Date of composition: 1901-1902
Premiere: 18 October 1904 in Cologne with the Gürzenich Orchestra conducted by the composer
Duration: 76 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First performed on 20 February 1905 conducted by Arthur Nikisch
The opening belongs to the solo trumpet. Its voice rings out – cutting, radiant, almost military – commanding attention with its brilliance and announcing that something of real weight is about to unfold over the roughly 70 minutes Gustav Mahler allows his Symphony No. 5. “To me, a symphony means this: to build a world with every means that the available technique affords.” So he confided to his artist friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner while composing his Third – and the idea became the guiding thread of his entire symphonic oeuvre. Perhaps the two friends discussed it again in the summer of 1901, during their stay in Maiernigg on the Wörthersee, where Mahler sketched the first ideas for a new symphony. It would become his fifth, and it marks a profound turning point in his life.
Four symphonies had already been entered in Mahler’s catalogue of works. The fourth had not even had its premiere when he set to work on a fifth – one meant to break new ground. In all his symphonies so far, he had drawn programmatic inspiration from various literary sources. Now, though, he turned emphatically away from that approach: “Away with programmes, which breed false ideas,” he declared. “Let the audience form its own thoughts about the work being performed.” Where he had once offered listeners interpretative aids alongside his music, he was now convinced that “there is no need for words; everything is said in purely musical terms.”
Perhaps Mahler used his first four symphonies to practise translating verbal language into music, only to dispense with it altogether in the Fifth? Instead, here he seems to turn to the vernacular – marches, waltzes, simple song forms. He draws on these stereotypes, reshaping them in his own musical language and offsetting their potentially trivial associations with grotesquerie, extravagance or profound gravity. He at once stylises and elevates them, while also using them to ground his art in the everyday experience of his contemporaries, touching something universally human.
Yet there is no Mahler without a great “but”: conventional notions of form and movement will get you nowhere with this symphony. From the very first bars, he plunges his listeners into deep unease – a funeral march to open a symphony? Bound to confuse. With the Fifth, Mahler takes complete leave of classical-romantic formal conventions. Three “parts” provide the framework for his symphony, spanning five movements. Each, as Mahler stressed, is self-contained; each stands independently, linked to the others “only by a related mood”. At the centre stands the longest movement, whose exuberant spirit might seem, on the face of it, an invitation to the listener. And yet Mahler himself admitted: “The scherzo is a damned movement! Heaven help the audience – what are they to make of this chaos, forever giving birth anew to a world that perishes again the very next moment, of these primeval sounds, this roaring, raging, booming sea, these dancing stars, these breathing, shimmering, flashing worlds?”
It was not only Mahler’s symphonic world that was shaken to its foundations while he composed the Fifth – his personal life was upended too. Alma Schindler entered it like an elemental force. The conductor Willem Mengelberg later recalled of the Adagietto from the Fifth: “Instead of a letter, he sent her the manuscript of this, without another word. She understood, and wrote back: telling him to come!!!”