The All-Embracing World of Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies

By Christopher H. Gibbs

“The symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.” Whether or not Gustav Mahler actually said this in 1907 to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, the sentiment resonates with other statements he made over the years. Expanding the idea further, some musicians have argued that, taken together, all of Mahler’s symphonies form a single gigantic work, fascinatingly interconnected and indeed all-embracing. 

Mahler’s symphonies are usefully divided into three groups. The first four are known as the “Wunderhorn” symphonies because in them he used songs composed to poems from the folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (From the Youth’s Magic Horn). He next wrote three purely instrumental symphonies (Nos. 5, 6, and 7) and then, after the somewhat anomalous Eighth (the “Symphony of a Thousand”), he concluded his career with the trilogy of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), the Ninth Symphony, and the unfinished Tenth. 

Over the course of this season Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra present one symphony from each of Mahler’s periods, beginning in October with the monumental Third. In April they perform the Sixth Symphony and in January the Ninth, his last completed work.

Mahler composed his symphonies over the course of a quarter century, generally during the summer months because he was otherwise preoccupied as one of the great conductors of the day. He was born in 1860 in a small Bohemian town into the family of a Jewish distiller and moved to Vienna at age 15 to begin studies at the Conservatory. He started his career with conducting jobs at provincial opera houses before assuming posts in Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg. In 1897 he was offered the greatest plum: the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, the most powerful musical position in Europe. To get the job, he had accepted baptism in the Catholic faith. Mahler held the Vienna post for a decade but left when the situation became untenable due to vicious anti-Semitic attacks in the press. He accepted prestigious appointments in New York, first with the Metropolitan Opera and then with the New York Philharmonic; he returned to Europe each summer to compose.

Although some aspects of Mahler’s musical style and aesthetic commitments changed over the years, there are throughlines that help to create the sense of a gigantic whole. His symphonies tackle eternal questions of life and death (funeral marches appear in many of them), of nature and the universe. The symphonies are deeply personal, the qualities of which Mahler in some instances candidly divulged and at other times attempted to hide. He often invites us to make connections between his life and music by giving titles and by making comments in letters, sketches, and manuscript scores, an intense subjectivity that was a legacy of Beethoven and later Romantic composers.

Some autobiographical moments in Mahler relate to one of the great debates of Romanticism: program music, about which he was deeply ambivalent. Symphonies during the earlier Classical era were usually “absolute,” not explicitly connected to literature, history, or other extra-musical elements. While Beethoven initially continued this approach, he also helped to forge a new path with his “Eroica” and “Pastoral” symphonies through titles and other programmatic clues. He opened further vistas in his Ninth Symphony by bringing in poetry and the human voice, a strategy Mahler emulated in his Second, Third, Fourth, and Eighth Symphonies. 

Mahler composed almost exclusively in just two genres: songs and symphonies, which he interrelated in masterful ways. For his songs he initially used Wunderhorn poems drawn from an early-19th-century anthology. While these folk poems had attracted earlier composers, they proved especially inspiring for the young Mahler and formed the basis of his first four symphonies.

After writing three symphonies, each progressively longer and more complex, Mahler reached something of a limit. They all had programs of some sort—titles, stories, or poems—the compositional approach so successfully pursued by his friend and rival Richard Strauss. But Mahler increasingly sought to suppress such extra-musical baggage: “Death to programs,” he proclaimed around the time of the Fourth Symphony, which was shorter, more modest in its orchestration, and, although it concludes with a Wunderhorn song, less programmatic.

Symphonies Five, Six, and Seven are a trilogy that mark Mahler’s ostensible retreat from programs and vocal movements. During this time, he stopped using the Wunderhorn anthology and began to write songs based on the more elevated poetry of Friedrich Rückert. Even though songs are no longer boldly sung or overtly quoted in the middle symphonies, they go “underground,” as Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell has put it, and nonetheless leave traces through affinities of mood or brief allusions.

These changes in Mahler’s compositional strategies coincided with crucial developments in his personal life. A medical crisis in early 1901 (internal hemorrhaging) brought the 40-year-old composer close to death. Soon thereafter he resigned his position as head of the Vienna Philharmonic’s subscription concerts, which he had taken up in 1898, and by the end of the year was engaged to Alma Schindler, who was 19 years his junior, and was starting his own family. 

The range of emotions explored in the Fifth Symphony, beginning with the solemn funeral march, including the magnificent “love song” of the famous Adagietto, and concluding with the blazing triumph of the finale, may give some indication of Mahler’s hopes. The Sixth Symphony, which briefly carried the title “Tragic,” charts a very different and more somber course. The Seventh again seems a journey from darkness to light in a poetic work featuring two evocative “night music” movements. 

Mahler wrote the monumental Eighth Symphony in a white heat of inspiration during the summer of 1906. It is popularly known as the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the enormous forces involved: an immense orchestra, mixed choirs and separate children’s chorus, organ, off-stage brass, and eight vocal soloists. The two-part work unfolds using a Latin Pentecost hymn and then the conclusion of Goethe’s Faust, Part II. Mahler’s astonishing feat of combining different languages, genres of music, and sacred and secular themes led to the greatest success of his career at its premiere in Munich. Leopold Stokowski and The Philadelphia Orchestra gave its American premiere in 1916.

A series of devastating personal blows in 1907 led to another turning point in Mahler’s life: His beloved elder daughter died at the age of four, he resigned from the Vienna Court Opera, and he was diagnosed with a heart condition. The final three works followed: Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1908, the Ninth Symphony the next summer, and parts of the Tenth in the summer of 1910, but Mahler died in May 1911 before finishing it. Given their ultimate place in the composer’s output, it has proven all too tempting to view these pieces as pointing toward death, a “farewell” trilogy, the artistic testament of a dying man. 

Another famous soundbite from Mahler in conclusion—this one from a letter he wrote to his wife in which he said, “My time will come.” The context was in relation to Strauss as the sentence continues “when his has passed.” At the time of his death, age 50, Mahler was hailed as a great conductor but was seriously underrated, and often dismissed, as a composer. Strauss was more esteemed and far more often performed. Of the three symphonies the Philadelphians present this season, Mahler conducted his Third a total of 15 times, the Sixth just three times, and he never performed the Ninth. 

It took decades for most of his pieces to enter the international repertoire, but in the wake of the 1960 centennial of his birth, Mahler was ascendent. By the end of the century, one might even say he had become the new Beethoven in popularity and with his music frequently being performed at festival occasions. For more than a century, symphonies by Beethoven (usually the Fifth or Ninth) were used at celebratory events. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s inaugural concert in 1900 featured the Fifth. Now, when a music director begins or ends their tenure, or when a new concert hall is dedicated, it is often marked with a Mahler symphony. His time, the vast all-embracing vision of his music, has arrived.

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and has been the program annotator for The Philadelphia Orchestra since 2000. He is the author of several books on Schubert and Liszt, and the co-author, with Richard Taruskin, of “The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition.”