Mahler: Oct 17–19, 2025
- cbeeson69
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 9
DIVE IN!
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was a German speaking Austrian-Bohemian composer and conductor of the late Romantic and early Modernist eras. During his lifetime he was best known for his conducting and for a very long time treated his composition as a side gig. As a result of this, and of the Nazi era ban on the performance of his music, his compositions only became popularly known and well received after the mid 1940s. Now Mahler’s music enjoys a bit of cult status with frequent recordings and performances, including entire festivals dedicated to his works.
HIGHLIGHTS
Mahler was born into a Jewish family who supported his musical talents. He attended the Vienna Conservatory and soon afterward began a successful career conducting for orchestras and opera houses throughout Europe. In order to ensure his success as a conductor in a time of open hostility toward Jews he converted to Catholicism. This worked to secure him positions but did little to keep people from casting aspersions on him in the form of anti-Semitic commentary. Toward the end of his life he accepted music director positions with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, in part to escape those attacks on his character.
Gustav Mahler is primarily known for his epic length symphonic works which follow spiritual and philosophical narrative arcs and utilize large numbers of instruments including vocal soloists and choruses. These works largely received tepid responses or outright criticism at their premieres but caught on later.
During his studies at the Vienna Conservatory Mahler was inspired and influenced by the music of Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner. He also became interested in German philosophy via his close friend, writer Siegfried Lipiner. Lipiner introduced him to the philosophies of Nietzsche, Lotze, Fechner, and Schopenhauer which had a profound and lasting effect on his approach to music making and composition. Even within this high art and philosophy approach Mahler frequently included folk materials like social dances or children’s lullabies in his music, often transforming them into something fantastical or barely recognizable.
Symphony No. 9 was actually Mahler's 10th symphony. He was deeply superstitious about the fact that Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Anton Bruckner had all died before composing a 10th symphony, and in fact Mahler felt there was a "curse of the 9th". Technically his ninth symphony was the work he titled Das Lied von der Erde "Song of the Earth" in order to avoid the curse.
He began working on a "Symphony No. 9" in 1908 and completed it in 1909, about a year before his 8th symphony was premiered. He had sketched much of his Symphony No. 10 by the time he died. Symphony No. 9 was the last symphony he completed before his death. It was premiered in Vienna in 1912 after his death, and wasn't premiered in the United States until 1931. So... A for effort on that curse avoidance technique I guess??
The symphony is in four movements:
Andante comodo [comfortably walking pace]
Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb ["At the tempo of a leisurely Ländler. A bit clumsy and very crude"]
Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig [Very quick. Very defiant]
Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend [Slow. Very slow and held back]
The four movement structure is typical, but it is highly unusual to find the outer movements (1 and 4) in a slow tempo. The second movement is typical of Mahler to use the Ländler dance rhythm and meter. Of course, with a marking of "A bit clumsy and very crude", he uses violas and bassoons to bring this to life at the outset. Rude, Mahler. Rude. 😂
In truth this movement is a collection of Ländlers which become more and more distorted throughout. The Ländler is a type of European folk dance that predated the waltz. It's a partner dance that in its early folk tradition strongly featured hopping and stamping. The music might be entirely instrumental or have a vocal part, sometimes with yodeling. By the mid/late 1800s the dance had been refined for higher class ballroom dance functions. A sweet example can be found in this clip from The Sound of Music.
The ending of Symphony No. 9 is often interpreted as Mahler's intentional goodbye to mortal life since he wrote it with his fatal heart disease diagnosis in mind and during the grieving of his daughter Maria Anna's death. The last note is marked ersterbend ["dying away"] and the final two pages of the score move extremely slowly over a relatively small number of pitches.
In one of Leonard Bernstein's famous Norton Lectures he theorized that in this movement Mahler is symbolically portraying his own death, the death of tonality, and the death of Faustian culture in the arts.
Hungarian conductor Ádám Fischer has said "Mahler's Ninth Symphony is not about death, but about dying. Death and dying are two entirely different matters. While working on the Ninth, I realized that I know of no other language apart from German in which the words death (Tod) and dying (sterben) have entirely different etymologies. ... the finale is just one sole extended act of dying, the disintegration of life. The last section, particularly the last page in the orchestra score, describes that situation so perfectly that it surpasses any other depiction, whether it be in literature or the fine arts."
A typical performance of Symphony No. 9 lasts 75-90 minutes.
Thanks for doing this even though it wasn't your talk.