In Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, song and symphony are intimately linked. This connection is especially evident in the period between 1880-1900, known as the ‘Wunderhorn years,’ when Mahler composed not only his first four symphonies but the Lie­der eines fahrenden Gesellen and songs based on texts from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) anthology. Mahler’s symphonic works from this time are suffused with the same folkloric quality as his songs, either in the form of a distant echo or a direct quote. In a few cases, Mahler transferred his songs in their entirety to a symphony (Urlicht, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, Es sungen Drei Engel).

Mahler’s selection of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn also reveals something about his youthful memories. He grew up in what was then the Moravian garrison city of Iglau (now Jihlava). There Mahler became familiar with soldiers playing their music while marching past the barracks. However, the ‘military’ texts found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are far from triumphant. Revelge (‘Reveille’: ‘Ich muss mar­schieren’) is one poignant example; it deals with a fatally injured drummer boy. In Der Tamboursg’sell (‘The Drummer Boy’) a comrade-in-arms receives a death sentence for desertion. Sometimes, Mahler skilfully unites declarations of love with martial music, as in Wo die schönen Tro­mpeten blasen, but these poems have a decidedly pacifistic tone.

Each of the songs in this cycle has its own orchestra, as it were, in which different instruments come to the fore, lending each song an ever-changing colour palette. Later, Mahler would expand his use of martial rhythms and trumpet calls, and along the way, the Ländler (Rheinlegendchen), a dance of the ‘common folk’, would gradually lose its innocence. Almost everything that makes Mahler a Mahler can already be found here.

Translation: Josh Dillon

Gustav Mahler felt his symphonies should embrace the world – hence their length and almost cinematic, narrative character. Yet at their core, they are versions of one and the same thing: the inner cosmos of a great composer, Mahler’s own world. Despite being the shortest, most accessible and light-hearted of his nine completed symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 in G major is nonetheless an expression of the ‘complete’ Mahler. It is a quest for meaning amid the bewildering mystery of life – often in nature, sometimes through grotesque humour and always through sensuous orchestration, with waves of clear melody crashing over and over against dark abstraction. The symphony as a whole builds towards its vocal finale, Das himmlische Leben, a folk-poetic depiction of heaven seen through the eyes of a child – a quintessentially Mahlerian blend of high and low styles, in a heaven in which even children enjoy abundantly flowing wine, and animals are as endearing as they are edible.

The sleigh bells that herald in Das himmlische Leben are heard even in the very first bars of the symphony, setting in motion a journey whose final destination is heaven and which unfolds in three stages: life, death and despair. For no other composer are mountains and valleys of such literal majesty and of such profoundly figurative importance. In the second movement, death is portrayed in a manner befitting the Fourth’s relative levity – the solo violin is tuned in scordatura to produce a piercing, shrill tone evoking this archetypal image: Freund Hain (or ‘Death the Fiddler’), who plays a danse macabre on his fiddle. As Mahler’s indication for this part of the score shows, this is death in scherzo form. The third movement unsurpassably draws the helpless listener into the depths with a truly Mahlerian adagio that is ineffably melancholic, as indefinable as it is all-encompassing. This is followed by the joy of Das himmlische Leben like a kind of redemption (but did we actually wish to be redeemed?).

Owing to his duties as director of the Vienna Hofoper, Mahler composed during his summer holidays. After he completed the Third Symphony in 1896, it seemed as if his symphonic muse had fallen silent. Yet just before the end of his 1899 holiday, Mahler conceived a rough outline of the first three movements of the Fourth. It would not be until the following summer, though, that he would resume work on the symphony, completing it in just over a month, thanks in part to the fact that he had previously set Das himmlische Leben to music. Years prior, Mahler had earmarked the text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a collection of German folk poetry and an enduring source of inspiration for him – for a movement of a symphony rather than his song cycle of the same name, published in 1899, from which he had intentionally withheld it. Mahler’s work navigates the boundaries between late and post-Romanticism. Cracks start to appear in the harmonic edifice so revered by those of that generation, including Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who would later dismantle it further.

Translation: Josh Dillon