Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) was born to a Jewish family in Kaliště in Bohemia and became one of the great conductors of his age, running the Vienna Court Opera from 1897. To win that job he converted to Catholicism. As a student in Vienna he attended Anton Bruckner’s lectures, and Bruckner’s vast symphonies left their mark on him.
His nine completed symphonies are huge in length and orchestra, and mix folk songs, marches, dances and funeral music with questions about life and death. Here is a quick guide to all nine.
The short version
If you only hear three, start with Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 5 (for its Adagietto) and Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”.
1. Symphony No. 1 “Titan”
1888 · Four movements, orchestra
Start with: “Third movement (funeral march)”
Mahler wrote his First Symphony in 1887 and 1888 while he was a young opera conductor in Leipzig, and conducted the premiere in Budapest in 1889. It went down badly. For a while he called it “Titan”, after a novel by Jean Paul, but he dropped the name once the symphony reached its final four-movement form in 1896.
The first movement grows out of a tune from his song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer and opens with a hushed dawn full of cuckoo calls. The third movement is the one people talk about: a funeral march on a minor-key version of “Frère Jacques” (Mahler knew it as “Bruder Martin”), started by a solo double bass.
2. Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”
1888 to 1894 · Five movements, soprano, alto, choir
Start with: “Finale”
The Second Symphony asks the biggest questions: what is life for, and what comes after death? The first movement began as a separate funeral piece called Totenfeier (Funeral Rites) in 1888. Mahler even asked for a pause of five minutes after it, an instruction rarely followed today.
The third movement reworks his comic song about St. Anthony preaching to the fish, and the fourth, “Urlicht” (Primal Light), brings in an alto soloist. The finale, which lasts more than half an hour, builds to a choral setting of Klopstock’s poem “Die Auferstehung” (The Resurrection), with extra verses by Mahler himself. He conducted the complete premiere in Berlin in December 1895.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: What is sonata form in music?
3. Symphony No. 3
1893 to 1896 · Six movements, alto, women’s and children’s choirs
Start with: “Finale (Adagio)”
At around 95 to 110 minutes, the Third is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire. Its first movement alone can run past half an hour. Mahler originally gave the six movements titles that climb from nature to love, from “Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In” through what the flowers, the animals, mankind and the angels tell him, to “What Love Tells Me”.
The fourth movement sets Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra for alto, and the fifth brings in a women’s choir and a children’s choir singing a Wunderhorn song about three angels. It ends with a long, glowing Adagio. At the premiere in Krefeld in 1902, the ovation reportedly lasted about 15 minutes.
4. Symphony No. 4
1899 to 1900 · Four movements, soprano
Start with: “Finale (“Das himmlische Leben”)”
The Fourth is Mahler’s shortest and gentlest symphony, and a good place to start. It is built toward its finale, “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), a song he had written in 1892 on a Wunderhorn poem describing heaven through a child’s eyes. A soprano sings it. The symphony opens with the jingle of sleigh bells.
In the scherzo, a solo violin is tuned a whole tone higher than normal to give it a harsh, rustic sound, as Death plays the fiddle. The slow movement is a set of variations on two themes. The premiere in Munich in 1901 drew both applause and boos.
5. Symphony No. 5
1901 to 1902 · Five movements, orchestra
Start with: “Adagietto”
With the Fifth, Mahler turned away from voices and wrote three purely orchestral symphonies in a row. It was composed in the summers of 1901 and 1902 at his lakeside cottage at Maiernigg, and opens with a solo trumpet call, whose rhythm recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, leading into a funeral march.
Its fourth movement, the Adagietto for strings and harp, is Mahler’s most famous music. According to the conductor Willem Mengelberg, it was a love letter to Alma Schindler, whom Mahler married in 1902. It reached a huge audience in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice.
6. Symphony No. 6 “Tragic”
1903 to 1904 · Four movements, orchestra
Start with: “First movement”
The Sixth is Mahler’s darkest symphony, and the only one to end in total defeat. He wrote it in 1903 and 1904, when his life was going well: he was married, his second daughter was born in 1904 and he ran the Vienna Court Opera. The nickname “Tragic” was not on the published score, though Bruno Walter said Mahler used it.
The finale is famous for its hammer blows, a huge wooden hammer striking like fate. Mahler cut the number down until two remained in the published score, though some conductors put back a third. Mahler also swapped the order of the scherzo and slow movement before the premiere in Essen in 1906, and conductors still disagree about which way round they should go.
7. Symphony No. 7 “Song of the Night”
1904 to 1905 · Five movements, orchestra
Start with: “Second movement (Nachtmusik I)”
The Seventh is Mahler’s most mysterious symphony. It is sometimes called “Song of the Night”, though the title was not his. Three night-time movements sit at its center: two serenades called Nachtmusik (Night Music) and, between them, a scherzo marked “Schattenhaft” (shadowy).
Mahler added unusual colors to the orchestra, including a tenor horn, cowbells, a guitar and a mandolin. After the shadows, the finale bursts into a riotous C major daylight. He conducted the premiere in Prague in 1908, with the Czech Philharmonic.
8. Symphony No. 8 “Symphony of a Thousand”
1906 · Two parts, eight soloists, choirs
Start with: “Part I (“Veni creator spiritus”)”About 1,000 performers
Mahler wrote his Eighth Symphony in record time in the summer of 1906. Instead of movements it has two huge parts. Part I sets the Latin hymn “Veni creator spiritus”, and Part II sets the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust, ending with the redemption of Faust’s soul through love.
The premiere in Munich on September 12, 1910, used around 1,000 performers, including 850 singers and more than 150 players. The impresario Emil Gutmann promoted it as the “Symphony of a Thousand”, a name Mahler disliked. It was the greatest triumph of his life, with applause lasting about 20 minutes.
9. Symphony No. 9
1908 to 1909 · Four movements, orchestra
Start with: “Finale (Adagio)”
The Ninth was the last symphony Mahler completed. He wrote it in 1908 and 1909 at Toblach in the Dolomites, but he died in 1911 without hearing it. Bruno Walter conducted the premiere in Vienna in 1912. Unusually, both its first and last movements are slow.
Many listeners hear it as a farewell. The first movement, which Alban Berg described as “a vision of the hereafter”, is full of uneasy, stuttering rhythms. The finale is a long Adagio that thins out until the last bars are marked “ersterbend” (dying away).
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: A guide to Beethoven’s 9 symphonies
What about Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth?
Mahler was superstitious about the “curse of the ninth”, the idea that composers die after their ninth symphony, as Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner had. So he refused to number Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1908), a symphony in all but name for two solo singers and orchestra.
He died in 1911 with his Tenth Symphony unfinished. Performing versions have since been made from his sketches.
Which Mahler symphony is your favorite?
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Summing up
Mahler’s symphonies were often misunderstood in his lifetime, but his influence reached composers such as Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Britten. They ask a lot of performers and listeners, and they repay it with some of the most moving music ever written for orchestra.
Which Mahler symphony would you recommend to a first-time listener?
