the Fifth is customarily described as being in the key of C-sharp minor.

The opening movement has the feeling of a funeral march, rather martial in character, given the opening trumpet fanfare (derived from the first movement of the Fourth Symphony) and the drum-like tattoo of the strings and winds in the introductory passage. The main march theme is darkly somber, a melody related to the recently composed song “Der Tamboursg’sell” (a last echo of Des Knaben Wunderhorn). The Trio is a wild, almost hysterical outcry in B-flat minor gradually returning to the tempo and the rhythmic tattoo of the opening. The basic march returns and closes with a recollection of the first song from Kindertotenlieder, which Mahler was almost certainly composing while he worked on this movement as well. The second trio, in A minor, is more subdued and given largely to the strings. Last echoes of the trumpet fanfare bring the movement to an end.

The second movement, marked “Stormy, with the utmost vehemence,” has a number of links to the first. It takes the frenetic outbursts of the first movement as its basic character and contrasts them with a sorrowful march melody in the cellos and clarinets. They take turns three times (each varied and somewhat briefer than the one before). A premature shout of triumph is cut off, and the main material returns. The shout of triumph comes back briefly as a chorale in D (the key that will ultimately prevail), but for now, the movement ends in hushed mystery.

According to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler had an idea for the character of the Scherzo, though he chose not to reveal it to the public. Following the dark and emotional character of Part I, the second part was to represent “a human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his life.” The Scherzo is on an unusually large scale, but it moves with great energy and speed, much of it as a lilting and whirling waltz with a featured solo horn. There are sardonic twists here and there, boisterous passages, even brutal ones, and some that have the lilt and verve of The Merry Widow.

The last part begins with the famous Adagietto, once almost the only movement of Mahler’s music that was heard with any frequency. When Mahler wrote it, he was recalling the musical worlds created for the second song of Kindertotenlieder and “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” though he is not using either song to shape this exquisitely restrained movement. The melody grows in sweeping arches to a climactic peak that is not hammered with fortissimos but whispered as if with bated breath.

Mahler builds his Finale as a grand rondo: after an opening horn call, a bassoon quotes a phrase from one of Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs, “Lob des hohen Verstandes,” which describes a singing contest with a donkey as the judge. Good natured satire of academic pedantry is the point of the song, and Mahler here undertakes his own cheerful demonstration of counterpoint, the academic subject par excellence in music theory, treated in a wonderfully exuberant and free wheeling way. He is concerned to build up a symphonic structure, alluding to the theme of the Adagietto with music of very different spirit. The climax of the Symphony brings back the chorale theme from the second movement, the one earlier passage in all that tragic realm that hinted at the extroversion of D major, now finally achieved and celebrated with tremendous zest. —© Steven Ledbetter