When Gustav Mahler was writing his Fifth Symphony, during the summers of 1901 and 1902, he was escaping from Vienna which for him had become a source of unbearable stress. On 1⁰ April 1901, he was exonerated from his post at the Vienna Philharmonic after a three-year period in which the anti-Semitic sentiment of the Viennese musical environment was exacerbated. Mahler had no choice but to cling to the other important position he held, as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, which was also stressful, perhaps a little less so but still caused him a permanent uneasiness, affecting his health, seriously.
Meeting Alma
But in November 1901, while working on the Symphony, an important event occurred that changed his life forever. At a dinner party, he met the most beautiful woman in Vienna, the budding composer Alma Schindler, who had just ended a relationship with her composition teacher. Gustav and Alma were immediately attracted to each other. They married a few months later, on March 9, 1902, when their first daughter, Maria, was already lodged in Alma's womb. It was a complex and at times unhappy relationship, although they remained together until Mahler died in 1911.
Maiernigg, and the "composition hut"
Yet Mahler could look forward to the future, composing. In the summer of that year, he escaped to Maiernigg, on the southern shore of the Wörthersee, a bucolic place in the region of Carinthia in southern Austria, where the composer was building a villa facing the lake, which he finished while working on the symphony.
Earlier, he had had a small, sparsely furnished hut - just enough to avoid being called a hermit - built on the hill behind his villa. Every morning he walked there along a forest path to work in splendid isolation. There he completed the Fifth Symphony - though later revisions took him five years.
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
The work, about an hour long, is in five movements (as opposed to the typical four of most symphonies) grouped into three sections. The first and third sections comprise two movements each, while the Scherzo stands between them as a section in its own right. Also, very curiously, the first movement is written in C♯ minor and the last, a half-tone higher, in D major.
Movements:
00:00 Funeral March
13:36 Stürmisch bewegt (stormy)
28:20 Scherzo
45:17 Adagietto. Sehr langsam (very slow)
53:49 Rondo-Finale
The Adagietto
The most famous movement of all Mahler's symphonies, the beautiful Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony ("quoted" also in the last movement), deserves a separate paragraph. Written only for strings and harp, its reflective, moving, nostalgic character, more resigned than mournful, makes it unique and memorable. It was an essential part of the soundtrack of Lucchino Visconti's film Death in Venice, and has been performed at numerous funerals of great personalities, such as Robert Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein.
According to some scholars, it was written as a tribute and love letter in code for Alma Schindler, to whom he sent the finished manuscript without accompanying it with any words.
Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, 2004.
