The Glasshouse

Symphony No. 9

Andante commodo – Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers (In a comfortable Ländler tempo) – Rondo. Burleske – Molto adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend (Very slow and even reluctant).

Gustav Mahler composed his Ninth Symphony – unusually, for him – in a single summer. It was 1909. Having returned from New York, where he was chief conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, he had taken his wife Alma to the health spa at Levico and had returned alone to a rented house in the Alpine countryside near Toblach (modern Dobiacco), where he’d spent the previous summer completing his song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde. Now, alone in the woodland hut that he used as a private study (and which Alma called, mockingly, his “earth closet”) he composed. Alma believed that he felt relieved of a psychological burden: his superstition that Ninth Symphonies were cursed to be their composer’s last. By composing Das Lied von der Erde – a ninth symphony in all but name – he was convinced he’d cheated fate.

Then – as now – the musical world moved slowly, and Mahler had commitments back in the USA. The symphony would not be heard until after his death, and the audience for the world premiere (in Jne 1912) included the young avant-garde composer Alban Berg. “The most wonderful music Mahler ever wrote” was Berg’s verdict; he heard in the symphony both “remarkable love for this world” and “a foreboding of death”.

Would Mahler have agreed? He must have suspected that this would be his last completed symphony (though he was soon at work on another). Certainly, he’d lived through intense tragedy (the death of his young daughter) and knew that his own health was dangerously weak. And he peppered his score with emotionally charged instructions – Mit Wut (with anger), schattenhaft (shadowy), wie ein schwerer kondukt (like a solemn funeral procession). Fanfares, waltzes and snatches of hymns weave their way through the music, inviting us to imagine our own meanings and pictures. Then there’s the beginning and ending. The symphony opens with a sighing, two-note theme that the conductor Bruno Walter thought (and Mahler may have backed him up on this) represented the word leb’ wohl (farewell). It ends with – well, see what you think: it leaves few listeners unmoved.

What’s certain is that Mahler would have asked only that we listen – and, ideally, respond with an open heart. Some have heard the quiet, faltering opening rhythm as a representation of Mahler’s own uneven heartbeat, but after the yearning first melody, the first movement opens out into a huge, circular survey of Mahler’s world and emotions, by turns tender, ghostly, passionate, violent and nostalgic. The second movement is a dance, sometimes playful, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes bittersweet. Trumpets announce the third movement, which Mahler called a Burleske: a joke with a fierce satirical bite, charged with the hectic, anxious gaiety of military bands. A great, passionate cry for the strings launches the finale: a lingering farewell which – after saying everything its heart has to say – begins a long, breathless fade to silence.

© Richard Bratby

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