Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor

By Gustav Mahler

BORN : July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia (now Kalištì in the Czech Republic)

DIED: May 18, 1911, in Vienna

Ω COMPOSED : 1901–02

Ω WORLD PREMIERE : October 18, 1904, in Cologne under Mahler’s direction

Ω CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PREMIERE : December 18, 1952, with guest conductor William Steinberg

Ω ORCHESTRATION : 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling english horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, slapstick, tam-tam, glockenspiel), harp, and strings.

Ω DURATION : about 70 minutes

GUSTAV MAHLER ARGUABLY did more to liberate symphonic form than any other composer in history. Before Mahler, the symphony was largely tied to the formal traditions of the dance suites that preceded it; voice was rarely used as an instrument, and few had dared push the length of a symphony past a standard 30 to 50 minutes. After Mahler, a symphony could be virtually anything the composer deemed it should be, at any length, using any resources at the composer’s disposal.

Mahler shifted the symphony’s focus away from motivic development and manipulation of key relationships and toward the juxtaposition of disparate elements for dramatic statement. Not that he didn’t develop his motifs and transform keys across the course of a symphony, but he had more ambitious aims for the form. “A symphony should be like the world,” Mahler once said. “It should embrace everything.”

The son of a distillery and tavern owner and his more cultured wife, Mahler found his childhood a wrenching combination of joviality and despair. Behind the bustling business, the family witnessed a procession of tragedy —  seven of Gustav’s 13 siblings died before they reached 3 years old. It’s little wonder that, throughout his life as a composer, Mahler eerily juxtaposed cheery folk tunes and funeral dirges. Young Gustav took piano lessons, showed promise, and entered the Vienna Conservatory at age 15. He received a diploma three years later.

Unable to win public recognition for his own music, Mahler turned to conducting. Over a remarkable career, he ascended the podium of all the great opera houses and concert halls of Europe and led two of New York’s premier musical organizations: the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. It was Mahler who restored Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, to prominence. And he gave Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana its first performances outside Italy.

But success with a baton meant Mahler did most of his composing in the offseason, alone in a summer cottage, intensely trying to distill his musical thoughts of an entire year on paper.

Mahler’s first four symphonies reflect the composer’s love of song and are shot through with references to his own settings of selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), a collection of German folk poetry. In the First Symphony, the references are merely orchestral, while the next three adapt the poetry into lyrics for soloists or chorus.

With the Fifth Symphony, Mahler entered a new period where structural instrumental considerations became paramount. Words were left behind for the tougher stuff of pure feeling. The human voice is not heard again in a Mahler symphony until his Eighth.

The genesis of Symphony No. 5 almost certainly can be dated to February 24, 1901, when the composer suffered an intestinal hemorrhage and nearly died. Mahler later wrote: “While I was hovering on the border between life and death, I wondered whether it would not be better to have done with it at once, since everyone must come to that in the end.”

Mahler started sketching the Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901. He had just turned 41. He was lucky to be alive, and he doubtless felt inclined to meditate on the meaning of a life that had nearly ended months before. The symphony opens with a Funeral March, then proceeds — in reverse chronology — to major episodes in the dead man’s life, ending in a triumphant Finale that represents the protagonist’s optimistic (perhaps falsely so) beginning. Or, perhaps, it finds him realizing, after looking back across his time on earth, that the good things can outweigh the bad, and that joy is a part of even a life cut short and should be cherished.

The symphony is in five movements, though the composer indicated three separate sections. Part I contains the first two movements, the lengthy Scherzo stands alone as Part II, while Part III comprises the Adagietto and concluding Rondo. Mahler’s Fifth is sometimes listed as being in C-sharp minor, but the composer himself observed that the work does not dwell in a single key, and the signatures for each movement support this, modulating from C-sharp minor to A minor to D major to F major and back to D major.

While working on this score, Mahler also composed his first songs based on the texts of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), and some of those songs find echoes in the symphony. During the writing and scoring of the Fifth, Mahler also met, wooed, and wed Alma Schindler.

Various critics have pondered the meaning of this symphony’s opening Funeral March and the propriety of its concluding Rondo, the most buoyant and unclouded of all Mahler finales. Once the idea of a man’s story told backward is in place, however, the outline of the symphony — including its jubilant close —makes great sense.

Part I

In the opening Trauermarsch (Funeral March), a solo trumpet announces death on a C-sharp-minor arpeggio. The orchestra takes up the funereal cry, which leads to a lament intoned by the strings. At length, the trumpet, with its distinctive triplet figure, reasserts itself, and again the song of lamentation ensues, varied this time and lengthened into something more personal than merely ritual. A third time the trumpet sounds the funeral call, but this time the orchestra takes off in an anguished cry of despair and outrage. Throughout the rest of the movement, the trumpet fanfare alternates with variations on the lament, with the variations displaying facets of mourning a life, from shock and anger to fond memories and resignation.

Looking back on the protagonist’s life, we hear in the opening bars of the second movement, marked “Stormily, with greatest vehemence,” the tortuous defeat and stormy rage that dominated the last years of his life. And then, a surprise: the strings intone a variant of the lament from the first movement. As the funeral fanfare in the first movement was repeatedly interrupted by the lament, so will the violent outbursts of this movement alternate with slower meditations, until, about halfway through, the woodwinds turn the theme into a bright march. Near the end, the brass latch onto a subject that becomes a triumphant chorale in pure, clear D major. That key becomes the new “home key” as the symphony wends its way back to a happy origin.

Part Ii

The Scherzo, in bright and confident D major, is a folkish Ländler or country dance, dominated by a solo obbligato horn in F that is one of the great bravura parts for that instrument. Mahler tosses around many related themes in masterful counterpoint. While there are quiet, even reflective, passages in the Scherzo, the overall mood is of vitality and adventure. The protagonist is at the peak of his life, and even the thought of death is distant.

Part Iii

A relatively brief intermezzo, the famous Adagietto for strings and harp is a tenderly romantic moment in the protagonist’s life. Mahler may have intended it as a musical love letter to Alma. Its proper tempo is a matter of great controversy. Mahler indicated “very slow” in both German and Italian, yet recordings of it by his contemporaries clock in at under 8 minutes, far less than the 10-to-12-minute Adagiettos presented over the past 50 years.

The horn, which heralds death in the opening movement then joy in the scherzo, announces the blossoming of the protagonist’s youth. Mahler displays the polyphonic knowledge he had recently acquired in his study of J. S. Bach, and as the melodies pick up increasing energy and pile one on top of the other, the picture irresistibly emerges of a new life progressing from birth to childhood to young manhood. The Adagietto theme is recalled, a portent of the protagonist’s love life. Amazingly, we hear at the very end the great D-major chorale from the second movement, the logic of its earlier appearance now made clear. Here in the Finale, it is the young protagonist’s assertion of newfound power in the world; in the second movement, it was (or will be, if viewed in normal chronology) a last grasp at the past, a farewell to the life force that had once been his. The symphony ends with the protagonist on the cusp of his maturity, unaware of the tragedy that will befall him —  optimistic, looking forward.

— Kenneth LaFave

Klaus Mäkelä

KLAUS MÄKELÄ IS CHIEF CONDUCTOR of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, music director of Orchestre de Paris, and, since autumn 2022, artistic partner of the Concertgebouworkest. An exclusive Decca Classics artist, he has recorded the complete Sibelius Symphony cycle with the Oslo Philharmonic as his first project for the label.

Mr. Mäkelä’s third season with the Oslo Philharmonic features 11 contrasting programs, with repertoire ranging from Jean-Baptiste Lully and Pietro

Locatelli to Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler to Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Julia Perry. In fall 2022, Mr. Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic embarked on their second European tour with performances in Germany, Belgium, and Austria with soloist Sol Gabetta.

For his second season with the Orchestre de Paris, Mr. Mäkelä has chosen to spotlight living composers

Pascal Dusapin, Betsy Jolas, Jimmy

López Bellido, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho, the latter featured with three different works. There is also a focus on the Ballets Russes with two key Diaghilev scores by Stravinsky: The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. In spring 2023, Mr. Mäkelä and Orchestre de Paris tour throughout Europe with Janine Jansen as soloist.

With the Concertgebouworkest Klaus Mäkelä embarks on a long-term collaboration this season, joining the orchestra as its artistic partner with his eventual appointment to chief conductor in 2027. For their first season together, they perform six programs including Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, the Mozart Requiem, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, as well as premieres by López Bellido, Sauli Zinovjev, Alexander Raskatov, and Sally Beamish. On tour, they performed the opening concert of Musikfest Berlin and at the Cologne Philharmonie.

As a guest conductor in the 2022–23 season, Mr. Mäkelä makes his first appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester, and Wiener Symphoniker; and returns to The Cleveland Orchestra, where he’ll lead two consecutive programs, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Klaus Mäkelä studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy with Jorma Panula and cello with Marko Ylönen, Timo

Hanhinen, and Hannu Kiiski. As a soloist, he has performed with several Finnish orchestras and as a chamber musician at the Verbier Festival, among others.

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NOW IN ITS SECOND CENTURY , The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of music director Franz WelserMöst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamberlike musical cohesion.

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