Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies

By David Vernon

'A beautiful and important book' - Marina Mahler

Gustav Mahler wrote some of the most challenging and cherished music of all time: eleven extraordinary symphonies that continue to fascinate, intrigue and infuriate music lovers around the world.

In his dazzling new book, David Vernon celebrates

• Language: English
• Publisher: Candle Row Press
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781739659912

David Vernon

I am a freelance writer and editor. I am father of two boys. For the last few years I have focussed my writing interest on chronicling women and men’s experience of childbirth and promoting better support for pregnant women and their partners. Recently, for a change of pace, I am writing two Australian history books. In 2014 I was elected Chair of the ACT Writers Centre.In 2010 I established the Stringybark Short Story Awards to promote the short story as a literary form.

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Praise for

Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama

‘David Vernon’s new book is a rattling good read … vivid, colourful … and knowledgeably argued. … This is a valuable addition to any Wagnerian’s library. Highly recommended.’

– Paul Carey Jones

‘A great and necessary addition to the Wagner literature. Clever and clear without being intellectually boring.’

– Matthew Rose

‘Engaging … wry and topical … much to ponder. Vernon’s enthusiasm is … relentless.’

– The Wagner Journal

Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies copyright © 2022 David Vernon

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

First edition May 2022

Interior layout: miblart.com

Cover photo: Portrait of a Woman, 1910, Egon Schiele

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Author photo © 2021

Marina Mahler photo © 2018 Yannis Katsaris

ISBN:

978-1-7396599-0-5 (paperback)

978-1-7396599-1-2 (ebook)

Published by Candle Row Press

Edinburgh, Scotland

To

Tim Ashley

‘L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps

rendus sensibles au cœur.’

Proust, La Prisonnière

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Marina Mahler

Introduction: Cliché, Riddle, Myth

PART ONE: THE WUNDERHORN YEARS

1. Dawn and Identity: The First Symphony

2. The Death Shriek: The Second Symphony

3. Energy into Matter: The Third Symphony

4. Eden and the Abyss: The Fourth Symphony

PART TWO: THE MIDDLE PERIOD

5. Cosmic Expansion: The Fifth Symphony

6. A Domesday Book: The Sixth Symphony

7. Enigma and Twilight: The Seventh Symphony

8. The Universe in Sound: The Eighth Symphony

PART THREE: THE FINAL TRILOGY

9. A Ninth Symphony: Das Lied von der Erde

10. Memory and Infinity: The Ninth Symphony

11. The World Without Us: The Tenth Symphony

APPENDIXES

Further Reading

About the Author

About Marina Mahler

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Marina Mahler for her marvellous foreword to this book, for taking the time to read an early draft, and for the joy of our new-found friendship. Your insights and passion for your grandfather’s music are wonderful to behold, as is your tireless, selfless work to promote the legacy of his extraordinary creations, especially via the Mahler Foundation and the Mahler Conducting Competition.

Matthew Rose, when not overwhelming the best opera houses our planet has to offer with his astounding voice, has been an unflagging supporter and promoter of my work, full of both acumen and enthusiasm. I owe you more than I can calculate, Matthew. Looking forward to our time on the links!

Steven Lally: thank you for the kindness, encouragement, hope and endless hours of insight, amusement and putting this silly but wonderful world to rights. Sorry, Zoe, for stealing your husband so often.

My editor, Elyse Lyon, has applied her usual mixture of diligence and brilliance, seeing what I cannot and always knowing what I am trying to say. Any errors are, of course, my own.

My wife’s perspicacity and patience have been — as ever — invaluable to my writing process. Thank you, darling, for all your love and support: my life and my work would be impossible without you.

Finally, I would like to thank Tim Ashley, not only one of the finest music critics ever to pick up a pen or tap a keyboard but a dear friend. This book is dedicated to you, Tim – in admiration, with much love, and in gratitude for everything you’ve taught me over the years.

Foreword

What does Mahler mean for me, his granddaughter?

When I took a Tibetan meditation course and was asked to choose a figure, an elder, to look up to, to reach out to and visualize in my meditations, it was Mahler’s face — the photo which always makes me want to weep each time I look at it, as it delves into his sorrows and inner trials — that instantly flashed into my mind. And it is his face and being as spiritual guide which became a part of my daily voyages in meditation.

Of anyone in the past — an artist, philosopher, musician, human being — who I know of, if I could speak with someone, have a face-to-face dialogue with anyone in the abstract never-never land of the imagination become reality, it would be my grandfather.

To sit next to him. To hold his hand; to have his eyes look into mine, and mine into his own memory and mind. To speak of Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, of Alyosha, of The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin, of history done and ongoing, of man’s treatment of man. The future life. The future death. Everything…

It would last forever, and I would forget nothing, not a phrase or a look.

That would be my request, my dream, my happiness.

In the meantime, I search in all ways to reach him. I can listen, and it is a kind of life quest.

One of these paths came out of the blue recently and has brought great fruit: Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, by David Vernon, a new friend made in reading this passionate, involved and understanding research into the reaches of Mahler’s music, heart, and mind. The book is a deeply descriptive realization and attempt to understand the unsoundable depths of where this heavenly, revelatory music came from.

Every sentence keeps my interest and attention and gives me such pleasure, as it is not merely knowledge but is alive. It takes one beyond the notes, through the notes.

I am moved, therefore, to have been asked to write a foreword and to say why I think this book significant.

In my view, it relates to the future every bit as much as to the past. It looks forward to what Mahler will mean in future times, and it speaks deeply to why his work will be always meaningful — what his music, which extends far beyond cultural and national boundaries, could mean to all. How it could be life-saving, restorative, hope-fulfilling and transformational.

I would like to quote from two passages to express what I think has been captured as important in Mahler’s music as we go further into this new aeon, this bridge into the twenty-first century, so disruptive and violent and unsettling, which seems a throwback to warring times:

In our current age, Das Lied von der Erde may serve as a potent reminder of everything we stand to lose through complacency and inaction. Most of the scenes depicted in the work could not exist if current environmental trends continue, and it would be a disgrace if future generations of listeners could hear Mahler’s extraordinary symphony only as a reflection on a world which once was — and not one which continued in perpetuity. … With this in mind, the beauty and sadness of Das Lied should compel us all to fight for the glories of the natural world that is both our inheritance and our bequest, even as we accept the inevitable passing of our own beings into eternity.

For all the doom and gloom in ‘late Mahler’ — something hardly absent from his earlier works — we also need to see the vigour of living and being contained within. The rising sense of hope and transfiguration which crowns the last movement of the Tenth, Mahler’s final musical utterance, denies despair the last word.

We need understanding and sustenance to anticipate and have the strength to reach positively forward into what is to come.

I thank David for his beautiful and important book. It seems to partake of Mahler as I think of him: Beyond. Beyond the concert hall and his own musical path — and far into the future.

Marina Mahler

Monte Carlo, May 2022

Introduction

Cliché, Riddle, Myth

‘Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?!’ sighs wannabe bohemian Trish as she answers the door to potential flatmate Rita, the finale to Mahler’s Sixth blaring away in the background in one of the symphony’s not infrequent passages of cacophonous woe. It is a deservedly famous — and now infamous — scene, the ‘Mahler’ line endlessly repeated the world over with a mixture of mock affectation, knowing irony and beaming pleasure which is itself entirely Mahlerian.

Filmmakers don’t make this kind of cultural reference, especially in popular comedies, unless they can be guaranteed to strike a chord with their audiences. The movie itself, Educating Rita (1983), directed by Lewis Gilbert from Willy Russell’s screenplay and with Maureen Lipman as Trish and Julie Walters as Rita, came at the peak of the ’80s Mahler boom, when the composer could be very effectively cited to denote student pretension, posturing, hysteria and faux intellectualism, as well as adolescent angst and instability (the character who utters the celebrated words will, in the film, go on to barely survive a suicide attempt).

Yet while the line was used as an ingenious comic shorthand to signify youthful narcissism and enthusiasm, relying on a perceived cliché of the typical Mahler listener, it also confirmed and proliferated such attitudes to Mahler’s art. To enjoy Mahler was, like his music, ostentatious, attention-seeking, self-indulgent, shallow, immature. Serious-minded music lovers liked Bach or Brahms, Webern or Schoenberg, not this juvenile self-pitying noise. Mahler’s music was, and often still is, regarded as merely melodramatic rubbish for aspirant sophisticates: a doleful, daydreaming period we can hopefully grow out of before graduating to the more disciplined and distinguished musico-cultural exemplars.

This is, of course, nonsense. For a start, it relies on equally false and correspondingly lazy clichés about Bach or Schoenberg. Few things can generate prejudice and platitudes born of ignorance quite like music. In his own case, Mahler knew and anticipated much of the narrow-mindedness himself. His music is preprogrammed not only with a caustic self-awareness but a parodic critique of the mindsets that could not envisage new ways to conceive of music or fresh approaches through which to expand and enrich the symphony.

On the other hand, one of many routinely regurgitated clichés about Mahler is that his time has finally come after the initial decades of misunderstanding, bigotry and incomprehension (as Mahler himself had predicted). It has certainly both arrived and refused to go away, so that while a determined belittling of his music has persisted, he has never been more popular, all over the world and among both general audiences as well as more professional musicians and musical scholarship. And yet, despite this enduring popularity, every successive generation seems to want to claim him as their own discovery.

When the coronavirus pandemic first struck, in the winter of 2019–20, many feared how long it would be before sizeable Mahlerian orchestras would be able to play live again. Fans and musicians were resigned for a time to either their record collections or live-streamed, scaled-down chamber versions of the symphonies (which did, it should be said, showcase some fascinating and brilliant new approaches to Mahler’s music). When concerts did eventually return, it was often Mahler performances that generated the most relief and joy that things were beginning to return to some kind of normality, like a celebratory Mass following the plagues of earlier centuries.

Mahler’s ability to communicate with a diverse and global audience has endured beyond the booms of the twentieth century, as well as through the shifting predilections of classical music audiences and arbiters. Still, for many listeners, Mahler is simply too emotional, too raw, to bear unless in a state of relative calm, while for others he is always intolerable. Tastes differ, of course, and there are many and honest reasons for disliking Mahler, but frequently it seems that he is too demonstrative, too direct, too apparently hysterical for some people to abide. They perhaps shy away, consciously or unconsciously, from the dark truths he reveals about ourselves — truths which it is easy to simply reject with the one-word dismissal ‘Mahlerian’, just as the throwaway epithet ‘Wagnerian’ is similarly engaged for the ostensibly grandiose or large scale. Both terms tend to reveal, whatever their speaker’s personal preferences, a lack of understanding about the composers’ methods and objectives, not least because not only can both Mahler and Wagner be extraordinarily intimate but their emotional candour or grandeur are usually included for specific dramatic or symphonic reasons. You cannot, after all, depict an angry god or furious grief with muted noises.

Yet, for all the fear and loathing, there is also adoration and idolization. It is clear that the passion and struggle of Mahler’s music is something many people need in their lives, perhaps especially during times of crisis or catastrophe, to offer solace and confirmation. Mahler seems for many to stand and survive as an intensely personal composer, who they revere with a possessive quality rarely given to others. They feel that Mahler speaks to them directly, individually, and to them alone, literally orchestrating their innermost thoughts and feelings — about life, love and death. Mahler can be a black hole into which people dump their feelings, as well as a reflective mirror, or a lightning rod by which they taste the electricity of existence. But there is danger — and diminishment — in overidentification.

This possessiveness occasionally generates an almost cult-like worship — and division — so that suspicion, insecurity and jealousy over Mahler exist in quite alarming ways, even and especially among his greatest fans, whether online, in print or in person. And as with sport or politics, internal quarrels between rival factions are often harrowing to behold. Arguments over the ordering of movements in the Sixth Symphony, or its finale’s hammer blows, or the status of the unfinished Tenth, or whether Das Lied von der Erde is or is not a symphony produce some frankly comical disputes, certain fastidious Mahlerians afraid that ‘their’ Mahler is being tarnished or undermined.

A further truism of Mahler and his music is that both he and it are divided as well as divisive, that both have a bipolarity or even a schizoid character. We need to be cautious with latter-day medical diagnoses of convenience and still more vigilant at employing analogies or characteristics that downplay actual and often very traumatic illnesses. But there is something complex and divided about Mahler as well as his music, and this is arguably a not inconsiderable aspect of his continuing appeal, especially to modern audiences, with their own particular brand of torment, isolation and alienation.

Of course, all ages have their sense of anguish and estrangement — it is the human condition remarked upon from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, or the Buddha to Beyoncé (who is, while we’re on the subject, Mahler’s eighth cousin four times removed). But Mahler tapped into and communicated something quite specific about modernity’s collective sense of anxiety, its self-awareness and wry humour, its often hotchpotch variety, and its ceaseless, restless nature.

Like Mahler, literary modernism would feast and feed on pastiche and parody, reference and allusion, while also articulating its own sense of beauty, hostility, elation and despair. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (both 1922) share Mahler’s feeling for comedy and caricature, perversion and pain, as well as a complex combination of both respect and irreverence for the traditions they were simultaneously extending and exterminating. Just as Ulysses is a novel of voices and The Waste Land a ‘heap of broken images’, throughout his symphonies Mahler connects and disconnects pictures, perspectives, fragments. And in the visual arts through the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí would — like Mahler — distort and hallucinate, mutually fashioning and exposing the strange new world which had disrupted, dismantled and often blown to bits the old by means of its scientific, cultural and political developments. It would be disturbing but exhilarating — a time of expansion and confusion, innovation and deterioration.

It is Mahler’s absolute identity with, and awareness of, the particulars of modernity that, in part, explains his endurance. Mahler lived in a time of rapid technological, industrial and social change, upheavals which have persisted into our own time. Modernism and modernity — along with their bastard cheeky love child, postmodernism — are not going away. New technologies and social changes confirm the problems and anxieties of modernity without offering any escape or channel away from them. So Mahler is still required, as a voice of, and looking glass to, that chaotic beauty and anxious sadness.

Who, then, was this man who created eleven symphonies which seem to speak to and for so many people? Although this book is primarily focused on Mahler’s music, and Mahler’s symphonies at that, it is not possible to write about either without some awareness of the conditions of his life. Mahler was clear, especially in his early works but throughout his career as well, that his music was profoundly autobiographical, a first person musical manifestation of his life and emotions. This is something which has almost certainly contributed to the cultural cliché of Mahler the egotistical narcissist — as well as Mahler the cherished confidant.

Many have claimed that this personal and/or documentary element restricts his symphonies. Quite the opposite. It releases even more of their potential, multiplying the number of lenses through which we can perceive and appreciate his sound worlds, though we must duly acknowledge that the works stand independent of their creator’s life and times as well. Although the relevant periods of Mahler’s life will be discussed in more detail in relation to each individual symphony under consideration, a brief overview of the main events, particularly those of his earlier years, will be instructive, setting the temper and tone of what is to come. (The reader should also note that, although each chapter stands relatively independent, they also build upon one another.)

Gustav Mahler was born on 7 July 1860, in Iglau, now Jihlava, a thriving commercial town of German-speaking Jews on the Moravian-Bohemian border. Already we can begin to see some of the tensions and influences which would inform his life and music. He would be a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German his native tongue, but he was isolated by his ethnicity, born in one of the scattered districts into which Jews had been coerced by various and repeated acts of imperial bigotry and bias. Mahler would famously, and with some justification, claim to be thrice homeless: as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. He was, he said, always an intruder, an outsider, never welcomed or greeted warmly, facing lifelong suspicion and resentment from the powerful, the insecure and the unimaginative. His music, too, would intrude upon the sensibilities and consciences of the world, infringing on proprieties of style and scale, content and clarity.

His father was an innkeeper and a brute, his mother a gentle, slightly elusive personality who bore fourteen children. Home life was consequently tense, full of poverty, parental quarrels and the screams of anxious or exasperated siblings. Half the children died in infancy. Gustav, as the second born, witnessed most of these deaths as a young boy. When he was fourteen, his favourite brother, Ernst, a year younger, died after a long illness during which Gustav sat reading him stories until the very end. The bourgeoning teenage composer set to work with a friend on a memorial opera, Duke Ernst of Swabia, but it has unfortunately not survived. (Such family tragedy continued long into Gustav’s adult life: his brother Otto would commit suicide at twenty-one, when Mahler was thirty-four.)

His parents would frequently bicker (and worse) but, as with his brother Ernst’s death, discord provided Mahler opportunities for creativity as well as sadness. Just a few months before his own death, undertaking a sort of afternoon walking therapy session with no less than Sigmund Freud, Mahler recalled how, following a dreadful fight between his parents, he had run from the house into the street in floods of angry, confused tears. There, a barrel organ was playing a familiar old tune. Catastrophe, heartbreak, rustic or slightly shabby music — these became intricately linked in his mind, personal experience and musical forms attaching in ways his symphonies would explore on a scale both intimate and immense.

As a youth, Mahler was fascinated by the world around him: both the human and natural spheres, as well as the engagement and interaction between the two. He was sullen, introspective, but given to flashes of humour and happiness. He would rove and wander the local countryside, delighting in the flora and fauna, but questioning, too, the darker side of things: the death, the disease, the essential transience of it all. Along with the musical noises of nature echoing in the landscape he traversed (bird calls, cattle cries, water in a stream or the breeze in the trees) came the sounds of human activity, mixed into the ambient background of the environment. Country song and dance, itinerant singers and bands, cowbells, the bugle calls and military tattoos from neighbouring army barracks — all would be interwoven into his songs and symphonies, alongside and communicating with the parallel resonances of nature.

Even his childhood musical compositions, which have survived only through word of mouth (usually Mahler’s own), show an apparent aptitude for assimilation and amalgamation, breaking down essentially false (or misleading) boundaries in the way which would be so instrumental to his later successes. To a youthful polka he affixed a funeral march as a prologue — a juxtaposition and model so familiar to Mahlerians as to be both eerie and prophetic.

This, a dance piece fused with a solemn processional, is pure Mahler, clearly something he was interested in from a very young age and which his broader cultural background would already have attuned him to. Jewish culture, and especially music, reverberates magnificently with irony, parody, contrast and combination. Other societies and traditions often separate emotions where Jewish culture sees no need. In truth, to forget to smile during a funeral, or when one is simply sad, is mistaken, unhealthy, dangerous. Life and death, comedy and tragedy, laughter and tears are not only part of the rich fabric of life but more closely entwined than we often think.

Variation, connection, contradiction: these are the particular fundamentals which Mahler would coalesce in his symphonic statements, his vast orchestral (and vocal) autobiographies. He did not feel the need to remove the enigmas, paradoxes or conflicts which both augment and destabilize our lives. Life is full of the illogical, the incongruous, awash with extremes of event and emotion. To remove these elements from his music would be to make his symphonies, in Mahler’s terms, insincere, hypocritical and fundamentally dishonest.

Yet Mahler’s work is not mere musical diary or symphonic sentiment. His structures are marvellously organized, designed by an architect who would come to know the music of his age, his region, his continent as well as anyone else. Though he was no particular prodigy, he was giving piano recitals in Iglau by the time he was ten and entered the Vienna Conservatory at fifteen. He did well, winning piano and composition prizes. But for him there was also a world beyond the music room. He was obsessed with the moral and metaphysical problems of existence, preoccupying himself with a vast library of literature and philosophy.

Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the idols he worshipped, consuming them as others feast on food, sharing his discoveries (and new-found anxieties) with fellow student friends like the composer Hugo Wolf. Tellingly, he would also develop a heartfelt and lifelong fondness for the serious-minded humourists of European fiction — Cervantes, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Laurence Sterne — though his principal literary diet at this time consisted of the great German Romantics: Goethe, Hölderlin and E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Mahler often felt suicidal, like Goethe’s Werther or Faust, but this seemingly reflected only an aspect of his moody, brooding and highly imaginative personality rather than any real desire for self-oblivion. It was not attention-seeking but part of the depth of his feelings and temperament — which were as shifting, restless and extreme as his symphonic art would become. Music, especially the music of Beethoven and Wagner, as well as his own emerging compositions, offered an outlet to complement — if not entirely escape from — the pain and cruelty he saw in the world. Music could not resolve the frictions of reality, but it could form an opening, a pressure valve to resolve some of the problems existence presented to humanity.

It was during his student days that Mahler forged the double career which would serve his life and amplify his talents and personality. His brooding self-examination and introspection would become fused with his unbending self-determination and affirmation. Creation and re-creation were the twin poles of his musical life: he would be both a composer and a conductor, innovating musical form and musical expression from behind and within scores. Musical practice would be revolutionized under his command, made into a true profession. Likewise, opera production, under his rule, would be transformed into a dynamic and sophisticated art form, painters and designers helping forge the new role of opera director. So, while the modern symphony owed much to Mahler’s masterpieces, the modern orchestra and opera house can trace their origins back to Mahler’s early labours in central Europe, then his prime in Vienna, and finally across the Atlantic in America towards the end of his life.

His career began like most others, conducting in provincial opera houses, among them Ljubljana, Olomouc, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig. He was desperate to earn money to help provide for his siblings, but Mahler also needed to conduct; it fulfilled a vital part of his being that was not satisfied through composition alone. He obtained significant posts in Hamburg and Budapest before, at thirty-seven, he was confirmed as music director of the Vienna Court Opera, as well as, shortly after, the Vienna Philharmonic — Europe’s highest musical positions and the true summits of any conductor’s calling.

Mahler became a central part of Viennese culture at a time when it dominated the continent — and the wider world. This was the city of Gustav Klimt and Arthur Schnitzler, the Ringstraße and the Café Griensteidl, psychoanalysis and the Vienna Secession. Otto Wagner’s Moderne Architektur came out in 1895, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It was a city of conservative pomposity but also a furious desire for progress. Haughty and insecure, fearless and assiduous, fin-de-siècle Vienna gave birth to much of modern art, science and thought.

It was also, of course, the world capital of music, had been for more than a century, and now claimed Gustav Mahler as its emperor and king. Mahler’s ironic wit, sharp brain, endless resources of energy and demanding, impeccable standards raised the quality of music — even in Vienna — immeasurably, as well as the values of many of those attending. Proper concert hall etiquette was firmly established, continuing the quasi-religious trends inaugurated at Wagner’s theatre in Bayreuth. In the opera house, unruly fan clubs for singers were expelled; latecomers and stragglers were barred entry; mid-performance applause was restricted. In short, concert and opera life was made more serious-minded, more professional — more important. If some of those improvements have since become a little exclusive and a touch pedantic, we can still be grateful for their initially progressive nature.

When conducting, Mahler allowed the music of others to infiltrate him like a virus, consenting to its becoming part of his own inner being, permitting him insights that only a composer could have into the structure and consequence of the continent’s vast symphonic, orchestral and operatic legacy. This would nourish and help define his own musical creations as a composer, even if his works occasionally acted in opposition or insurrection against it.

As we will see in the coming chapters, the symphonic traditions which had persisted after Beethoven’s death in 1827 had operated largely within Beethoven’s classical and post-classical models, albeit with occasional Romantic flourishes and aggrandizements. Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák were outstanding protagonists of the symphony in the second half of the nineteenth century, but for all their inventions and works of genius, they remained inside a relatively conservative model. These composers, as well as, to some extent, Tchaikovsky, had produced essentially non-figurative interior dramas, conceptual musical works exploring and exploiting the abstract legacy of classical Vienna, while adding some local or national colour, their own individual peculiarities, and, occasionally, a suggestive title, such as Schumann’s first, ‘Spring’, or Tchaikovsky’s last, the ‘Pathétique’. Although Tchaikovsky knew his music — perhaps all music — was bursting with emotions and psychological baggage, and it was clear that works like his Fourth Symphony did have a programme, this agenda was, to his mind, decidedly one that could not be expressed in words. To try to do so would be preposterous. Consequently, even he stayed somewhat within the abstract Viennese models.

These composers had also created music based on extramusical material: overtures and symphonic tone poems, in addition to operas and ballets, based on myth, legend and drama. Yet their symphonies tended to remain largely abstract, content to be driven by their own internal musical force and logic, even if — for example — we can detect the driving fate motifs of Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies or see the Native American and African American influences on Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony.

Elsewhere, Bruckner had largely stayed true to the classical inheritance, though he had also greatly increased the length of the symphony, in addition to augmenting the possibilities of its harmonic language and the fertility of polyphonic manoeuvrings, both of which would be vital to Mahler’s own developments. (As a student in 1877, Mahler had attended the disastrous premiere of Bruckner’s Third and was sympathetic to his older colleague’s plight, preparing a piano reduction of the vast score which he presented to the composer.)

But other symphonic storms were brewing, ready to disrupt and distort the classical models. Developing revolutions Beethoven made in works like his Eroica, Pastoral, and Choral Symphonies, Berlioz and Liszt created programme symphonies to include significant narrative elements and inherent programmes. These diverged from the conventional four-movement abstract symphony into wildly varied constructions. And between his Fourth and Fifth, even Tchaikovsky fashioned his own specifically programmatic symphony, Manfred (1885). This was a work which dangerously destabilized the borders between symphony and tone poem, and was written just as Mahler himself was embarking on his First and struggling with defining his music as either entirely programmatic or suitably symphonic.

At the same time, Mahler’s friend and colleague Richard Strauss had taken the whole concept of programme music to a new level of sophistication and possibility. Strauss’s astounding sequence of seven major tone poems (from Don Juan in 1888 to Ein Heldenleben in 1898) significantly influenced Mahler, especially his first three symphonies, both in terms of pure orchestral power and ability to communicate intricate, complex feelings as well as elaborate philosophical discussion. Mahler would become a leading conductor of Strauss’s works, on top of allowing their impact to nurture how he did — and did not — conceive of his own symphonic worlds.

As we will see in the coming chapters, the musical sphere Mahler had inherited and now worked in was multifaceted and ever-changing, with attitudes towards the progress of music as varied as the sands of the sea. Tradition and innovation were always engaging in complex, often confrontational skirmishes as an art form sought to both uphold its conventions and capture new ground. And Mahler was at the centre of these battles and developments, both as a leading composer and the foremost conductor of his generation.

In 1901, at the height of his powers, he suffered an intestinal haemorrhage, brought on through overwork. One Sunday he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a Bruckner symphony in the afternoon and Mozart at the Opera in the evening. It was all too much, and his body rebelled. Recuperating, he resigned from the Philharmonic (though he would remain an important guest conductor), then spent some months away at his new holiday home in Maiernigg, on the banks of the Wörthersee in the Carinthian hills, composing songs and quietly embarking on his Fifth Symphony.

This had gradually become the established pattern of his years: he spent winters in the city, conducting, while composition was reserved for his summer vacation, away amid the beauty of the forests and lakes, meadows and mountains. The alpine landscape was Mahler’s favourite scenery, where he could not only compose in peace among nature but also hike, cycle, swim and row. Physical activity was critical to his personality, ability to compose, and musical processes. He needed the loneliness of the mountains, too, to stockpile his feelings, his ideas, his images.

The following autumn, he became romantically involved with one of Vienna’s pre-eminent society figures, the aspiring composer Alma Schindler. Twenty years Mahler’s junior, Alma was the daughter of a leading landscape painter and belle of the fin-de-siècle city. After some initial doubts and anxieties on both sides, they married the following spring. Alma went on to bear him two children: Maria in 1902 and Anna in 1904.

Alma’s own reputation has undoubtedly suffered because of the global stardom her first husband achieved in the decades after his own death (she would outlive Mahler by over half a century). Though her personality, like her husband’s, could be difficult, with bouts of vanity and self-interest, she was also justifiably keen to protect her and her family’s legacy. She