Mahler's Symphony No. 5

What are you going to listen to?

Max Bruch

"I rewrote my violin concerto half a dozen times and submitted it to x number of violinists," Max Bruch later revealed about the genesis of his First Violin Concerto , which he had christened in Koblenz in 1866. Yet Bruch was still not completely satisfied with it and eventually sent it to Joseph Joachim. The famed violin virtuoso who had made a name for himself performing the violin concertos of Beethoven and Mendelssohn (and would later also be at the cradle of that of Brahms), was immediately impressed by the melodies of the slow movement, but still suggested several changes. After some modifications, Joachim finally played it in its final form for the first time in 1868.

The success for the thirty-year-old Bruch was great. So great, in fact, that all his other repertoire was ignored. He often sighed in exasperation that he had also written two other beautiful violin concertos, but every violinist only wanted to play that one.

Thanks to Joachim, Bruch's First Violin Concerto became a repertory piece that went all over the world. Joachim reflected at the end of his career, "The Germans have four violin concertos," referring to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch and Brahms, "but Max Bruch wrote the richest and most seductive of the four." Bruch did not derive much benefit from his masterpiece. An inexperienced composer at the time, he had sold his composition to a publisher and subsequently missed out on all royalties.

Gustav Mahler

Raised in the Moravian hill country of what is now the Czech Republic, Gustav Mahler had an eventful childhood. In the small garrison town where the Mahler family lived, it was a coming and going of soldiers, accompanied by marches and trumpet signals. Gustav's parents quarreled frequently, and of his thirteen siblings, six died in childhood. The first compositions Mahler wrote at age 10 were, tellingly, a funeral march and a polka. Five years later at the conservatory in Vienna, the young Gustav would broaden his musical horizons and quickly grew into one of the world's most celebrated conductors. In 1897 he was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera, and composing was of necessity confined to summer vacations, when he secluded himself like a hermit in a tiny composing cottage on Lake Wörthersee.

In 1901, during a performance of Die Zauberflöte, Mahler suffered an intestinal hemorrhage that nearly killed him. The incident was described by a young lady in the audience, Alma Schindler, the daughter of a well-known landscape painter. Mahler narrowly survived, and during his recovery he began work on his Fifth Symphony, an ode to life. After three symphonies with vocal input from soloists or chorus, this work was different from the start. A purely instrumental development, with no concrete narrative, from deep lament to exuberant triumph. "A symphony must be like the world," Mahler once said, "it must encompass everything."

The symphony begins in minor, with a series of trumpet signals announcing a funeral march. Dark lamentations and raging back and forth emotions characterize the first two movements that actually make up one long movement. Music in which snatches of the funeral march are never far away. Then the sky clears. A horn solo introduces a Scherzo that balances on the edge of the folk Ländler melodies of the countryside and the more cultivated Viennese waltz.

It was also during this period of the Fifth Symphony 's genesis that Mahler met Alma Schindler in Vienna. A passionate relationship grew, and conductor Willem Mengelberg would later reveal that the Adagietto was a declaration of love to his "beloved Almscherl. The separate movement, in an intimate setting with only strings and harp, Mahler had sent to his beloved as an anonymous letter without words. The message arrived, and in 1902 Gustav and Alma were to be married.

With joyous energy, the music of the Adagietto passes into the effervescent final movement, in which elements from all the previous movements occasionally surface. With the Fifth Symphony, Mahler struck a new path musically, a path of emotional extremes. At the first rehearsals in Cologne, the composer was aware of how new this music was, for to Alma he wrote, "My goodness, what should the audience make of this chaos, in which new worlds are constantly being created that will be destroyed the next moment?"

Frans Boendermaker