Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 6

Gustav Mahler

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 6

INSTRUMENTATION: Four flutes and piccolo (third and fourth flutes also doubling piccolo), four oboes (third and fourth doubling English horn), three clarinets with high clarinet (D and E-flat) and bass clarinet, four bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, six trumpets, three tenor tombones, and bass trombone, bass tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum (doubled), cymbals, triangle, rattle, tam-tam, glockenspiel, cowbells, low-pitched bells, birch brush, hammer, xylophone, two harps, celesta, and strings.

DURATION: About 79 minutes

It is not always easy for the outsider to understand that artists do not necessarily produce “happy” works when they themselves are happy, or “sad” ones–whether “tragic” or “pathetique”–when their lives are going badly. In the summers of 1903 and 1904, Mahler was as happy as ever in his life, and though his gift for misery gets more attention, he had a great talent for happiness. In March 1902, only four months after meeting her, he had married the vivacious, gifted, and beautiful Alma Schindler; one daughter, Maria, was born in November of that year, and another, Anna, came along in June 1904. His music was getting more performances and even seemed at times to be meeting with more understanding. His work at the Imperial Court Opera in Vienna, where he had been director since 1897, was going well, and he had just begun a wonderfully harmonious association with that prince of stage designers, Alfred Roller; their productions together of Tristan, Fidelio, Don Giovanni, and Figaro have become part of operatic legend. During these sunny, energy-filled summers, and as an immensely busy conductor and administrator, he had to cram all his composing into the summer months, Mahler wrote the darkest music of his life, the Sixth Symphony (which he himself may or may not have called the Tragic, though others certainly have) and the two final songs of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children).

Alma Mahler was understandably appalled by the obsession with the deaths of children on the part of a father of two healthy little girls (Friedrich Rickert had 

written the Kindertotenlieder poems in response to the death of his own children), and when the four-year-old Maria died after a combined onslaught of diphtheria and scarlet fever in the summer of 1907, Alma was sure that her husband had tempted providence by composing those songs. Mahler himself saw it differently. He was convinced that an artist has the power to intuit, even to experience events before they occur, and that he cannot escape the pain of such foreknowledge.

He imagined the Finale of the Sixth Symphony as a scenario in which “the hero” is assaulted by “[...]three hammer-blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.” The summer of 1907 brought him three such blows: Maria’s death, the discovery of his heart disease, and the bitter end of his dictatorship of the Vienna Opera. Again, as Alma insisted, the Sixth Symphony is Mahler’s autobiography, written ahead of time.

Was Mahler writing about himself? Was he predicting the apocalypse of 1914, Auschwitz, and Babi Yar? Was he just writing a symphony? We know from Alma–and on matters like this she is dependable–-that frighteningly so, Mahler was emotionally more engaged by this piece than by any other in his life, that after the dress rehearsal for the first performance, he walked “[...]up and down in the artists’ room, sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself.” At the concert itself he was so afraid of losing control, so afraid of the demons he himself had unleashed in his music, that he conducted badly. The Sixth Symphony is a work imbued with a tragic vision. Whereas Mahler’s other symphonies end in triumph, exaltation, joyous exuberance, quiet bliss, or at their darkest in resignation and acceptance, and while even the Kindertotenlieder draws to their close with a vision of the children at rest “[...]as though in their mother’s house, affrighted by no storm, protected by the hand of God[...]” the Sixth is unique in its bleakly hopeless, minor-key conclusion.

Mahler’s ambivalence about extramusical meaning in his symphonies never went away. What is behind the music? How much did he want his listeners to know? He stressed that his First Symphony went “[...]far beyond the love story on which it is based, or rather, which preceded it in the life of its creator[...],” and on another occasion, he remarked irritably that his symphonies were not just the memoirs of an opera director. In that spirit, having suggested that the Sixth Symphony carries heavy emotional freight and that it has persistently shown power to provoke intense emotional reactions in its listeners (rejection not excluded), let us now move on to the work itself.

When the first bad (in both senses) reviews of the Sixth Symphony appeared, Mahler remarked: “All of a sudden they like my Fifth. I suppose we’ll have to wait till the Seventh for the Sixth to turn out to be any good.” And to Richard Specht, his first biographer, he wrote: “My Sixth will propound riddles whose solution can be attempted only by a generation that has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” It was an accurate prediction. The Sixth, “[...]the only Sixth, despite the Pastoral[...],” said the twenty-one-year-old composer Alban Berg in a rush of understandable hyperbole, was transformed from riddle to communication in letters of fire in the 1960s when Mahler began to be played enough for what Adorno called his [...]“musical physiognomy” to be known (Nor might Camus now call Mahler the “much abused,” -except by certain conductors.)

Mahler’s Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies explore what Schoenberg called “fluctuating tonality,” and what the English composer Robert Simpson, writing about Nielsen, identified as “progressive tonality;” that is, they end in keys other than the ones where they began. This is a radical design possibility that interested Mahler as early as 1884 in the third of his Songs of a Wayfarer. But the Symphony No. 6, a fascinating mix of the classical and the radical, is anchored firmly to a single key, A minor. This is a special key for Mahler, the one that dominates his early cantata, Das klagende Lied (The Song of Lamenting), the key of the Fifth Symphony’s ferocious second movement, and later, of that bitterest of toasts to life and death, “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery,” which opens Das Lied von der Erde.

Each of Mahler’s three middle symphonies requires a more elaborate orchestra than its predecessor, No. 6 having a large brass section and being especially rich in percussion, and No. 7, along with ample and colorful percussion, calling for such exotica as tenor horn, mandolin, and guitar. Although Mahler always uses his enormous band as a pool from which to draw ever-new chamber combinations, No. 6 is the most tuttistic of all his symphonies. Mahler’s instructions to the conductor for the opening march music are bilingual: Allegro energico, ma non troppo, to which he adds Heftig, aber markig, which one can translate as “vehement but sturdy” (Markig, an adjective Bruckner liked, comes from Mark, meaning “marrow.”) This march is grim: here is a heightening of that pitiless, terrifying masterpiece of song, Revelge (“Reveille”), that he had written four years earlier. We feel the tramping before we rightly hear the band, but it takes only five measures of fierce crescendo before the music is hugely present. Bruno Walter drew attention to the breadth of Mahler’s first themes, and here is a striking example. This powerful paragraph ends in a decrescendo as abrupt as the crescendo that introduced it, one managed, however, by the withdrawal of instruments rather than by a reduction in dynamics. Though brusque, these are formal measures of preparation, and their very detachment sets off all the more effectively the cold horror of what they prepare for.

It is a simple gesture. Against a diminishing snare drumroll, two timpanists beat a left/left/left-right-left march cadence. Over that, three trumpeters sound a chord of A major. They too make a diminuendo, and halfway down the chord changes from major to minor (as the trumpets get softer, three oboes, playing the same notes, make a crescendo). That is all. “Fate” or “tragedy” or “Abandon all hope”

—no words say it as surely as the music itself. Chillingly, the symphony continues as though this had never happened, with a quiet, chorale-like passage for woodwinds.

Upon those few measures there follows a complete swing-about in mood as violins, seconded in patches by woodwinds, sing a fervent melody which Alma tells us is intended to represent her. (“He came ... to tell me that he had tried to express me in a theme. ‘I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded or not, but you’ll have to put up with it.’”) The Italian scholar Quirino Principe made an interesting discovery about this “Alma” theme. In 1883, Mahler was for a brief time the conductor at Olmutz (Olomouc) in Moravia. His predecessor was a certain Emil Kaiser, who while there wrote an opera called Der Trompeter von Sackingen. Principe found an uncanny similarity between the melodic line of an aria for the hero in Kaiser’s Trompeter and Mahler’s “Alma” theme of 1903. The words of the aria read: “God keep you, it would have been too lovely; God keep you, it was not meant to be.” Let who will interpret that!

Interrupted briefly by grotesquely staccato march music, ‘’Alma” in tender decrescendo brings the exposition to a close. This first movement is the only one after Symphony No. 1 in which Mahler, in another surprisingly “classical” move, asks for a repeat of the exposition. For a long time, the marchers dominate the development, and they are grimmer than ever. One of Mahler’s most beautiful songs is based on a text by Rickert, in which the poet describes himself as “der Welt abhanden gekommen”(“detached from the world with which I used to waste so much time”). Now Mahler puts that world in its place. He withdraws to mountain heights. Celesta and divided violins play mysterious chord sequences, beautifully blurred by the sound of distant cowbells. “The last greeting from earth to penetrate the remote solitude of the mountain peaks,” Mahler said. Some fragments of melody drift aloft, but the major-minor “fate” sequence, though strongly intoned by muted horns and trombones, scarcely penetrates our awareness. The awakening from this vision is sudden and cheerfully unkind; more march music, aggressively jolly and in major. Even the opening theme is recapitulated in major, but not for long: Mahler’s major-minor game is played in dead earnest. The recapitulation is regular, though powerfully and interestingly compressed; for example, the drummers’ left/left/left-right-left that precedes the major-minor “fate” chord is now telescoped with the formal bars of preparation. “Alma” reappears in due course; in fact the movement ends with “herself”  in a gesture of unbridled triumph.

Klaus Pringsheim, Thomas Mann’s brother-in-law who had just been appointed assistant conductor in Vienna, accompanied Mahler to Essen for the first performance of the Sixth Symphony and reported that even during the rehearsals Mahler had difficulty making up his mind about the order of the two middle movements. This was a major issue in the revisions that followed the first performance and the first printing by C.F. Kahnt of Leipzig that year. The matter is controversial, but Erwin Ratz, editor of the revised score published in 1963 in the Critical Complete Edition, decided in favor of placing the Scherzo second, and most conductors in the last twenty years have followed this order. I shall return to the question in a moment.  Mahler marks the Scherzo wuchtig, which means “weighty” or “ponderous.” It shares motivic material with the first movement: it too begins with stabbing detached low A’s, and it is in A minor. But where in the first movement those low A’s provided a grimly regular one--two-three-four framework, here rhythmic dissension reigns from the beginning. The basses (and the cellos with them for two measures) scan the repeated As quite regularly as ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, but at the same time the timpani insist on THREE-one-two, THREE--one-two: the resulting metrical tension becomes a permanent feature of this Scherzo.

What you notice first is the similarity to the first movement–the A’s and the forceful presence of a melodic shape that goes A-C-A. This, however, is a grotesque, horrible variant of that earlier music, sardonic commentary filled with mirthless laughter. Mahler may well have been thinking of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, where the “Mephistopheles” finale is a similar perversion of the “Gretchen” movement, just as Liszt was surely thinking of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, whose nose- tweaking Scherzo is a satirical and miniature variant of that sonata’s mighty first movement.

The trio, which comes around twice, first in F major, then in D, is of an extreme metrical irregularity, and in that sense one of Mahler’s most forward-looking pages; at the same time, because of its deliberate, eerily “cute” gestures, Mahler marks it altvaterisch (old-fashioned). Alma Mahler heard in it “[...]the arrhythmical play of little children.” Her reading of the coda, in which this altvaterisch music is reintroduced with a sinister cock-crow, is that “[...]the childish voices become more and more tragic, finally dying out in a whimper.”

After this music of disintegration and suppressed violence, the Andante is balm. The first sonorities–muted pianissimo strings in middle and low registers–are like a soothing hand after the insistent woodwinds and high strings of the Scherzo. Even the key itself, E-flat major, is warmly mellow after the sharper harmonic areas explored thus far. Like “Alma” in the first movement, here is a theme that would be dangerous if written by anyone else–“plain,” but as composed by Mahler, “cliche turned into event,” as Adorno says–this inspired melody, twenty measures long, is a marvel of subtle phrasing. Some time try listening to it and breathing when it breathes. It is magically scored, with dabs of wind color acutely setting this or that point on the melodic curve into higher relief. When it returns later in the movement, Mahler, as well as adding a softly soaring counter-melody for muted violins, has the line trace a path from oboe to bassoon to horn and so on, the changing colors delicately overlapped.

Here is music full of Mahlerian major-minor ambiguities (twenty bars of an E-flat major melody brings four G-flats, two C-flats, and two F-flats, all notes from the world of E-flat minor and beyond). The movement as a whole is of surprising harmonic sweep, its climax placed in faraway, luminous E major. For that arrival Mahler brings back the mysterious sound of the cowbells. Gentle echoes, drifting as though from great distances, can be heard of a phrase from the first of the Kindertotenlieder: Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt! (“Hail to the World’s Joyous Light”) and of the “Life in Heaven” finale of the Fourth Symphony. Mahler’s final intentions concerning the order of these two middle movements are not entirely clear. The autograph (in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York) puts the Scherzo before the Andante, as does the first printing, which preceded the first performance. During rehearsals for that event, Mahler changed his mind and placed the Andante ahead of the Scherzo, and he stayed with that ordering on the two subsequent occasions when he conducted the symphony again. The second edition, which he began to proofread almost immediately after the first performance, also puts the Andante second and the Scherzo third. One reads consistently that Mahler eventually wished the original order restored, and Erwim Ratz in his brief editorial report for the Critical Edition simply states this as a fact, but there is no hard and direct evidence for it.

Musically, the case for having the Scherzo precede the Andante is strong and threefold. One: the Scherzo’s impact as a kind of parody of the first movement is greater if it follows that movement immediately (cf., as suggested earlier, the Faust Symphony and the Hammerklavier Sonata). Two: the respite provided by the Andante is more telling when it is offered after the double impact of the first and second movements and just before the emotionally taxing finale. Three: the key relationships, whose effect we all feel even if we cannot put names to them, are more effective for reasons we shall see in a moment. And with this we come to the finale. With Beethoven, the center of gravity in symphonies began a decisive shift to the finale, and here we have an extreme case of a “finale symphony.” This last movement is not much longer than the first; it is, however, longer than the second and third movements together, and so it feels big, and is meant to feel big. Of course “big” and “long” are not synonymous, and in a good performance the finale is actually the least likely of the four movements to feel “long.” The feeling of “big” that this finale conveys, our sense of the location of the center of gravity, has much more to do with psychological rather than with clock time, and psychological time here is a matter of weight and density. The finale of the Sixth Symphony surpasses the earlier movements in richness of musical event and in the oppressiveness that its emotional burden lays upon the listener. This, remember, is the movement in which, to cite Mahler’s own mixed metaphor, three hammer-blows of fate fell the hero like a tree.

If, absurdly, I had to pick one passage of Mahler to show him at his uniquely greatest, I would probably go to the first two pages of the finale of the Sixth Symphony. From the thud of a low C (contrabassoon, eight horns, harps, cellos, and basses, reinforced by a soft blow on the bass drum) there arises an encompassing swirl of strangely luminous dust: harp glissandos, a woodwind chord, chains of trills on muted strings. It is alien and terrifying because, with one exception, everything in the symphony thus far has been lucidly and sharply defined, even in the most delicate pianissimo. The exception is the unearthly episode with the cowbells in the first movement. That was a beatific moment; this is its inverse, music of enveloping terror.

We have come to an accursed spot.

The first violins, unmuted, detach themselves from this nebula to declaim a wide-ranging phrase of impassioned recitative, which in its descent collides with a specter we have not met in a while the—major chord that turns to minor (trumpets and trombones together this time), and the drummers with their fierce marching cadence. And as this recedes, the low strings come slowly to rest on a low A.

If you thought that the blaze of triumph in which the first movement ended promised real victory, or that the grotesque apparitions of the Scherzo were Romantic fondness for the bizarre as spice, now is your moment to reconsider. These sixteen measures, not much more than half a minute of music, also define the finale’s harmonic task. The Andante closed in E-flat major. The finale begins in its nearest related key, that is, the one with which it shares the greatest number of notes, C minor; the arching phrase, however, is slewed about in mid-course to A minor, and that is where it makes its cadence. Here is the finale in microcosm. The music must now re-establish the primacy of A minor, the symphony’s central key.

Mahler’s finale is a design not only of great breadth but of astonishing boldness and originality. Its formal point of reference is the familiar sonata plan of introduction, the presentation of material, its development, its restatement or recapitulation, and coda. This is, however, realized in a totally original way, one hardly more surprising than what we might find in late Haydn, but of course on an enormously larger scale. Thus the introduction, itself a complex sequence of events of which the nebula-plus-”fate”-chord is but the first, reappears, always varied, its components redistributed, at each major juncture of the movement: before the development, before the recapitulation, and to introduce the coda. Part of the exposition is recapitulated before the development, and the main recapitulation itself is, so to speak, out of its proper order.

Let me describe the piece in another way. From the introduction, variegated but all slow, the music gradually breaks through once again to the world of marches. The hero goes forth to conquer, but in the full flood of confidence and exaltation, a hammer blow strikes him down. This is literally a hammer blow, for which Mahler wants the effect of a “[...] short powerful  ‘heavy-sounding blow of non-metallic quality, like the stroke’ of an ax[...]” or as the conductor Frederick Prausnitz has put it, like “[...] a blow to one’s own helmeted head.” The music gathers energy, the forward march becomes even more determined, even frenzied in its thrust, only to be halted again by a second hammer blow. 

In Mahler’s original conception, a third hammer blow coincided with the A major “fate” chord after the last appearance of the introductory duststorm. He eliminated it in his revision. Perhaps he felt that the irrepressibility of that monstrous introduction was enough. Perhaps, as Benjamin Zander suggests, he identified so keenly with his hero that, while he himself was on the podium, he could not face that third, final assault. He also lightened the orchestra at a tight spot by striking out the trombones and tuba, using one timpanist instead of two, and cutting back the dynamics of the horns, trumpets,  and percussion. It is possible that around 1910, Mahler considered restoring the third hammer-blow (and presumably the original, heavier orchestration of this passage), but since there was no further edition of the symphony in his lifetime and no performances after his own in Vienna in 1907, this never came about.

-Michael Steinberg, From The Symphony

Footnotes

1.  Alban Berg read and heard this page with eager excitement. In his opera Wozzeck, when Wozzeck has murdered his common-law wife Marie, the orchestra responds with two terrifying crescendos on B. The second of these is the “normal” kind, that is, a crescendo from ppp to fff for all instruments but the first. through most of its duration is “additive,” progressing from the sound of a single horn ppp to the full orchestra fff.

2. Rapid, nervous alterations of major and minor (Schubert raised to a higher power) are a constant feature of Mahler’s style: Adorno calls this the “dialect element” in his language. Here is that trait compressed to the ultimate degree, and for the most drastic purpose. Opera lovers will recall the Prelude to Act 5 of Don Carlos where Verdi, in a context of deep gloom, presents the progression in reverse, minor to major. I have no idea what, if anything, this means. Though he never conducted Don Carlos, Mahler certainly knew his Verdi and admired him.

3. Mahler wrote music for a series of tableaux vivants on the poem on which both Kaiser’s opera and a once popular one by Viktor Nessler were based, and it was from that score that he drew Blumine, the original second movement of his First Symphony.

4. The realization of this effect caused Mahler no end of difficulty and frustration; conductors since his day as well as recording producers have, on the whole, fared little better. The most effective realization I have heard is on Benjamin Zander’s recording with the Boston Philharmonic on the Pickwick label. It is accompanied there by bashing a wooden timpani crate with a length of plumber’s lead piping.

Photo: Moritz Näir