Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 9

When Gustav Mahler began work on a new orchestral piece following his Symphony No. 8, the myth surrounding ninth symphonies was perhaps at its peak – after all, neither Beethoven, Schubert nor Bruckner had surpassed this number in their symphonic output. Mahler himself, not immune to superstition, therefore chose not to call the piece a symphony, but Das Lied von der Erde. Only afterwards did he feel ready to truly tackle a “Ninth”. He began sketching it in the summer of 1908 in Toblach, his South Tyrolean holiday retreat. The previous year had brought a series of personal blows: his young daughter had died at the age of four, he had been diagnosed with heart failure, and he had been pressured to resign from his post as director of the Vienna Court Opera. But Mahler's mood had since improved, not least due to an attractive new engagement at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The following summer, he returned to his sketches and, in a creative frenzy, completed the actual composition. In this work, he wrote to conductor Bruno Walter, “something is said that I have had on my lips for the longest time.” He copied his manuscript, by his own admission “probably quite illegible to other eyes”, into a fair version in New York in 1910.

Before he could even think about a performance of the symphony, however, Mahler's heart condition worsened into incurable endocarditis. In May 1911, he was brought back to Vienna, where he died a week after his arrival. With Mahler’s death, the mythologising around the Ninth Symphony began, and the work’s 1912 premiere further fuelled it: had the composer bid farewell to life through these sounds? “What Death tells me,” speculated the music writer Paul Bekker, might be the secret subtitle – yet when Mahler wrote this symphony, he was not even 50, and his illness was not yet life-threatening. Nevertheless, the composer finds in this Ninth a radically subjective tone, one that disregards the listening expectations of the public.

With its four purely orchestral movements, lacking any vocal parts, the symphony appears at first glance to follow conventional patterns. However, both outer movements are not only unusually long, but are also set in slow tempo; only the inner movements are comparatively brisk. Arnold Schoenberg observed that the work was “no longer voiced in the first person”, as if “there were a hidden author using Mahler merely as a mouthpiece.” This is particularly evident in the middle movements: they evoke rustic dances and traditional forms (a landler and waltz in the second, tangled fugati in the third), partly distorted, partly alienated – “grim cheerfulness”, as the conductor Willem Mengelberg, a close associate of Mahler, called it.

By contrast, the first and last movements strike an almost painfully intimate tone, as if someone were laying bare their innermost self, exposed and defenceless to present and future generations. The expansive Andante, loosely based on classical sonata form with its three thematic ideas, allows fragmentary tonal figures to coalesce into melodies. It establishes the falling second – described by Mahler himself as a “farewell” motif – as a key interval, building it into sweeping structures, surging exclamations, mysterious new beginnings, and furious, compacted outbursts marked “with rage”. Catastrophe is inevitable: death knocks with heavy rhythms in the trombones and tuba, while trumpets respond from afar with a funeral march (“like a heavy cortège”). At the end, a curtain lifts to reveal an idyll; bird calls emerge from the flutes – a glimpse into another world. The Adagio finale meanders, circling around a gruppetto figure as if it never wishes to end – a music, in the words of the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, “that at times seems to be beyond itself.”