Symphony No. 6 in A minor, “Tragic”
Gustav Mahler
b. Kalischt, Bohemia / July 7, 1860
d. Vienna, Austria / May 18, 1911
Following the premiere of Symphony No. 6, Mahler wrote to a friend, “My Sixth will propound riddles whose solution may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” Here’s a brief introduction to them.
Symphonies One to Four form a group, bound together by their shared, youthful qualities: exuberance, passion, innocence. Mahler began sketching what would eventually become the first of them in 1884, aged 24. Understandably for so early a piece, it displayed the influences of the many composers he respected: Beethoven, Weber, Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, for example, plus echoes of such contemporaries as Tchaikovsky and Dvořák.
Symphony No. 2, whose creation occupied Mahler from 1888 to 1894, stretched the symphonic time scale to about 80 minutes and expanded the forces involved in a piece of this kind. It embraced an astonishing range of materials, from furious outbursts of emotion to gentle, Schubertian dance rhythms. It concludes with a vast, apocalyptic choral hymn on the resurrection of the human soul – quite an undertaking for a 34-year-old!
No work of Mahler’s casts its expressive net more widely than Symphony No. 3 (1893-1896). To an even greater degree than its predecessors, it gave voice to many of his deepest personal concerns: love of nature, joy in the music and words of folk traditions, and humanitarianism. He completed the Fourth Symphony in 1900. In contrast to Nos. 2 and 3, it is short (at least by his standards) and consistently sweet-natured.
His personal life in those early years of the new century seemed equally contented. His five-month courtship of Alma Schindler, a spirited, attractive, and musically talented young woman, ended with their marriage in March 1902. Yet the music Mahler composed during this period – Symphony No. 5 – bespeaks a far from contented frame of mind. It portrays, in fact, a much darker world than any of those found in his previous symphonies. Its long, turbulent journey from darkness to light demonstrates that happiness is still possible, but it must be won, and that the forces to be overcome are daunting.
Mahler began his Sixth Symphony during the summer of 1903, completing it a year later (along with the second and fourth movements of Symphony No. 7, and Songs on the Death of Children, which he had begun three years earlier). This was one of the most idyllic periods of his life: his fame as a conductor reached its apex; regular and well-received performances of his music were taking place across Europe; and the companionship of his wife and their two daughters was giving him great joy (the younger, Anna, was born in June 1904).
Yet the music he was writing represents an even greater gulf between reality and his creative world than the one which had surrounded the creation of the Fifth Symphony. Both Symphony No. 6 and the song cycle are somber, even tragic works. They turned out to be disturbingly prophetic ones, as well.
Regarding the Symphony, Alma Mahler wrote in her memoirs, “In the last movement he describes himself and his downfall; or, as he later said: ‘It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.’ On him, too, fell three blows of fate, and the last felled him.” This refers to the events of 1907: the death of their older daughter Maria of diphtheria and smallpox, aged four-and-a-half; Mahler’s being driven from his job as Music Director of the Vienna State Opera; and the diagnosis of his life-threatening case of heart disease. To represent these “blows of fate,” Mahler included a hammer in the orchestration of the Sixth Symphony’s Finale. The sound he wanted from it wasn’t clangorous and steely, but a non-metallic thud, “like an axe stroke.”
“But at the time he was serene; he was conscious of the greatness of his work,” Alma continued. “He was a tree in full leaf and flower. None of his works came as directly from his innermost heart as this one. The music and what it foretold touched us so deeply.” The first performance took place on May 27, 1906, in Essen, under the composer’s direction. According to Alma, “Out of shame and anxiety he did not conduct the Symphony well. He hesitated to bring out the dark omen behind this terrible last movement.”
Mahler later made changes to the Symphony’s orchestration, the most important of them the deletion of the last of the three hammer blows. He superstitiously feared it might hasten the arrival of the disaster that it predicted for him. He also had second thoughts about the sequence of the inner movements. His original plan was to have the Scherzo performed first, followed by the Andante, and this was the order in which the movements were published. The sequence that he eventually decided upon, and which he always conducted, however, was Andante first, followed by the Scherzo. It is followed in the critical edition of his complete works that is sanctioned by the International Gustav Mahler Society. For these performances, Maestro Herbig has decided to use the published order (Scherzo, then Andante).
Mahler gave the Sixth Symphony the subtitle Tragic. In overall terms it is an appropriate designation. Yet it is only in the finale that the work’s catastrophic nature becomes completely clear. Each of the three preceding movements offers a balance of positive and negative elements.
The opening movement contrasts a menacing, march-like subject with a passionate second melody. Alma recalled, “After he had drafted the first movement, he came down from the forest to tell me he had tried to express me in a theme. ‘Whether I’ve succeeded I don't know; but you'll have to put up with it.’ This is the great, soaring theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony.” In the middle comes a peaceful interlude, atmospherically colored with the sound of cowbells. (Mahler may have included them as a recollection of his happy youth in central Europe. They will be heard again in the Andante and Finale.) The “Alma” theme crowns the coda triumphantly.
“In the Scherzo, he represented the unrhythmic games of the two children, tottering in zigzags over the sand,” Alma wrote. “Ominously the childish voices become more and more tragic, and at the end die out in a whimper.” This is one of the bitterest and most bizarrely scored scherzos in any Mahler symphony. The slow movement is a serene, gorgeously melodious lullaby, its climax, in contrast, a searing outpouring of emotion.
The colossal, overwhelming finale opens with an eerie, unsettling introduction in slow tempo. The movement proper is restless and striving. It consists of a series of waves of vigorous activity, each of which is crowned catastrophically by one of the hammer blows of fate. There is no recovery from the third and final climax. The music, its tragic destiny fulfilled, subsides into utter darkness.
© 2008 Don Anderson. All rights reserved.
