TTC - Great Masters - Mahler - His Life and Music (Guidebook) PDF

Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music
Professor Robert Greenberg
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®

Robert Greenberg, Ph.D.
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Robert Greenberg has composed over forty works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent
performances of Greenberg’s work have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England,
Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string quartet was performed at the
Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.
Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, where
he received a Ph.D. in music composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies,
Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson.
Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in composition, three Meet the Composer
grants, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String
Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company.
He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served as Chair of the
Department of Music History and Literature and Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division for
thirteen years.
Professor Greenberg is resident music historian for National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered”
program.
Professor Greenberg has taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, speaking to such
corporations and musical institutions as Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, Harvard Business School
Publishing, Deutches Financial Services, Canadian Pacific, Strategos Institute, Lincoln Center, the Van Cliburn
Foundation, the University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business, the Chautauqua Institute, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and others. His
work as a teacher and lecturer has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and The Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of COMPOSER, INC. His
music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label.
Professor Greenberg has recorded 256 lectures for The Teaching Company, including the forty-eight–lecture super-
course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music.
©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i

Table of Contents
Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture One Introduction and Childhood.......................................2
Lecture Two Mahler the Conductor ................................................5
Lecture Three Early Songs and Symphony No. 1...........................10
Lecture Four The Wunderhorn Symphonies .................................14
Lecture Five Alma and Vienna .....................................................17
Lecture Six Family Life and Symphony No. 5 ...........................20
Lecture Seven Symphony No. 6, and
Das Lied von der Erde.............................................23
Lecture Eight Das Lied, Final Symphonies,
and the End ..............................................................27
Vocal Texts ........................................................................................................31
Publication Credit ............................................................................................36
Timeline .............................................................................................................37
Glossary.............................................................................................................39
Biographical Notes............................................................................................40
Bibliography......................................................................................................41
ii ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Scope:
To a greater degree than that of many other composers, the work of Gustav Mahler is a highly personal expression
of his inner world, a world characterized by an overwhelming sense of alienation and loneliness. Some of this
feeling can be attributed to Mahler’s Jewish heritage and his critics’ response to it. Part of his isolation began in
childhood, a reaction to a brutal father and the loss of eight siblings, including his beloved brother Ernst.
From the beginning of his compositional career, at age six, to its end, Mahler’s music focuses on the lonely, isolated
individual attempting to cope with romantic rejection, the struggle between hope and despair, the questions of death
and redemption, and the grieving process. Mahler’s work constitutes the first generation of expressionism, the early
twentieth-century art movement that celebrates inner reality as the only reality. Unlike other expressionist
composers, however, Mahler used the musical language of the nineteenth-century to explore expressive themes very
20th century in their nature.
Mahler also had an exceptional career as a conductor, beginning in a small theater in Austria and culminating at the
Royal Vienna Opera, the New York Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. His performances were
almost magical for his audiences and he ultimately achieved critical acclaim for his conducting. His conducting
career was nevertheless marked by difficulties, because of Mahler’s tyrannical stance with performers and theater
management and because the anti-Semitic press, particularly in Vienna, continued to attack him with a ferocity that
we must consider almost pathological.
In the last years of his life, Mahler’s older daughter, Marie, died of scarlet fever. Soon after, Mahler himself was
diagnosed with a heart condition that was not serious at the time but would contribute to his death in 1911. We are
left with Mahler’s unique and all-inclusive body of workhis symphonieshis universal statements about life,
death, love, redemption, religion, God, nature, and the human condition.
©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1

Lecture One
Introduction and Childhood
Scope: One of the most significant aspects of Mahler’s life was his sense of alienation, brought on largely by his
Jewish heritage and his critics’ reaction to it. In fact, the tension created by the Czech, Germanic and
Jewish culture of which Mahler was a part may be one of the elements that makes his work so striking and
fascinating. As a child, Mahler built a fantasy world to which he retreated as a defense against abuse and
loneliness. This ability to retreat reveals itself in the highly personal inner landscapes of Mahler’s music.
From the time he was quite young, he was entranced by music and became devoted to the piano from about
the age of five.
Outline
I. A central fact of Mahler’s life is his isolation and alienation. He was psychologically and culturally alone, the
eternal outsider.
A. Mahler wrote, “I am thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew
throughout the world, everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”
B. Mahler’s “Jewishness” was held against him as a man, a conductor, and a composer, both during his
lifetime and after.
C. On April 10, 1897, two days after the announcement of Mahler’s appointment as conductor of the Vienna
State Opera, the Viennese newspaper Deutsche Zeitung attacked what it called “the frightening
Jewification of art in Vienna” and questioned whether a Jew could perform “our great musicour German
opera” (Lea, 51).
D. Even reviews published later in Mahler’s life echo these sentiments.
E. I might suggest that we find Mahler’s music so unbelievably moving today because its angst; its
uncontrollable extroversion, optimism, and pessimism; its sheer power and often schizophrenic emotional
progressions are even more relevant to us than to the music’s original audience. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 1, movement 4 conclusion [1888].)
F. Mahler’s music is a mixture of brilliant, rich, irregularly changing harmonies; of extraordinary (often
grotesque) juxtapositions of moods: tragedy, humor, farce, irony; constant, almost obsessive melodic
activity; sudden, unexpected explosions of passion or rage that disappear as quickly as they come; strutting
march music heard back-to-back with Viennese love music; and a pure, crystalline, overwhelming passion
untempered by the “civilizing” effect of artistic control and manipulation. (Musical selection: Symphony
No. 5, movement 2 opening.)
II. Mahler was born to Jewish parents in the Bohemian town of Kalischt in 1860, in what was then part of the
Austrian Empire and is today the Czech Republic.
A. Like so many emancipated Jews in their part of Europe, the Mahler family considered themselves
assimilated Western European Jews. Typical of the Czech (Bohemian and Moravian) Jewish community,
the Mahlers spoke German at home, not Yiddish, and moved in a cultural orbit that was distinctly
Austrian/German.
B. While growing up, Mahler had little contact with Jewish religious practices. According to biographers Kurt
and Herta Blaukopf, he was more familiar with Catholic religious practice than Jewish.
C. Little documentary evidence exists that Mahler considered his Jewish heritage as anything other than a
burden to be overcome.
D. In February 1897, Mahler converted to Catholicism, not because he really cared about the religion, but
because doing so was the only way he could secure the position of conductor and music director of the
Vienna Opera.
1. Whatever Mahler considered himself, those around him, especially in the artistic and political
atmosphere in which he traveled, forever considered him a Jew, with all the attendant reserve, distrust,
and sometimes outright hostility that accompanied that identification at the time.
2 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

2. The anti-Semitic Viennese press played a large part in having Mahler drummed out of Vienna in 1907,
ten years after his “shotgun conversion” to Catholicism.
3. After his death, Mahler’s music was condemned and banned by the Nazis as being both degenerate
and Jewish.
E. In 1916, Max Brod published the first of his essays dealing with Mahler’s music.
1. Brod was a novelist, music critic, and Franz Kafka’s editor. He was also, like Mahler, Kafka, and
Freud, a Bohemian-born Jew who grew up in a German-speaking household.
2. Brod’s observations approach very nearly the heart and soul of Mahler’s music and help to explain the
basis of the anti-Semitic criticism directed toward him.
3. Brod concluded that Mahler, like Heine and Mendelssohn, was culturally only partially
German/Austrian.
4. Those aspects of his music that seemed bizarre and arbitrary from the German perspective are in
reality completely natural if we perceive Mahler as a Jewish artist of the emancipation and
cosmopolitan period who was, nevertheless, not entirely assimilated into German/Austrian culture.
5. Most of Mahler’s contemporary German/Austrian critics argued that European music was essentially
“Nordic” in structure and expressive content, meaning serious, metaphysical, idealistic, carefully
structured, stylistically consistent, exalted, and “pure,” and, therefore, superior to all other music.
These critics maintained that no bridge could be built between “Nordic” and any other music and that
the Jews exerted a destructive influence on Nordic culture.
6. Max Brod pointed out that the tension between East and West, Germanic and Jewish culture, made the
works of Mahler, Heine, and Kafka striking, different, and fascinating.
F. Perhaps if Mahler had been a practicing Jew and hadn’t been as culturally assimilated as he was, he
wouldn’t have felt as alienated as he did. But Mahler was a supreme individual and egotist; he considered
himself an enlightened, cosmopolitan European, even as the community around him continued to
stereotype him as “a Jew.”
G. Perhaps a more personal issue can also be found in Mahler’s rejection of his heritage.
1. Mahler’s sense of alienation, loneliness, and existential homelessness was part of his personality,
almost from the very beginning.
2. Without the fantasy world he created as a defense against childhood loneliness, the extraordinary and
equally fantastic music-scapes of his adulthood could never have been created.
3. As a young man, Mahler identified himself as Ahaseurus, the Wandering Jew. The figure of the
homeless, lonely wanderer, searching but never finding, asking questions for which few answers exist,
is a constant, basic theme in Mahler’s letters and music.
H. From the beginning of his compositional career to its end, from The Songs of a Wayfarer (1885) to The
Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) (1909), Mahler’s music is about the lonely, isolated individual
“coping” with:
1. Romantic rejection (The Songs of a Wayfarer, 1885);
2. The struggle between hope and despair (Symphony No. 1, 1888);
3. The questions raised by death and redemption (Symphony No. 2, 1894);
4. The relationship between the individual and nature (Symphony No. 3, 1896);
5. The deaths of children (Kindertotenlieder, 1904);
6. The grieving process (Symphony No. 5, 1902).
I. Mahler’s music asks many questions; by his late works, The Song of the
Earth (1909) and the Symphony No. 9 (1910), very few answers can be found.
J. Mahler’s “world”the environment that shaped his soul, the core of his being, his music, and his
relationships was his inner life, his emotional landscape. Rarely do we encounter an artist who generated
such a degree of his reality from a place entirely within himself. Incredibly, Mahler was able to unite the
diversity of his world and his often tortured emotional makeup into rich and original music.
III. Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, roughly midway between Vienna
and Prague.
A. Bernard Mahler, Gustav’s father, was a totally self-made man, ferociously ambitious, and a strict
authoritarian who brutalized his wife and, on occasion, his children.

B. Gustav certainly learned from his father’s example; he, too, was voraciously ambitious, unshakable in his
convictions and will, and equally despotic (if not actually physically violent) as a conductor and husband.
C. Marie Hermann Mahler, Gustav’s mother, was a quiet, affectionate, sickly, and not surprisingly, unhappy
woman. She had a weak heart, suffered from migraines, and walked with a limp as a result of a clubfoot.
D. No physical ailment could compare to how Marie suffered as a result of the mortality rate of her children,
which was ghastly even by the standards of the nineteenth century. Six Mahler children survived into
adulthood, but in the twenty years between 1859 and 1879, the Mahlers buried eight sons.
IV. When Mahler was a little more than four months old, his family, recently emancipated by imperial decree,
moved to the nearby town of Iglau, in Moravia, where Bernard opened a distillery and modest tavern.
A. Iglau was a bustling trading and mining town of 25,000, an oasis of German culture in a Slavic sea, a town
that boasted a major music school and an extensive season of symphonic concerts and operas.
B. Despite his shortcomings, Bernard Mahler gave his children the comforts and education that he himself had
never had. The Mahler apartment was spacious and comfortable, filled with books, curio cabinets, and a
grand piano on which young Gustav practiced.
V. Gustav was precocious and entranced by music from infancy.
A. The Mahler home in Iglau was near a military barracks, and Gustav grew up fascinated by military
marches, songs, and tattoos.
B. In fact, we have difficulty finding a single symphonic work by Mahler that does not feature a march of
some kind.
C. Given Mahler’s morbid inclinations, it should come as no surprise that many of his symphonic marches are
funeral marches.
1. First listen to the genuinely bizarre funeral march of Symphony No. 1. (Musical selection: Symphony
No. 1, movement 3, Funeral March [1888].)
2. Next hear the grisly and ghastly march of the dead in Symphony No. 2. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 2, movement 5, March of the Dead [1894].)
3. Now, the numbed and agonized funeral march that initiates Symphony No. 5. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 5, movement 1, Funeral March [1902].)
4. Finally, the inexorable march of fate and death that begins Symphony No. 6. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 6, movement 1, March of Fate.)
D. Mahler’s mature music continued to reflect, to the end of his life, the tragic experiences and environmental
and musical influences of his childhood in Iglau.
E. Mahler also developed a propensity, from the earliest age, to enter into a sort of dream or fantasy state for
hours at a time to escape Bernhard’s emotional and physical abuse.
F. Mahler began taking music lessons around the age of five.
1. The single-minded intensity with which he threw himself into the piano was nothing short of
compulsive.
2. Like so many families with a single-minded prodigy, the Mahler family’s daily life, routines, and
dreams of fortune soon began to revolve around Gustav’s particular needs.
3. Mahler made his first public appearance at the age of ten and, if he had wanted to, he could
undoubtedly have made a career as a performing pianist. But Mahler had another musical interest, one
that transcended even playing the piano: making up his own music and writing it down.

Lecture Two
Mahler the Conductor
Scope: Mahler began composing at age six, was sent to school in Prague at eleven, and experienced the death of
his dear brother Ernest at age fifteen. Later in his fifteenth year, he went to the Vienna Conservatory to
study music. There, he became enamored of the work Richard Wagner, which became a great influence on
him. After graduating in 1878, Mahler composed Das klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow), based on an
old folktale. In 1880, he began his conducting career at a small theater and realized that he had found a
calling. He steadily moved up the ladder to larger theaters, where his audiences appreciated his attention to
detail, but performers and musicians found him tyrannical. Ultimately, he replaced the ailing Artur Nikisch,
the most famous conductor of the day, at the Neues Stadttheatre in Leipzig, then moved on to the position
of music director and first conductor of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest. He stayed in Budapest for
three years, sometimes conducting as many as nineteen different operas a month.
Outline
I. Gustav Mahler began composing around the age of six. He entitled his first composition Polka with
Introductory Funeral March. Even at six years old, because of the circumstances of his life and the ironic and
morbid nature of his psyche, he was already writing music that juxtaposed the joy of dance with the ritual
sadness of a funeral march.
II. In 1871, partly because of Gustav’s lackluster academic performance in elementary school, Bernard Mahler
decided to send him to Prague to study at the Neustadte Gymnasium. Gustav was eleven years old.
A. Bernard arranged for his son to board in the house of a leather merchant named Moritz Grunefeld, who was
a well-known lover of music and the father of eleven children.
B. The stay in Prague was a disaster. Gustav was not properly fed, his room was not heated, and various
Grunefeld children “borrowed” some of his clothing and shoes. Gustav withdrew, more deeply than ever,
into his dream world.
C. One incident at the Grunefeld’s made a profound impression on young Mahler. He accidentally came upon
Alfred Grunefeld who was then nineteen, having sex with a maid. Apparently mistaking the young
woman’s cries for distress, Gustav hurried to her “rescue.” He was beaten by the couple and sworn to
secrecy. According to one biographer, “Mahler never recovered from this awkward and brutal introduction
to the facts of life” (de La Grange, 24).
D. To his credit, when Bernard Mahler found out what was going on in Prague, he took Gustav home to Iglau.
E. Gustav had been in Prague for eight months. Of the sixty-four students in his class at the Neustadt
Gymnasium, he was ranked sixty-fourth.
F. In 1875, when Mahler was almost fifteen, his younger brother Ernst died of pericarditis (Wassersucht).
Gustav was terrified by Ernst’s illness and traumatized by his death.
III. Later that same year, in September 1875, when Mahler was fifteen, Bernard gave his consent for Gustav to
study music at the Vienna Conservatory.
A. The Conservatory, founded in 1812 by Antonio Salieri, was the preeminent school of music in the German-
speaking world.
B. Mahler had the support of the great Herr Doktor Professor Julius Epstein, who was astounded when he
heard Gustav play.
1. Julius Epstein (1832–1926) became Mahler’s essential music teacher and his second father. Unlike
Bernard, Epstein was a kind and gentle man who remained one of Mahler’s best friends until Mahler’s
death in 1911.
2. Mahler’s harmony teacher was Robert Fuchs, who later told Mahler’s wife, Alma, “Mahler always
played truant and yet there was nothing he couldn’t do.”
3. Alma recalled that Gustav was regarded as a “marvel” during his Conservatory days.
4. Among Mahler’s other classmates and friends at the Conservatory were Hans Rott and Hugo Wolf, the
future master of lieder (art songs). Both would go mad and die in asylums.

C. Mahler’s life in Vienna was hard. Like most provincial students, he lived in poverty.
D. Mahler wrote a good deal of music while he was at the Vienna Conservatory, but he destroyed most of it.
Almost nothing from this period of his creative life survives.
1. We know that Mahler was, like virtually everyone of his generation, powerfully influenced by the
music of Richard Wagner and that his own music reflected that influence.
2. We know that Mahler wrote a symphony, a work that received a cursory reading by the Conservatory
Orchestra.
3. By Mahler’s own admission, we also know that he did not complete a single work while at the
Conservatory, inevitably abandoning them after the first movement or two.
E. Accounts of Mahler as a Conservatory student offer conflicting descriptions of the young man.
Acquaintances and classmates variously remembered him as tyrannical and heartless, quiet and reserved,
and patient and generous. Even at his tender age, he was a complex person of extremes.
F. As a student of music in Vienna, Mahler had the opportunity to hear everyone and everything during his
three years in the city, including Wagner and Brahms conducting and Liszt and Anton Rubinstein playing
the piano.
G. No one exerted a greater influence on the young Mahler than Richard Wagner. Despite his virulent anti-
Semitism, Wagner represented to Mahler’s generation all that was modern, progressive, and revolutionary
in new music.
IV. Between 1878 and 1880, Mahler wrote Das klagende Lied, his first significant composition.
A. Mahler graduated from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878. The previous year, he had given up the idea of
becoming a professional pianist and, at this point in his life, at age eighteen, he had yet to conduct
anything.
1. For the next two years, while living on a small allowance from his family, Mahler wrote the cantata
Das klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow).
2. This piece of music is probably the first one that Mahler actually finished. It is the earliest complete
composition of his that has come down to us. It is also a major work by any standard.
B. In 1878, Mahler was a vegetarian (because of Wagner’s influence), a socialist, restless, unhappy, and in
love (it would come to nothing) and, thus, tortured by his hormones.
C. Mahler wrote the libretto for Das klagende Lied from an old folktale.
1. The story is that two brothers seek to marry a queen. The younger of the two finds a red flower that
will win her favor. The older brother kills the younger, steals the flower, and becomes engaged to the
queen.
2. A wandering minstrel finds one of the younger brother’s bones and makes a flute out of it; the flute,
when played, tells the story of the murder.
3. The minstrel plays at the wedding and the guests are stunned and horrified when they hear the story of
the murder. The castle falls and buries everyone.
4. This story, about the death of a brother, was close to Mahler’s heart. Mahler wrote his brother Ernst’s
name several times in the margin of the manuscript.
D. We will sample the magnificent opening of the third and last part of Das klagende Lied, entitled
“Hochzeitsstuck” (“Wedding Piece”).
1. This celebratory, joyful music begins the day that will end with the revelation of fratricide and the
destruction of the castle.
2. Be aware of Mahler’s extraordinary compositional technique. Even at age eighteen, he handles the
resources of a large chorus, vocal soloists, and orchestra quite well. (Musical selection: Das klagende
Lied, part 3 opening.)
E. Das klagende Lied is a brilliant work, a mixture of song, operatic choruses, and symphonic music. It is
also, even at this early date, “vintage” Mahler.
1. Expressively, it is about sorrow and tragedy, Romantic-era motifs that Mahler inherited and, through
the circumstances of his life and the nature of his personality, truly made his own.
2. For Mahler, sorrow “made the man”; he praised it as the defining element of life and believed that
sorrow endowed a person with emotional richness and depth.

V. During the late spring of 1880, Mahler, tired of living in constant financial need, decided to make some money
conducting. Despite the fact that he had never conducted, he determined that this was how composers made
money and, indeed, work could be found for novice conductors at the small theaters that dotted the Austrian,
Moravian, and Bohemian countryside.
A. Because of his reputation as a pianist, Mahler managed to obtain a booking agent, Gustav Lowy (or Levi).
Mr. Levi would be Mahler’s agent (or impresario, as he called himself) for the next ten years.
B. Mahler, the greatest conductor of his age, began his career in the tiny theater at the spa of Bad Hall in
upper Austria.
C. Within a few weeks, Mahler realized that he had found a calling.
1. Mahler claimed that he turned to conducting because he did not receive the Beethoven Composition
Prize in December 1881 for Das klagende Lied. In reality, the prize was not an issue.
2. Mahler craved stimulation, a performance venue for his gift of interpretation, the instant gratification
of live performance, an outlet for his tyrannical will, a career path through which he could direct his
extraordinary ambition, and the limelight. His career as a conductor gave him all of this and more.
3. Mahler’s need for activity could never have been satisfied by the relatively quiet life led by most
contemporary composers. He would not have been the composer he was without the stimulation
afforded by his career as a conductor.
D. Mahler’s next job was as conductor at the Landestheatre at Laibach, where he conducted his first opera,
Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, on October 3, 1881.
1. Mahler learned on the job; his career and apprenticeship were one and the same.
2. From the beginning, Mahler’s attention to detail and enthusiasm were noted by audiences and critics
alike. No one seemed to notice that he was a complete beginner.
3. On October 27, 1881, twenty-six days after conducting his first opera, Mahler conducted Mozart’s The
Magic Flute to rave reviews. The days of poverty were over.
E. Mahler’s next position, at the Stadttheatre in Olmutz (Moravia), was a disaster waiting to happen.
1. When Mahler assumed the position, in January of 1883, the theater was nearly bankrupt and in dire
artistic straights.
2. Mahler, with his enthusiasm and inflexibility regarding artistic mediocrity, managed to temporarily
turn the company around.
3. At Olmutz, while conducting a brilliant performance of Carmen from memory, Mahler came to the
attention of both the Dresden and Kassel operas. These operations were significantly more important
than the one at Olmutz.
F. In October 1883, nine months after taking the job at Olmutz and three years after first picking up a baton,
Mahler assumed the position of music and choral director of the Kassel Theater.
1. At that time, Kassel boasted a population of over 100,000; the Kassel Theater sat 1,600 and was used
interchangeably for spoken theater and opera.
2. Mahler’s administrative duties at Kassel were considerable, but they were dwarfed by his problems
with his “superiors” and the “professional musicians” with whom he worked.
3. Mahler set out to reform the opera company and raise it to his ever-higher standards. Soloists, chorus,
and orchestra found themselves rehearsing to the point of exhaustion.
4. Biographer Henry Raynor sums up Mahler’s conducting style at Kassal: “A small, pale tyrant with a
merciless tongue gave them no quarter. Mahler won a following because he created a tension and
excitement new to Kassel. The chorus and orchestra loathed him.”
5. Mahler, for his part, loathed the chorus and the orchestra in Kassel, with one notable exception: Joanna
Richter, a soprano at the Kassel Theater, with whom Mahler fell deeply in love. Mahler claimed, “She
is everything loveable in the world and I would give my last drop of blood for her” (de La Grange,
121).
6. Mahler and Richter may have been lovers; if so, she would almost certainly have been his first. In any
event, the affair was short and rapidly came to grief.
7. Mahler’s despair over his rejection inspired him to write six poems that portray the shame and pain he
was dealt. Of these, four would soon be set to music as The Songs of a Wayfarer.

VI. Mahler escaped from Kassel in 1885 at age twenty-five, taking a one-year position as assistant conductor at the
Landestheatre in Prague.
A. The following year, Mahler was engaged as one of three assistant conductors at the Neues Stadttheatre in
Leipzig.
1. Leipzig was the city of Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and
one of the newest opera houses in Europe.
2. The orchestra, which Mahler called, “One of the finest in the world,” consisted of seventy-six full-time
professional musicians; the chorus had seventy singers, some of them world class.
3. The theater stayed open all year and had a vast repertoire. A different work was performed almost
every evening.
4. The principal conductor at the Neues Stadttheatre was Artur Nikisch, the most famous and influential
conductor of the day.
B. Although most of the conducting plums went to Nikisch that first fall in Leipzig, Mahler had his share of
works to conduct. His disregard for “tradition” and scrupulous attention to detail made audiences and
critics either love him or hate him.
C. Mahler’s big break came in February of 1887, five months into his contract at Leipzig.
1. Nikisch had fallen gravely ill. On February 6, 1887, without warning, Mahler had to conduct Rossini’s
The Barber of Seville and, three days later, Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyries).
2. The Barber was a huge success; Die Walküre was a triumph, with Mahler receiving sustained applause
after each act and fifteen curtain calls at the conclusion of the performance.
D. The administrators of the Neues Stadttheatre decided that Mahler would replace Artur Nikisch for the
remainder of the season.
1. Mahler conducted seventeen different operas in March, sixteen different operas in April, and thirteen
different operas in May!
2. He crowned the season by conducting Wagner’s Ring cycle to unanimous enthusiasm.
E. For all intents and purposes, Mahler’s victory over his critics in Leipzig was complete, and his eventual
fame and fortune as a conductor were guaranteed.
VII. The other event of these Leipzig years was Mahler’s completion of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Die drei
Pintos (The Three Pintos).
A. Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was an extraordinary early-Romantic German composer, who died at
the age of forty. Even as a young conductor, Mahler had developed a well-earned reputation as an
interpreter of Weber’s music.
B. Sometime during the 1886–1887 concert season, Mahler met von Weber’s grandson, Baron Karl von
Weber, who asked Mahler if would he like to try to complete a comic opera begun by his grandfather but
left unfinished at his death.
1. The task must have seemed daunting. Of the seventeen scenes in the libretto, Weber had sketched
music for only seven, and his notation was illegibleno one had yet been able to decipher his peculiar
system of musical shorthand.
2. The orchestration was even more poverty stricken; only eighteen measures of the introduction were
fully scored.
3. At the same time, Mahler was busy conducting both his and Nikisch’s repertoire at the opera house.
C. After some initial indecision, Mahler took the project on and finished the opera in about four months. The
twenty-three–year-old Richard Strauss was one of the first people to see the completed manuscript and, in a
letter to the conductor Hans von Bülow, called it a “masterpiece.”
D. Mahler’s reconstruction or recomposition of Die drei Pintos was a huge success; performances almost
immediately took place across Europe and North America, and the publication of the score brought Mahler
good money. His budding fame and finances were substantially improved at just the time he began
composing again after a hiatus of three years.
VIII. Nikisch remained ill during the 1887–1888 season, which required Mahler to continue the duties of both the
principal and first assistant conductor.
A. During the season, he conducted over two hundred performances, presenting fifty-four different operas.

B. In 1888, Mahler was appointed music director and first conductor of the Royal Hungarian Opera in
Budapest.
1. This position was of major importance, involving choosing the repertoire, hiring and firing, and
controlling a budget of one million florins.
2. The appointment was a bombshell. Mahler was only twenty-eight years old, an unknown in Budapest,
a “German,” and a Jew.
3. In Mahler’s first speech to the opera orchestra and singers, he made his position known: “Discipline,
work. Work, discipline.”
C. Mahler instituted Hungarian language performances, to the howls of the “guardians of tradition” but to the
enduring affection of his audience. He also hired native Hungarian singers whenever possible.
D. Mahler remained in Budapest for three years.
1. In 1891, he assumed the post of conductor at the Hamburg Stadttheatre, one of the oldest and most
prestigious opera theaters in Europe.
2. At the height of the season, Mahler was conducting nineteen different operas a month.
3. By this point of his career Mahler’s mature conducting style was set: uncompromising, tireless, a
merciless crusader against mediocrity with an extraordinary eye and ear for detail. Mahler would bring
all these elements to his compositions.

Lecture Three
Early Songs and Symphony No. 1
Scope: Mahler’s years in Budapest were quite successful, with the exception of a performance of his own
Symphony No. 1 in 1889. Before the symphony, Mahler had composed many lieder, German Romantic
songs in which the poetry and music rival the best opera. His Songs of a Wayfarer shows the emotional
progression of a jilted lover attempting to deal with his rejection. In later works, Mahler identified certain
moods and situations with melodies he had originally created in his songs. Parts of Songs of a Wayfarer,
for example, reappear in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 to evoke the same emotions and expressive states that
they had originally represented in a song.
In 1887, Mahler discovered a poetic anthology entitled Des knaben Wunderhorn, or The Youth’s Magic
Horn, which was to become one of his greatest inspirations. Later in 1887, Mahler began composing his
Symphony No. 1, which focuses on the struggle between hope and despair.
Outline
I. During his three-year stint as director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest, Mahler became the darling of
the Hungarian musical world.
A. He put the opera theater back in the black, single-handedly created a school of Hungarian singing,
performed everything from Wagner to Mozart to Bizet in Hungarian, and conducted performances that
astonished audiences and critics alike.
B. Mahler experienced some hard times, too, during his tenure in Budapest. His parents died, first his father,
then his mother, both of heart disease, followed by his twenty-six–year-old sister, Leopoldine, of
meningitis in 1889.
C. Professionally, though, the Budapest years were marked by one success after another, with one glaring
exception.
1. In November 1889, Mahler secured a performance for his Symphony No. 1 (then entitled Symphonic
Poem). He had begun this work in Kassel in 1884 and completed it in Budapest in 1888.
2. The performance was not well received. Mahler later recalled that his friends in Budapest avoided him
afterwards and he “went about like a leper or an outlaw.” One critic wrote that although Mahler was a
conductor of the first rank, he was not, and should not consider himself, a composer.
3. We can draw two conclusions from this episode. First, Budapest was a conservative town, unlikely to
understand or appreciate a long, difficult new work on the first hearing.
4. Second, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 is, indeed, a long, difficult, highly personal, and idiosyncratic work
that flaunts tradition, plumbs heights and depths of pathos, and features musical juxtapositions that still
startle to this day. The music was new, combining Mahler’s Germanic training with his highly
complex Czech/Jewish soul.
II. At the heart of nineteenth-century German Romantic musicat the heart of Mahler’s compositional
impulseis the song, or lied, a composition for voice and piano.
A. Obviously, every musical culture has produced “songs,” accompanied vocal works, the content of which
can run the gamut from simple romance to the most emotional expression and story telling.
B. Nineteenth-century German Romantic lieder, however, became an experimental art form, in which
expressive German-language poetry was lavished with music that intensified and illustrated the meaning of
the words to a level that rivaled the best opera.
1. Such composers as Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf wrote songs and groups of songs
(song cycles) that, despite their brevity and miniscule performing forces (typically, piano and voice)
rival in their intensity of feeling and description anything heard in the opera house.
2. Mahler wrote many songs long before he wrote a single symphony. The German song tradition lies at
the heart of his compositional craft; it is not an overstatement to say that Mahler’s symphonies grow
directly out of his songs.

C. We have already observed Mahler’s first completed work, Das klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow).
Despite its orchestral interludes, this work is just what its title says, an extended “song” of sorrow. Mahler,
like many sensitive, artistic, “misunderstood” young people, considered himself a poet in his youth and
wrote the libretto himself.
1. As I mentioned, Mahler wrote a series of poems in 1884 at the end of his affair with the soprano
Joanna Richter.
2. Mahler almost immediately set four of these poems to music (for voice and piano). Together, these
songs constitute the song cycle entitled The Songs of a Wayfarer.
3. Mahler’s cycle is modeled on Schubert’s Wintereisse. In both works, the singers journey from the
scene of their “rejection” to find peace (or, in Mahler’s case, resignation), under a linden tree.
4. Mahler’s poetry, the text of the songs, is folk-like in sentiment and strophic in structure. The four
songs trace an emotional progression as the jilted lover seeks to deal with his rejection. The first song
deals with melancholy, grief, and frank self-pity.
5. The second song is about denial; the third finally gives way to righteous anger; and the fourth ends,
quietly and sadly, on a note of resignation. We will focus on the second song, the deeply moving Ging
heut’ morgen übers Feld (“I walked this morning over the field”).
D. Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld is a “strophic” song; the poem has four verses, and we hear the same music,
with important changes, four times. This song is about denial; the singer/jilted lover turns to nature for
solace and consolation and, initially at least, seems to lose himself in nature. Slowly, however, emotional
reality intrudes on his fantasy.
E. While you listen to the song, note the following elements. (Musical selection: Songs of a Wayfarer, No. 2:
Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld [1884; orchestrated 1896].)
1. The sweet, rustic, almost folk-like spirit of the melody.
2. The hint of sadness that begins during the third verse as the tempo begins to slow and the music quiets.
3. The bittersweet heartbreak of the fourth verse, in particular, the incredible, sigh-like high note on
“nimmer” (“never bloom for me”).
4. The gentle and lonely solo violin at the conclusion that both weeps for the singer and stands as a
metaphor for his singularity and isolation.
F. One of the most important things I can tell you about Mahler’s music is that he came to identify certain
moods, states of mind, and literary situations with melodies he had originally created for those moods and
situations in his songs.
1. For example, the lilting, rustic melody Mahler created for Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld represented,
in Mahler’s mind, the purity of nature, as well as the bittersweet nostalgia and unfulfilled yearning
with which the song ends.
2. For Mahler, the melody of this song took on in his mind’s ear the meaning of the words that the
melody set. Mahler would use those same melodies again in instrumental (nonvocal) works, if he
wanted to evoke the mood and spirit that a particular melody originally represented in a song.
G. Listen to the opening seconds of Ging heut’ morgen ü bers Feld. (Musical selection: Songs of a Wayfarer,
No. 2: Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld [1884; orchestrated 1896].) Now listen to the first theme of the first
movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 1, theme 1
[1888].)
H. Even though the symphony has no words, it is clear that Mahler is using this tune to evoke the same sense
of beauty, nature, naiveté, and potential heartbreak that it explicitly evoked in the song.
I. Mahler’s use of his song melodies, then, became a sort of personal musical iconography; his songs and
song melodies became emotional leitmotifs that he often plugged directly into his symphonic works as he
saw fit.
III. In the fall of 1887, during Mahler’s second season at Leipzig, he discovered the poetic anthology Des knaben
Wunderhorn, or The Youth’s Magic Horn, which had been published in 1808. The anthology is filled with
German-language folk poetry. Mahler was enchanted; the poetry was a revelation for him. The anthology
became Mahler’s single greatest inspiration, both musical and poetic, until around 1900.
A. As an example of this poetry we turn to “St. Anthony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes.”

B. The poetic metaphor is obvious: people, like the fish, spend their dreary and useless lives swimming
aimlessly about. They might listen to the words of a saint, they might even be temporarily moved by the
words of a saint, but ultimately, they will return to their flawed, empty lives filled with sin and vice.
C. The music Mahler supplied to this text is suitably comic, almost circus-like in its mocking of the fish and,
for that matter, St. Anthony. As you listen, note the following elements. (Musical selection: St. Anthony of
Padua Preaches to the Fishes, from Des knaben Wunderhorn, voice and piano [1893].)
1. Mahler marks the opening of the song “mit Humor” (“with humor”).
2. The perpetual “swimming” motion of the piano part is meant to represent the constant movement of
the fish.
3. The piano part is an equal partner to the voice, not only supplying the accompaniment but also
presenting much of the thematic melodic material of the song.
4. The lasting impression of the song, despite its humor, is of irony, almost bitterness, at the thoughtless
absurdity of everyday life.
D. Between 1887 and 1901, Mahler set twenty-four poems from The Youth’s Magic Horn to music. The
pieces were originally written for voice and piano, but Mahler later orchestrated most of the songs, so
today we might hear them in either version. (Musical selection: St. Anthony of Padua Preaches to the
Fishes, from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, voice and orchestra [1893].)
IV. Mahler composed his Symphony No. 1 between 1884 and 1888. He was thrilled to be composing again after a
hiatus of three years.
A. Mahler began his Symphony No. 1 in 1884 (in Kassel) and completed it in late May of 1888 (in Leipzig).
Again, we are astounded by both the technical mastery and expressive originality Mahler manages in his
“first” symphony.
B. Like all of Mahler’s symphonies, the first is a brilliant combination of program (storytelling) music,
Romantic expressive gestalt und angst und schmerz, and classical formal clarity and structural integrity.
C. Mahler generally objected to writing descriptive “programs” of his works, although others did not. Because
of the use of the melody from the song Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld in the first movement, Mahler’s
contemporaries referred to the symphony as a “love story.” Mahler objected to so literal an interpretation,
writing that the symphony was “greater than the love affair it is based on…”
D. Mahler’s friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner wrote: “[In his first symphony], all he had in mind was a
powerfully heroic individual, his life and suffering, struggles and defeat at the hands of fate.” She
continued:
"In the first movement, we are carried away by a Dionysian mood of jubilation, as yet unbroken and
untroubled. With the first note, the long sustained A in harmonics, we are in the midst of Nature: in the
forest, where the sunshine of the summer day quivers and glimmers through the branches."
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 1, introduction opening [1888].)
E. Bauer-Lechner also tells us that Mahler said: “The end of this movement will certainly not be understood
by the audience; it will fall flat. My hero bursts into a roar of laughter and runs away. Certainly no one will
ever discover the theme which the kettledrums play at the end!” By listening, can we divine the source
material for the end of the first movement (and, indeed, for much of the symphony)?
1. Listen to the timpani at the end of the first movement. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1,
movement 1, conclusion.)
2. Listen to the beginning of the first movement. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 1,
introduction opening [stepladder fourths].)
3. The melodic interval of a fourth is a basic thematic building block in the piece. That, in itself, is not all
that significant; what is notable is how much musical use Mahler gets out of this simple interval.
4. For example, the Triumphant March, the climax of the fourth movement, grows directly out of the
“stepladder” fourths of the first movement. (Musical selections: [At the piano], Symphony No. 1,
movement 1, introduction opening [stepladder fourths]; Symphony No. 1, movement 4, Triumphant
March.)
5. We find fourths everywhere. Early in the first movement, we meet a cuckoo bird. Typically in musical
depictions, cuckoo birds sing a downward major third; Mahler’s, of course, sings a downward fourth.
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 1, introduction, cuckoo in clarinet [A-E].)

6. Where did the idea of using these fourths come from in the first place? From the beginning of the
melody of Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld, which Mahler intended to include in the symphony from the
start. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 1, theme 1: Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld.)
7. The second movement of the symphony begins with a brief introduction that consists entirely of the
same falling/rising fourth (A–E) that began the first movement. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1,
movement 2, introduction opening.)
8. The opening theme of this second movement grows directly out of the Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld
melody. (Musical selections: Symphony No. 1, movement 2, opening theme; [at the piano], Ging
heut' and movement 2 theme relationship.)
9. The dramatic opening theme of the fourth movement also grows out of the melody from Ging heut’
morgen übers Feld. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 4, opening theme; [at the piano],
Ging heut' and movement 4 theme relationship.)
F. Before we end this brief discussion, we must listen to the third movement, by far the most striking and
controversial of this symphony.
1. Mahler’s inspiration for this movement was a children’s illustration by the artist Moritz von Schwind
entitled The Huntsman’s Funeral. The illustration depicts a torch-lit funeral procession of animals.
2. To describe this bizarre scene, Mahler juxtaposes a series of musical events that are correspondingly
bizarre.
3. Mahler begins the movement with a funeral march, a dark, minor-mode version of the children’s round
Frere Jacques (or Bruder Martin, as Mahler knew it). Note that the movement begins with a solo
double-bass playing high in its rangean orchestrational detail calculated to create an odd, ponderous
effect and guaranteed to sound strained and nervous. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement
3, opening thematic entries.)
4. Soon we hear a strange bit of melancholy and nostalgic dance music, replete with cymbals, drawn
directly from the central and eastern European tradition of Jewish Klezmer dance music. (Musical
selections: Symphony No. 1, movement 3, Klezmer; Klezmer Conservatory Band, Dos freylekhe
Shnayderl [The Happy Tailor].)
5. This music both “places” the forested scene in the central European environment in which Mahler
grew up and acknowledges the irony and bittersweet nature of life.
6. Just moments after we hear the dance music and moments before the funeral march returns, Mahler
inserts the music of his own song no. 4 from The Songs of a Wayfarer. Perhaps the message here is
that we must resign ourselves to the sometimes arbitrary, sometimes brutal, sometimes wonderful
aspects of life and to the inevitability of death.
7. As the movement approaches its conclusion, we hear the strange, circus-like, herky-jerky music of
celebration, followed by a hushed return to the conclusion of the funeral march. How unhappy are
these animals at the huntsman’s death? (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 3, concluding
celebration.)
V. Mahler’s symphonic language is one of expressive exaggeration, musical juxtapositions, and inclusivity.
A. Mahler’s famous dictum, “The symphony is the world; it must contain everything within it,” expresses his
own musical and compositional philosophy.
B. No other composer’s music better describes the inner landscape and struggles of its creator, and no other
composer manages to ask so many questions about the human condition in music as does Gustav Mahler.

Lecture Four
The Wunderhorn Symphonies
Scope: In 1893, after a hiatus of five years, Mahler returned to composing, beginning with his Symphony No. 2,
the first of the so-called Wunderhorn symphonies. This second symphony is an ambitious work, tracing the
progression of the death of an unnamed individual through stages of memory, bitterness at the folly of life,
and the questions of faith and resurrection. Symphony No. 3, written almost immediately after the second,
is a natural companion piece. It explores nature and the cosmos and the lives of plants, animals, people,
and angels, culminating in a hymn to divine love. The Fourth Symphony is Mahler’s “classical” symphony,
addressing a child’s innocent view of life and heaven without the intervening step of death.
Outline
I. During the summer of 1893, just as he was finishing his second symphony, Mahler told his friend Natalie
Bauer-Lechner: “My [first] two symphonies contain the inner aspect of my entire life; I have written into them
everything I have experienced and enduredTruth and Poetry in music.”
A. Natalie Bauer-Lechner was a violinist and Conservatory classmate of Mahler’s. In 1890, recovering from a
nasty divorce, she traveled to Budapest to visit Mahler.
B. The two became confidants for the next ten years, and Bauer-Lechner carefully transcribed their
conversations day after day in a manuscript entitled Mahleriana.
C. No doubt Natalie fell in love with Gustav who, for his part, considered Natalie one of the boys. Sadly but
predictably, their relationship broke off following Mahler’s marriage in 1901.
D. Natalie Bauer-Lechner was one of the few people who understood and appreciated Mahler’s music and
compositional potential.
1. Mahler seriously considered giving up composition in 1891, at the age of thirty-one.
2. At this point of his life, Mahler had little time to compose and he had almost no success whatsoever in
getting what music he had written performed, despite his extraordinary musical connections.
II. As we know, Mahler did not give up composing; rather, he underwent a compositional renaissance in 1892, a
rebirth spearheaded by the composition of songs with texts drawn from Des knaben Wunderhorn. These songs
would form the backbones of his next three symphonies, which are often referred to as the Wunderhorn
symphonies.
A. During the summer of 1893, while on holiday at Steinbach, Mahler returned to symphonic composition for
the first time in five years.
1. Drawing on musical materials sketched as far back as 1888 and working at a pace that genuinely
endangered his health, Mahler composed his Symphony No. 2 in C Minor (“Resurrection”).
2. Consciously modeled on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Mahler’s Second Symphony is a huge,
ambitious, five-movement work, in which the fourth movement is a song from Des Knaben
Wunderhorn and the fifth is a grand and magnificent movement for vocal soloists and chorus.
3. This last, choral, movement gave Mahler pause. He needed a text that was appropriate to the spirit of
the other movements. On March 29, 1894, at Hans von Bülow’s funeral, Mahler heard a setting of
Theodor Klopstock’s poetic ode, Resurrection (Auferstehn). It was a moment of inspiration.
4. When he completed the symphony, Mahler was absolutely giddy with delight.
5. As we previously discussed, Mahler hated writing programs to accompany his symphonies, but he
made an exception to his own rule when he wrote a program for his second symphony at the request of
his new wife, Alma. We’ll use the program Mahler prepared as we seek to understand the large-scale
dramatic flow of his Symphony No. 2.
B. Symphony No. 2, movement 1
1. “We are standing beside the coffin of a man beloved.” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2,
movement 1, opening funeral march.)
2. “Is it all an empty dream, or has this life of ours, and our death, a meaning?” (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 2, movement 1, recapitulation, resurrection theme/theme 3.)
C. Note the following elements in this selection.

1. Quiet, funereal drums;
2. Trumpet blast signaling a violent descent as the coffin is lowered into the grave; “All perishes that
exists”;
3. A five-minute pause, indicated before the start of the second movement. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 2, movement 1, conclusion.)
D. Symphony No. 2, movement 2: “A blissful moment in his life and a mournful memory of youth and lost
innocence.” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2, movement 2, opening theme.)
E. Symphony No. 2, movement 3: “The spirit of disbelief and negation has taken possession of him. Looking
into the turmoil of appearances, he loses together with the clear eyes of childhood the sure foothold which
love alone gives. He despairs of himself and God. The world and life become a witches’ brew; disgust of
existence in every form strikes him with an iron fist and drives him to despair.” (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 2, movement 3, opening.)
1. For this movement, Mahler created an extended orchestral version of the song St. Anthony of Padua
Preaches to the Fishes.
2. In his mind, the satiric and ironic metaphor of brainless, soulless fish (people), meandering mindlessly
through their daily existence, fit perfectly the expressive image he wanted to create.
F. Symphony No. 2, movement 4
1. “The mourning voice of ingenuous belief sounds in our ears. I am from God and will return to God!
God will give me a candle to light me to the bliss of eternal life.”
2. Mahler offers here another song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, entitled Urlicht, or Primordial Light.
3. The movement is scored for alto singer and orchestra; the alto singer, because of her low vocal range,
becomes everyperson. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2, movement 4, verse 1; Symphony No. 2,
movement 4, verse 3.)
4. The ethereal, twilight world the music creates sets the stage for the explosive and magnificent fifth
movement.
G. Symphony No. 2, movement 5
1. “We are again confronted by terrifying questions.” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2, movement
5, measures 1–26.)
2. “The great and the little ones of the earthkings and beggars, righteous and godlessall press on; the
cry for mercy and forgiveness strikes fearfully on our ears. The wailing rises higherour senses desert
us; consciousness dies at the approach of the eternal spirit…” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2,
movement 5, measures 192–225.)
3. “A chorus of saints and heavenly beings softly breaks forth…” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2,
movement 5, measures 448–471.)
4. “Then appears the glory of God! A wondrous, soft light penetrates us to the heartall is holy calm!
And beholdthere is no judgment. There are no sinners, no just. None is great, none is small. There is
no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love lightens our being. We know and are.”
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 2, movement 5, verse 8, measures 712–end.)
III. The premiere of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, in Berlin on December 13, 1895, offered him one of the few
unadulterated triumphs of his compositional life.
A. The Berlin audience was tremendously moved by the performance.
B. A 1910 Parisian performance of the same symphony elicited different results. According to Alma Mahler,
Debussy, Dukas, and Pierné, walked out during the second movement.
C. Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 is a philosophical tract, a spiritual and emotional journey that documented
Mahler’s pan-religious belief structure as it existed in 1894.
1. This belief system is neither Jewish nor Christian; the message of the symphony seems to have more in
common with various Indian and Eastern religious philosophies than European.
2. Like Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 5 and 9, Mahler’s Second is a “catharsis” symphonyit begins
darkly and tragically in minor and achieves, ultimately, major-mode triumph in its finale.

IV. Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, written almost immediately after the Second, in 1895–1896, is the natural
companion piece to No. 2.
A. Mahler’s Third is, like the second, a massive piece in six movements, scored for large orchestra, vocal
soloist, and chorus.
B. The third also uses a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn to explore nature and the cosmos, evolution, the
seasons, and the lives of plants and animals, people and angels. It culminates in an extraordinary, twenty-
seven–minute hymn to divine love.
C. In a letter dated August 29, 1895, Mahler laid out the plan of the symphony to his friend Fritz Lohr:
“…The movements are meant to express the arrangement of all creation, as follows:
I. The creation of life out of lifeless matter/What the Mountains Tell Me
II. What the Flowers Tell Me
III. What the Animals Tell Me
IV. What Mankind Tells Me
V. What the Angels Tell Me
VI. What Love Tells Me” (Floros, 88)
D. Let us sample the first movement, which Mahler referred to variously as “the awakening of Pan,” “the
creation of life out of lifeless matter,” “summer marches in,” and “what the mountains tell me.”
1. Note as you listen that from the “void” comes jagged, primeval, craggy vertical power; uneroded as
yet by the forces of nature; undecorated by the niceties of human civilization (melodic embellishment).
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 3, movement 1 opening [1896].)
2. Of this opening music, Mahler said, “It is hardly music…just the voice of nature: one shudders at this
motionless, soulless material, from which, little by little, life frees itself and finally conquers,
developing and differentiating step-by-step: flowers, animals, men, right up to the kingdom of the
spirit and that of the angels” (de La Grange, 365).
3. According to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, while writing this piece, Mahler “was struck with the most
uncanny sense of awe,” yet he still believed himself a martyr who would not be understood in his
lifetime.
V. We conclude this lecture with a quick reference to Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 (1900).
A. It is the third and last of the Wunderhorn symphonies, so called because of the inclusion, as its fourth
movement, of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
B. The Fourth is entry-level Mahler, the most gracious and unselfconscious of his symphonies, almost
completely devoid of the weighty, ironic, and dark philosophical and expressive elements of his other
work.
C. Like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (No. 41), and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4,
Mahler’s Fourth is his “classical” symphonythe shortest, most structurally clear, and most thematically
lyric of all his work. It is “about” a child’s (Mahler’s) innocent view of life and heaven without the
typically intervening step of death.

Lecture Five
Alma and Vienna
Scope: In November of 1901, Mahler met Alma Schindler, a beautiful young woman who was also an aspiring
composer. Within a few weeks, Alma was pregnant, and in March of the following year, the two were
married. Mahler demanded that Alma give up her music, for which she never forgave him. A few years
before Mahler met Alma, he had converted to Catholicism to secure a position at the Vienna Opera. His
appointment as music director in 1897 created a firestorm in the press, but his debut was an almost magical
triumph. He also instituted reforms at the opera, and his first few years there were phenomenally
successful.
Outline
I. Sometime during the spring of 1894, Mahler explained to his friend J. B. Forster what he would require from a
wife, should he ever marry. His conditions: She should understand that he would want her company only at
certain planned times, she must be well groomed, and she should not be upset if he showed no interest in her.
A. The great love of Mahler’s life during the 1890s was the singer Anna von Mildenburg, a superb lyric
soprano whom Mahler almost single-handedly turned into one of the great singers of her day. Their affair
was the most passionate and powerful of Mahler’s life.
B. Unfortunately, it is impossible to imagine a woman any less like Mahler’s dream girl than the overly
sensitive, possessive, hot-tempered, and demanding Anna von Mildenburg.
C. Their breakup, in 1897, was inevitable, but Mahler’s relationship with Anna lit a fire in him that he could
no longer ignore. He wanted to be in love, to marry, to settle down, and to have children. The woman he
believed to be perfect for him came along just a few years later, Alma Schindler.
II. On November 7, 1901, Mahler attended at dinner at the house of a well-known Viennese hostess. Sitting across
from him was the young and strikingly beautiful Alma.
A. As he left that evening, Mahler invited his hostess, her sister, and Alma to attend the rehearsal of
Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann the following day at the opera house. Alma was twenty-three years old,
eighteen years younger than Mahler. Despite her misgivings, she attended the opera rehearsal the next day.
B. For Mahler, the attraction might not have been love at first sight, but it was close. Alma was a native
Viennese, the daughter and stepdaughter of famous painters.
1. Her father, Jakob Emil (whom she adored), was the most celebrated painter of landscapes in the
Austrian Empire. Indeed, Alma’s family members were central players in the rarefied intellectual and
artistic atmosphere of Vienna’s elite.
2. Alma’s father died when she was fourteen, and she was crushed. Her mother remarried four years
later, to Karl Moll, another painter and one of the founders of the Viennese Secession movement.
Alma, who did not get along with her mother, was appalled.
3. Having lost her father at fourteen, Alma turned to a succession of older men for solace and
mentorship. One after another, these men fell in love with her.
4. At the age of sixteen, Alma began seriously studying music; by the time she met Mahler, she was an
accomplished pianist and a composer of some promise.
C. On November 27, just twenty days after they first met, Mahler showed up unexpectedly at Alma’s house.
1. Before dinner, Gustav and Alma went for a walk, during which he suddenly blurted out some of his
requirements for a wife and Alma replied that she understood.
2. Within a matter of weeks, Alma was pregnant and, on March 9, 1902, the two were married.
D. Both the couple and their relatives had misgivings about the marriage, but Alma and Gustav were in love.
III. At first glance, Alma didn’t think much of Mahler’s music. And Mahler, for his part, was terrified that his
bride-to-be wouldn’t like or understand his music. But the big bone of contention between the two was not to
be Mahler’s music, but Alma’s.
A. About six weeks into their courtship, Alma, writing to Gustav while he was in Dresden, excused the letter’s
brevity because she had a composition lesson coming up and had work to do.

B. Mahler responded with a long, thoughtful, excruciatingly honest, and unbelievably selfish letter demanding
that Alma renounce her musical ambitions.
C. Alma wept, and her friends and family told her not to give up her music, but Alma, twenty-three years old,
vain and flirtatious, selfish, impulsive, conceited and capricious, was captivated by the depth, the spirit, the
strength, and the purity she attributed to Gustav Mahler.
D. Alma outlived Mahler by fifty-three years, dying in Los Angeles in 1964. She never composed another
note and never forgave Mahler for making her choose between him and her music.
IV. By the time Gustav met Alma in 1901, he was one of the most powerful and important musicians in the world,
living and working in Vienna as the music director of the Royal Vienna Opera.
A. The fall of 1896 marked Mahler’s fifth anniversary at Hamburg.
1. In addition to his opera responsibilities, Mahler had conducted the Hamburg Symphony during the
1895–1896 season.
2. He adored symphonic conducting, but management, at wits end with Mahler’s artistic intransigence,
not only denied his request to continue the symphonic conducting but also began assigning the
operatic plums to other conductors.
B. Mahler began casting about for a new position and heard that Wilhelm Jahn, the director of the Vienna
Opera, was losing his eyesight and would soon step down. The Vienna Opera was the most prestigious
musical institution in Europe.
C. For Mahler, such a position would mean climbing to the top and ruling from the summit. He was only
thirty-six years old in 1896, and this position would make his career.
D. The story of Mahler’s application, audition, and ascension to the position is long and complicated; the
following are the highlights.
1. Fall 1896: Mahler’s friend, Rosa Papier, advises him that for the time being, he should apply for a
position as conductor in Vienna.
2. Fall 1896: Mahler contacts everyone he knows who might help him overcome the countless obstacles
he knew he would face, making numerous visits and writing hundreds of letters.
3. January 1897: Mahler is informed that “under present circumstances, it is impossible to engage a Jew
in Vienna” (de La Grange).
4. January 1897: Mahler’s nomination gains the support of Eduard Hanslick, Vienna’s most influential
music critic and a close friend of Johannes Brahms.
5. February 23, 1897: Mahler converts to Catholicism.
6. April 8, 1897: Mahler is appointed one of the four conductors of the Vienna Opera; just six months
later, Mahler will be appointed music director, thereby deriving his authority from the emperor
himself.
7. The anti-Semitic Viennese press goes wild.
E. Despite the response in the press, the fact that the Emperor Franz Joseph and his advisors had placed a
thirty-eight–year-old Bohemian Jew at the head of the single most important cultural institution in the
empire reveals just how liberal the Habsburgs, and Franz Joseph in particular, had become.
1. The Jewish middle class had become a backbone of late nineteenth-century Viennese society, and
Jewish artists and thinkers were central players in Viennese intellectual life.
2. The Austrian Empire, with Vienna as its capital, had been in decline for a hundred years, eclipsed by
the growing power of Prussia and, eventually, a united Germany. But Austria’s decline was well
concealed by Vienna’s prosperity and brilliant culture.
3. By the turn of the twentieth century, as the political problems facing the Austrian Empire became
increasingly insoluble, “The dominant Viennese characteristics were a sort of pessimism, a hedonism,
a love of spectacle, and an amused, blasé, and often morbid skepticism” (de La Grange).
4. Gustav Mahler, himself a man of a thousand moods and faces, arrived into a conservative, liberal,
Jewish-empowered, anti-Semitic, opera-crazed environment to take over the spring season of 1897.

V. On May 11, 1897, Mahler made his Viennese debut with Wagner’s Lohengrin.
A. Every review, every reminiscence of the debut performance recalls Mahler’s magical, almost mystical
triumph, with the audience spontaneously applauding every time he used an unfamiliar tempo or did
anything out of the ordinary.
B. Unfortunately, Mahler’s responsibilities at the Vienna Opera, particularly after he assumed the position of
music director on October 8, 1897, left him no time to compose. He was busy, and not just with
conducting; the reforms he instituted at the opera were as uncompromising as his conducting style.
1. He abolished the practice of “claques,” by which singers would buy up tickets and install ready-made
cheering sections in the audience, whose job it was to applaud their benefactor and disrupt the other
singers.
2. He abolished the practice of allowing latecomers into a performance once it had begun, no matter how
rich, aristocratic, and influential they were. The emperor himself backed Mahler on this.
3. He also did away with the distribution of complimentary tickets, insisting that the critics buy their
own.
4. Mahler rankled everyone, but he delivered, quickly making the Vienna Opera and the Vienna Opera
Orchestra (known as the Vienna Philharmonic during the off season) the best performing institutions
in the Western world.
C. Despite the difficulties he encountered, Mahler’s first few years in Vienna were phenomenally successful.
1. For a time, he conducted both the opera and the Vienna Philharmonic concerts, the audiences adored
him, and he became a genuine celebrity and something of a legend in his own time.
2. It was this “legend” that Alma Schindler met in November 1901.
VI. The Mahler marriage experienced the discord of two very mismatched people. Unfortunately, the best
documentation we have of the marriage and the last ten years of Mahler’s life, from 1901–1911, are Alma’s
“diaries,” which are deeply flawed.
A. In her time, Alma was considered quite beautiful; Gustav was not particularly attractive. He twitched
constantly; had an odd manner of walking; and was of less than middle height, slender, and weak in
appearance, although he possessed exceptional strength. He also suffered from gastric upsets, migraine
headaches, and hemorrhoidsphysically, he was a mixed blessing.
B. Alma should never even have considered marrying Mahler.
C. Her resentment toward Mahler, which began with her renunciation of music, grew and festered with time.
D. Mahler was a difficult older man, and he predeceased his wife by fifty-three years. After his death, Alma
had time to get back at Gustav, to alter and destroy letters, and to paint herself as a martyr.
E. Over the remaining three lectures, we will draw extensively from Alma’s reminiscences, but in general,
only from those passages that deal with external events and “third parties.”
F. Gustav Mahler was no peach, but neither was Alma Schindler. She was a talented, powerful woman who
lived at a time when her power had to be filtered through the men in her life.
G. Ultimately, as one biographer has said, “In spite of the sufferings and conflicts their union was to
engender, Alma transformed and enriched Mahler’s life and gave him a new incentive to live, to strive, and
of course, to create” (de La Grange, Volume 2, 470).

Lecture Six
Family Life and Symphony No. 5
Scope: Mahler experienced the best years of his life from 1902 to 1907. He and Alma had started a family and
built a summerhouse where Mahler could compose. His music was finally being accorded some respect. In
1902, he completed his Symphony No. 5, which is unlike any of his previous works. The Fifth, a superb
example of the expressionist art movement, describes the progressive emotional states of the grieving
process. Around this time, Mahler also befriended Arnold Schönberg, one of the most well-known
expressionist composers of the early twentieth century. Although their musical languages differed, the two
men ultimately developed a lasting relationship.
Outline
I. The years from 1902 to 1907 were, for all their ups and downs, the best of Mahler’s life.
A. He had a young, loving wife and the closest thing to domestic tranquility he would ever experience.
B. Alma had also managed to pay off the staggering debt that Mahler’s brothers and sisters had accumulated
for him.
C. By late 1902, Mahler had a family. On November 3, 1902, Alma gave birth to their first child, Maria,
whom Gustav loved greatly. Their second child, Anna, was born on June 15, 1904.
D. The years 1902–1907 also saw the completion of Mahler’s summerhouse in Maiernigg, on Lake Werther
(Werthersee), a gorgeous spot that would be Mahler’s home away from home for six years. He composed
his fifth through eighth symphonies there, as well as the Kindentotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of
Children).
E. Perhaps most important, by 1902, Mahler’s music, although still considered revolutionary, difficult, and
problematic, was also being treated with a level of respect that must have given Mahler some feeling of
vindication.
1. For example, when Mahler conducted the premiere of his Third Symphony on June 9, 1902, he scored
a rare triumph. The house was full with paying ticket-holders; the audience response was tremendous,
and included celebrities such as Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Mengelberg, and the reviews were
outstanding.
2. Mahler’s music was not out of the woods yet, but it was coming to be understood and respected.
II. Inspired by the triumphant premiere of his Third Symphony in June of 1902, Mahler and Alma hurried to their
lake house at Maiernigg, where Mahler completed his Symphony No. 5 that summer.
A. In its expressive content, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 is unlike any of his previous works.
1. Mahler’s Fifth seeks to describe the progressive emotional states of the grieving process. It is a
psychodrama, a superb example of expressionism, a contemporary art movement that celebrated inner
reality as the only reality. His first four symphonies, in contrast, are all narrative dramas in the style of
nineteenth-century program music.
2. Mahler’s Fifth is not influenced by the youthful, rustic, and naïve mood of the Wunderhorn poems or
his own youthful poems, which formed the basis for his First Symphony.
3. Mahler composed his Fifth Symphony in full score, rather than in a short score that was later
orchestrated. More than any other of his previous works, the Fifth was conceived whole, as an
orchestral entity, from its inception.
B. Mahler’s Fifth, again, is about our emotional progressionthe conscious and unconscious emotional
response to the death of someone close to us. The symphony consists of five movements bunched together
to form three large parts.
1. Part one consists of movements 1 and 2. Movement 1, entitled Trauermusik (“Funeral March”), acts as
a grand introduction to the stormy and agitated movement 2, where grief and rage are given full
spleen.
2. Part two consists of movement 3. This long, dancing movement confirms that as long as we have
rhythm, beat, and heartbeat, life will go on.

3. Part three consists of movements 4 and 5. Movement 4, the superb and famous Adagietto, is a lyric
and magnificent meditation on the bittersweet reality of life. Finally, movement 5 is a giddy
reaffirmation of life, which looks back on the emotional distance we have traveled in the earlier
movements and looks forward to a triumphant conclusion, as if to say, “Live now and live well.”
C. Only Gustav Mahler would be willing to submerge himself in such thoughts of grief and pain during the
best years of his life to express these feelings that the rest of us would rather avoid.
III. The first movement begins with a stark, funereal fanfare initiated by a solo trumpet. This emotionally
uncluttered music represents the immediacy of death. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 1,
opening fanfare.)
A. This funereal fanfare is the binding formal element of the movement. It will return, in different forms, three
times, each time representing the unambiguous, irrevocable presence of death.
B. This opening fanfare is followed by a monotonous, almost numb funeral march. This music represents the
necessary rituals surrounding death. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 1, funeral march,
measures 34–103.)
1. The music is numb and quiet because we, as mourners, are numb and quiet; reality has not yet set in,
nor has the grief process truly begun. During the rituals immediately following death, it is enough for
us simply to remain upright and coherent.
2. The plodding inevitability of this theme also acts as a metaphor for the plodding inevitability of death
itself.
C. However, in the presence of death, our hearts, and Mahler’s music, will not remain calm for long. (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 1, grieving theme, measures 155–185.)
1. The second section of the movement explodes from the first; it is labeled “wild,” and we are
introduced to the grieving theme, stark, violent, angular, despairing, and unrestrained music.
2. This theme comes to represent the stabbing initial pain of grief, the revelation that this nightmarish
ritual is real.
3. As the movement continues, the funereal fanfare and funeral march, representing the “reality, the
unsentimentality” of death, alternate with wildly emotional music of different types, as we, the living,
undergo that extraordinary range of emotions that only death can force on us.
D. About midway through the movement, we hear an attempt at quiet consolation. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 5, movement 1, Kindertotenlieder quote, measures 295–316.)
1. For this exquisitely lyric and temporary moment of consolation, Mahler quotes a song he had just
completed entitled Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgehn (“Now the sun will rise as brightly”).
2. The song’s text is by the nineteenth-century German Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, and it came
from a collection entitled Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children).
3. Can we think of any experience less consolable than the death of a child? Here in the Fifth Symphony,
first movement, Mahler used the music he wrote to accompany the last line of the poem, “Hail to the
joyous light of the world.”
E. By the end of the first movement, we have experienced the piercing pain of the grieving theme; the attempt
at consolation offered by the Kindertotenlieder quote; and a third theme, the sorrow, or lamentation, theme,
itself a throbbing, toned-down version of the grieving theme. Always, these themes are surrounded by the
funeral music; they convey internal responses to a terrible external reality.
F. Mahler’s Fifth is not about the trials and tribulations of a Romantic “hero,” as his first symphony was; nor
is it, like the second, about life and death and resurrection; about humankind, nature, and angels, like the
third, or a child’s view of heaven, like the fourth.
1. Unlike these, Mahler’s fifth represents musical expressionism; it is very modern, very Viennese
Secessionist, and very Freudian.
2. Mahler might still be speaking in the tonal language of the nineteenth century, but the expressive
content of his Symphony No. 5 is very much of the twentieth century.
G. The second movement of Mahler’s Fifth is even more remarkable than the first. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 5, movement 2, introduction and "Storm" theme.)
1. We, as mourners, have had time to reflect on our loss, and we are filled with blinding, white-hot rage.

2. We feel rage at the loss of someone we loved, at being left behind, at death and the certainty of our
own mortality, and at the whole farce of life.
3. Ultimately, however, the music simply collapses, its energy completely spent. How long can any of us
maintain that ripping, tearing level of emotion before we are utterly spent?
H. Near the end of this second movement, after emotional trials and tribulations, Mahler gives us a glimpse of
joy, a triumphant hymn that promises us that “all things will pass.” Perhaps, sometime in the future, we can
transcend our pain and enter, emotionally and spiritually, a higher, more enlightened place. (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 2, D major hymn, measures 464–519.)
I. The third movement comprises the second large section of the symphony. In this extraordinary scherzo,
Mahler reactivates the living soul within us by activating the body through dance. The dances contained in
this movement run the gamut from a simple, rustic, life-affirming three-step (Landler) to a melancholy
Viennese waltz. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 3, opening.)
J. The fourth movement is the famous Adagietto. The astonishing, otherworldly lyricism of this movement
balances the ferocity of the second movement. It wistfully allows us to acknowledge our loss and
remember the deceased without becoming hysterical. We have mastered our grief to the extent that we can
remember the best without feeling our worst. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 4, opening.)
K. The fifth and final movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 is a brilliant orchestral and compositional tour-
de-force. (Musical selection: Mahler, Symphony No. 5, movement 5, opening.)
L. This movement, and the symphony, concludes with an extended version of the joyful, triumphant hymn
first heard near the end of the second movement. This brilliant, D major music is no longer a “promise” of
things to come but a promise fulfilledlife goes on and life is good if we choose to make it so. (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 5, conclusion, measures 711–end.)
M. The reviewers of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 didn’t know what to make of it, so they panned it. We now see
it as one of the genuine orchestral masterworks of the twentieth century.
IV. I believe that Mahler’s Fifth is, at heart, an expressionist work of art. When we think of early twentieth-century
expressionist composers, however, we usually think of Arnold Schönberg and his students Alban Berg and
Anton Webern.
A. Arnold Schönberg was born in Vienna in 1874; he was fourteen years Mahler’s junior. Like Mahler, he
was Jewish, and like Mahler, Schönberg’s alienation from his native culture allowed him to take expressive
steps and make compositional innovations that a more comfortable and culturally vested composer would
never have made.
B. What separates Mahler’s expressionism from Schönberg’s is that Mahler used the nineteenth-century
musical language, whereas Schönberg largely dispensed with traditional musical language and, in many
ways, created his own.
C. Alma introduced Mahler and Schönberg to each other; the two men had a stormy and, ultimately, most
touching relationship.
1. The young and messianic Arnold Schönberg had, at first, been convinced that Mahler was nothing but
a composer who was obsolete in his own time.
2. After hearing a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, however, Schönberg deeply moved,
changed his mind about Mahler.
3. Mahler, for his part, protected Schönberg from disturbances caused by audiences who did not
understand his music and lent him money when Schönberg was jobless and in dire financial need.
D. On Mahler’s fiftieth birthday, Schönberg wrote him a letter of appreciation.
1. The letter is significant, in part, because it speaks for the incredible number of contemporary
composers whose music Mahler performed and championed throughout his career as a conductor.
2. Incredibly, the letter also reveals Schönberg asking for forgiveness for his early misunderstanding of
Mahler’s work. At the time, Schönberg himself was the unforgiving and unrepentant messiah of new
music.
3. Schönberg’s letter reached Mahler in New York City, where he was conducting the New York
Philharmonic. How Mahler got to New York, and the circumstances surrounding his departure from
Vienna, will occupy much of the next lecture.

Lecture Seven
Symphony No. 6, and Das Lied von der Erde
Scope: Mahler composed his dark Symphony No. 6 during the summers of 1903 and 1904, when he was never
happier. Alma attributed the Sixth’s tragic end to Mahler’s premonition of the three events that would
shatter their lives in 1907: his resignation from the Royal Vienna Opera, the death of their elder daughter,
and the diagnosis of his heart disease. In 1908, Mahler threw himself into composing Das Lied von der
Erde as his only solace from the grief of his daughter’s death. The work is a symphonic song cycle about
loss, grief, memory, disintegration, and transfiguration.
Outline
I. Mahler composed his Symphony No. 6 during the summers of 1903 and 1904.
A. The piece is known as Mahler’s “tragic” symphony because it is the only one that ends soberly, rather than
triumphantly (as the First, Second, Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth do) or with a transfiguration (as the Third,
Fourth, and Ninth do).
B. Remember that Mahler was never happier than he was during the summers of 1903 and 1904 when he
composed the symphony. Perhaps, like Beethoven, Mahler was able to grapple most effectively with
darkness, pessimism, and tragedy when he was actually most happy and could, therefore, deal with
emotional issues objectively that might otherwise have torn him apart.
C. However, many commentators, including Alma, have ascribed the Sixth’s tragic end to Mahler’s
premonition of the three events that would shatter their lives in 1907. According to Alma, Mahler said that
he had tried to capture her in the second theme of the first movement. (Musical selection: Symphony No.
6, movement 1, second theme, “Alma” [1904].)
D. Again, Alma tells us, “In the last movement he describes himself and his downfall or, as he said later, the
downfall of his hero. ‘The hero who receives three blows from fate, the third of which fells him like a tree.’
These are Mahler’s words” (Floros, 163). (Musical selection: Symphony No. 6, movement 4, "hammer
blows of fate.")
E. Alma concludes: “No other work has flowed so directly from his heart as this one. We both cried at the
time; we felt so deeply what this music meant, what it forebodingly told us. The Sixth is his most personal
work and is also a prophetic one” (Floros, 163). (Musical selection: Symphony No. 6, movement 4,
conclusion.)
II. The year 1907 was the beginning of the end for Mahler, the year of the three hammer blows: his resignation
from the Royal Viennese Opera; the death of his elder daughter, Maria; and the diagnosis of his diseased heart.
A. Mahler was appointed music director of the Royal Vienna Opera in October of 1897. The inevitable
problems with the Viennese authorities began as early as 1898, when Mahler was but one year into his
tenure.
1. The problems began with money. Mahler was infuriated when the budget he submitted for the fall
season of 1898 was rejected.
2. He had reduced the deficit he had inherited and felt that the Viennese authorities were not showing
proper respect for what he had already accomplished.
3. Mahler also believed that the authorities were limiting the singers he could hire, in a sense, making
artistic decisions, which Mahler could not abide.
B. In addition, although Mahler understood the importance of respecting the stagehands and rewarding their
work, he was tyrannical with the performers. Hostility was building within the opera.
C. Despite Mahler’s extraordinary success at the opera and his almost universal critical acclaim, his
intransigence as a man and conductor and the “revolutionary” aspects of his own compositions provided
constant grist for the anti-Semitic press.
D. Despite these tensions, Mahler continued to use his summer vacations to extraordinary creative advantage.
1. The summers of 1904 and 1905 saw the composition of Symphony No. 7.
2. In 1906 Symphony No. 8 was written.

E. Mahler’s despotism and sheer fanaticism exhausted everyone around him, physically and emotionally.
1. By 1907, his enemies outnumbered his friends at the Vienna Opera.
2. A new wave of attacks in the press began on January 1, 1907, when a thoroughly negative summary of
Mahler’s recent activities was published in the Deutsches Volksblatt. A series of vicious articles then
appeared in various papers.
F. Mahler was approaching forty-seven years old, was getting tired, and was finally slowing down.
1. He was disgusted by what he perceived as an ungrateful public. Attendance at the opera house fell off
precipitously and troublemakers began booing him from the promenade seats behind the orchestra.
2. Mahler was weary of fighting with the musicians and singers in his never-ending battle against
carelessness and mediocrity.
3. He asked for a new contract and was humiliated when his request was publicly refused.
4. By the end of May, Mahler had decided to resign his position and, by the beginning of June, despite
serious misgivings, he had decided to accept an offer from Heinrich Conrad, the director of the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, to conduct at the Met during the following season.
5. After having lived and worked in one place for ten years, Mahler once again became Ahaseurus, the
Wandering Jew.
6. On June 29, 1907, Mahler and his family departed for their summer home at Maiernigg on Lake
Werther. There, his life would go from bad to catastrophic.
III. Once again, we turn to Alma Mahler for a description of that summer: “On the third day of our holiday the
older child (Marie/Putzi) was already beginning to show alarming symptoms. It was a combination of scarlet
fever and diphtheria, and she was doomed from the start” (de La Grange, Volume 3, 690).
A. Marie, whom Alma described as Mahler’s favorite, lingered for two weeks. The pain of her illness was
almost unbearable for Mahler.
B. Almost immediately following Marie’s death, doctors declared that both Alma and Gustav had serious
heart conditions.
1. We now know that Mahler’s heart had a valve dysfunction that was not fatal. In 1907, however,
Mahler’s doctors couldn’t make that distinction; they assumed the worst and turned Mahler into a
cardiac invalid.
2. According to Alma, doctors forbade Mahler to engage in the exercise and sports that he had always
enjoyed.
C. Mahler and his family fled the house at Maiernigg; they would never return, although it stands to this day.
1. Apparently, Mahler never spoke to anyone about the death of his daughter. He even forbade Alma
from wearing mourning clothes.
2. People who knew him well saw the depth of Mahler’s suffering.
3. He coped by reading voraciously and composing.
D. In Vienna, the authorities were having an impossible time finding and hiring a new conductor for the
opera. No one wanted to risk being Mahler’s successor. Ultimately, Felix Weingartner took the job, but he
quit after two and a half years, even more discouraged and disgusted than Mahler had been.
IV. Mahler’s four-year contract with New York’s Metropolitan Opera called for him to conduct for three months a
season, with all travel and housing expenses to be paid by the opera.
A. Musically and financially, Mahler’s first season in New York was a great success. Between January and
late April 1908, he conducted twenty-seven performances in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
1. His accommodations, an eleventh-floor suite at the Majestic Hotel overlooking Central Park, were
palatial, and he was making a lot of money.
2. He and Alma were fascinated with New York, but of course, just beneath the surface was still raw
grief.
B. On returning to Europe, the Mahlers rented a home in the village of Tobloch. There, Mahler would
compose Das Lied von der Erde and his ninth and tenth symphonies.

V. The summer of 1908 began badly; the Mahlers were still grieving for their daughter and Mahler was in constant
fear for his health and life.
A. Alma reported, “This summer was the saddest we were to spend together. Every excursion, every attempt
at distraction was a failure. Grief and anxiety pursued us wherever we went. Work was his one resource.
He slaved at Das Lied von der Erde…These poems, and their infinite melancholy, answered his own”
(Alma Mahler, 142).
B. Das Lied von der Erde is one of the great masterworks of the repertoire. We will begin a brief exposition
of this work now and continue it in Lecture Eight.
C. Das Lied von der Erde is a symphonic song cycle, consisting of six songs for alto and tenor voice and
orchestra. The texts come from Hans Bethge's translation of Chinese poems, The Chinese Flute. Mahler
arranged the songs to create a progressive drama.
1. Mahler fully conceived of Das Lied as a “symphony” and, time permitting, we would examine the
structural working of these songs and their parallels and analogues in the movements of a fully
instrumental symphony.
2. Mahler had originally intended to call Das Lied von der Erde his Symphony No. 9, but knowing that
Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, and Dvorak had all died either during or soon after composing their
ninth symphonies, he decided not to tempt fate.
VI. The six songs are about loss, grief, memory, disintegration, and ultimately, transfiguration.
A. The first song, entitled The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth, is a toast, offered during the progress
of a drinking party. The song runs the gamut of emotions from joy to abject grief. (Musical selection: Das
Lied von der Erde, song one, verse one.)
1. The song starts with almost manic energy; the urgent, rather loose-tongued tone suggests that the
speaker has already had a few drinks. By the third and fourth lines, “The song of sorrow shall burst out
in laughter in your souls,” we realize that this is not an ordinary toast. We are being told, bitterly and
ironically, that we must laugh through our pain.
2. The mood of the speaker continues to spiral downward in lines five through seven: “When sorrow
draws nigh, the gardens of the soul lie wasted, both joy and song whither away.” This “wasted garden”
is a metaphor for death that will pervade the entire cycle.
3. We ask, as the speaker’s mood spirals downward, what has wasted his “garden,” his soul? Finally, the
last, chilling line tells us: “Dark is life, dark is death.”
4. By the end of this song, we know that something terrible has happened to the speaker. He is enraged
and he has lost faith. And why a drinking song? Because only the inhibition-destroying property of
alcohol will allow the masculine side of our characters to feel and express the unbearable.
B. The second song (The Lonely One in Autumn) would seem to be the opposite of the first: serene and
controlled where the first is manic and barely under control; a female voice where the first is for a male. In
reality, the second song is simply the flip side of the first. It is also about grief and incalculable loss, but
expressed with heartbreaking sadness and directness, by the “eternal feminine.” (Musical selection: Das
Lied von der Erde, song two, verse one.)
1. A vaguely and stereotypically “Chinese” sound pervades this song, as befits the text.
2. Note the opening oboe solo that underlines the mood of loneliness and lament that pervades the rest of
the song.
3. Once again, a fragile, wasted landscapethe “wasted garden of the soul”is used as a metaphor for
emotional and spiritual desolation.
4. Finally, note the incredible, sigh-like descent when the voice enters; this is music of exquisite despair
and resignation.
C. In the third verse of this second song, we get an inkling of the source of the singer’s despair.
1. The reason for this numb, autumnal music all at once becomes clear: “My little lamp went out…,” a
clear allusion to the death of a child.
2. This line is stunningly like the line that concludes the first of Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder poems, “A
small lamp has gone out in my dwelling.”
3. These heartbreaking lines are delivered gently and directly, which redoubles their emotional punch.

4. At the end of this second song, the singer asks, “Sun of love, will you never shine again,/And gently
dry my bitter tears?” The audience knows that the sun cannot and will not shine again. The song ends,
murmuring, quietly and forlorn.

Lecture Eight
Das Lied, Final Symphonies,
and the End
Scope: Das Lied von der Erde continues, through an idealized past in which all things are possible, back to the
deadened emotions of the present, and beyond, to the bittersweet realization that although life is reborn
endlessly, there is no rebirth for the individual. Mahler next completed his Symphony No. 9, which is filled
with contemplation of his own mortality, and began work on Symphony No. 10, which was left incomplete
at his death. During this time, Mahler was working in New York and spending the off seasons in Europe.
He discovered that Alma was having a love affair with Walter Gropius, a founding member of the Bauhaus
school of architecture. In 1910, Mahler arrived back in New York, already ill. He died in Vienna in 1911,
uttering, according to Alma, his last word, “Mozart!”
Outline
I. Songs three, four, and five of Das Lied von der Erde, taken together, act like a symphonic scherzo; they are
lighter in mood and considerably shorter than the first two movements and songs. Songs three and four delve
into the past, when plants were green and all things were possible.
A. The third song is called Of Youth. It deals with an idealized past, a memory that is as stylized and fragile as
the “porcelain pavilion” it evokes. (Musical selection: Das Lied von der Erde, Song Three, verse one.)
1. Mahler’s setting of this poem is brilliant. The quasi-oriental/ Chinese sound of this music is as quaint,
unreal, and artificial as the romanticized memory evoked in the text.
2. Note all the ringing and chattering in the instrumental introduction and the manner in which the
introduction sets the glistening, fragile, “porcelain” mood of this song.
B. The fourth song is entitled Of Beauty. It is one of the crowning glories of Mahler’s entire compositional
output. We will listen to the first verse, but this brief introduction cannot possibly convey the joy, the
heated sexuality, and ultimately, the exquisite and heartbreaking regret with which the song ends. (Musical
selection: Das Lied von der Erde, Song Four, verse one.)
1. Again, like the third, this fourth song takes place in the idealized and romanticized past, which seems
almost like a painting.
2. In the past, living things flourished. The world was verdant and alive, filled with light and color.
3. Like the third song, number four is a dreamlike evocation of youth and beauty; this song also uses
images of light, water, and reflection to project the selective reality of memory.
C. The fifth song, entitled The Drunkard in Spring, takes us back to the present. We again meet the toast-giver
from song one who has, since we last met him, surrendered completely to the anesthetizing joys of the
bottle. (Musical selection: Das Lied von der Erde, Song Five.)
1. For all its bubbly, upbeat energy, this fifth song is filled with incredible sadness and sorrow; again, as
in the earlier songs, Mahler’s subtlety and understatement are infinitely more powerful than if this
setting had been filled with self-pity and melodrama.
2. Although we never learn what “cares and worries” turned the singer into a drunk, we realize that his
smiling, alcoholic haze is his last defense against some crippling emotional pain.
3. Note the evocation of spring and, with it, the possibility of rebirth, new life, forgiveness, redemption,
and physical and spiritual resurrection.
4. But the emotions stirred by “Spring” and all it represents are too much; our drunk responds in the only
way he knowshe drinks himself into a stupor.
5. The song ends with a tilting, drunken “Salut!” in the orchestra.
D. The sixth song is entitled, simply, The Farewell. It is as long as the other five songs put together. This so-
called “song” is in reality a monodrama for alto and orchestra. (Musical selection: Das Lied von der Erde,
Song Six, verse one.)
1. It is extraordinarily dramatic and fully operatic, displaying the operatic elements of recitative, aria,
dialogue, and orchestral commentary throughout its thirty-minute length.

2. James Hepokoski writes, “The increased transparency and emptiness of the orchestration [are a
metaphor] that suggest that part of the body has already been left behind; the ecstatic experiences of
life, love [and grief] exist only as memory.”
3. Indeed, we are in the twilight zone between life and death; the bleak, barren, autumnal landscape
evoked in the second song returns here as eternal darkness approaches.
4. Note the deep, tolling notes in the tam-tam that cast a funereal pall over the beginning of the song.
Note as well the pungent, “shepherd’s pipe-like,” solo oboe that helps to create a bleak, rocky,
windswept landscape at twilight.
5. The last lines of the sixth song again invoke spring and rebirth. We hear a celestaorchestral
bellsdistant glimmers of blue sky, the birth of a new day, or perhaps, an invocation of a heavenly
canopy as our collective consciousness transcends the earth and drifts upward.
6. Life continues, is reborn, endlessly, although a deep existential sadness remains in this music. Mahler
would seem to recognize, at this point of his life, that there is no rebirth for the individual man,
woman, or child.
E. The song doesn’t really end; it expires. It hangs on a dissonance that never resolves. All pain is gone, all
individuality is lost, and we are left with a feeling of awesome, profound acceptance and resignation to the
inevitable. (Musical selection: Das Lied von der Erde, Song Six, conclusion.)
F. Mahler did not live to hear Das Lied von der Erde performed. It was premiered seven months after his
death.
II. Mahler’s second season with the Metropolitan Operafrom January to April of 1909was a rousing success.
A. He only had to conduct three different operas for a total of nineteen performances; he was well paid; and
he was acclaimed, this second season, as a conquering hero.
B. At about this same time, a committee of wealthy ladies formed to revamp the Philharmonic Society into a
new orchestral organization called the New York Philharmonic, with the expressed aim of hiring Gustav
Mahler to be its conductor. Mahler was intrigued and accepted the position, which was a mistake.
1. Mahler had no way of knowing that by creating the New York Philharmonic, the rich ladies of the
orchestra committee were wreaking havoc in the New York musical scene.
2. They created a virtual civil war between musicians, who were torn between the old and new
orchestras, and they split public and press opinion down the middle.
3. Resident American conductors were insulted by the engagement of Mahler, who as far as American
audiences were concerned, was an opera conductor, not a symphony orchestra conductor.
4. The season, which began in November of 1909, was a failure, critically and financially. After a few
months, the New York Philharmonic was $90,000 in the red.
5. Mahler, however, persevered. He signed on for another, longer season, for which he returned to New
York in October 1910. By the time he returned to Europe in April 1911, after this second season at the
Philharmonic, he was mortally ill and had but weeks to live.
C. Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, completed in March 1910 in New York, is yet another masterwork we will
touch on. It is filled with Mahler’s premonitions and contemplations of his own death.
1. The first movement begins with an introduction that depicts Mahler’s heartbeat, followed by the
“fluttering sound” of his leaking heart valves. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 9, movement 1,
introduction.)
2. This introduction is followed immediately by a theme that picks up where Das Lied von der Erde left
off, opening with a drooping, unresolved dissonance. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 9, movement
1, theme 1.)
3. The message is that Mahler, at least at the outset of this symphony, is resigned to his heart disease.
During the course of this first movement, the music projects a fatal heart attack. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 9, movement 1, "heart attack.")
4. During the course of the symphony, the music evokes a transcendental acceptance of one’s fate. Truly,
after the events of 1907, Mahler’s music is no longer about triumph and transcendence; it’s about
resignation and acceptance.

III. In June of 1910, while taking a “rest cure” at the fashionable spa of Tobelbad, Alma began her affair with
Walter Gropius, architect and soon-to-be founding member of the Bauhaus school.
A. Gropius was twenty-seven, four years Alma’s junior, single, smart, talented, attractive, and filled with good
humor.
B. By 1910, Alma was lonely, grieving, and unhappy. She was suffering from a number of psychosomatic
illnesses and she had forgotten what it felt like to be beautiful and attractive to men. Alma had remained
faithful to Mahler for almost nine years, but now she fell in love.
C. Gropius, who would be Alma’s husband from 1915–1920, reciprocated Alma’s feelings entirely. In July of
1910, one month into the affair and after Alma had returned to Toblach to rejoin Mahler, Gropius decided
to force the issue. He wrote Alma a letter begging her to join him and addressed it to “Herr Direktor
Mahler.”
D. Mahler was devastated, and Alma, rather than begging forgiveness, went on the offensive: “I told him I had
longed for his love year after year and that he, in his fanatical concentration on his own life, had simply
overlooked me.”
E. Alma promised to end her affair with Gropius and, for all Mahler knew, she did. But in reality, she did not
break it off, and it continued, on and off, until Mahler’s death ten months later.
F. Mahler fell apart. Alma reported that he would lie on the floor of his composing hut weeping for fear of
losing her. Finally, at wits end, Mahler met with Sigmund Freud in the Dutch town of Leiden, where Freud
was vacationing. Their “interview” took place on August 26, 1910, and lasted for a few hours while they
strolled about the environs.
1. According to Alma, Freud told Mahler that he should calm down. Alma was looking for a father figure
and could only find one in a man Mahler’s age. Too, Mahler looked for his mother in every woman
and unconsciously wished for his wife to be as “careworn and ailing” as Marie had been.
2. Alma believed that Freud was right on both counts, and Mahler, too, felt that the interview had done
him some good.
G. During this extraordinarily difficult time of his life, Mahler was working on his Symphony No. 10, a work
left incomplete at his death.
1. We have no indication that Mahler ever worked on the tenth again after his visit with Freud.
2. Almost immediately after his return from Holland, Mahler left for Munich to prepare and premiere his
Symphony No. 8 on September 12, 1910.
IV. On October 25, 1910, Mahler arrived in New York for the fourth and last time.
A. He was tired and had a sore throat that would not go away.
B. He also faced problems at the Philharmonic, which could be reduced to a single word: deficit.
1. The deficit was blamed on Mahler’s programming, which was considered arcane and overly
ambitious.
2. A programming committee was created to “oversee” Mahler’s choice of repertoire, which resulted in
more tension.
3. The Philharmonic started looking for a new conductor.
4. Nevertheless, the season was a success, with Mahler conducting in New York (at Carnegie Hall),
Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica (New York).
C. Mahler’s sore throat was still lingering and, on February 21, 1911, his body temperature suddenly spiked
to 104 degrees.
1. Doctors were called in, Mahler’s blood was tested, and it was discovered that he was infected with the
streptococcus bacteria.
2. The diagnosis was subacute bacterial endocarditisa serious ailment afflicting hearts that, like
Mahler’s, have suffered valvular disease.
3. Most likely Mahler had picked up the bug sometime during the summer of 1910.
4. In those days, before antibiotics, subacute bacterial endocarditis was almost certainly fatal. This fact
was kept from Mahler.
D. From this point, it took Mahler three agonizing months to die.

1. Ultimately, it was decided that Mahler should return to Europe and be examined by the eminent
bacteriologist Dr. Chantemesse in Paris. According to Alma, the doctor was delighted by the state of
development of the streptococci but did nothing for Mahler.
2. Of Mahler’s death, Alma wrote, “Then the end. Mahler lay with dazed eyes; one finger was
conducting on the quilt. There was a smile on his lips and twice he said: ‘Mozart!’” (Alma Mahler,
197–200).
V. Of all Mahler’s contemporary critics, perhaps no one understood him better than William Ritter, the self-
professed anti-Semitic, German-speaking, Swiss art critic.
A. After hearing the premiere of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in Munich in November 1901, Ritter’s assessment
was that Mahler’s Jewish heritage might be responsible for the vehemence, passion, and rebellious
character of his music. Ritter also grudgingly admitted that against all his experience and convictions, he
admired the music.
B. Ritter’s only real mistake in his appraisal was that he saw Mahler as tearing down the traditions of the past,
rather than anticipating the musical eclecticism and expressionistic tendencies of the future.
C. Mahler, the greatest opera conductor of his time, perhaps the greatest of all time, wrote no operas. His
symphonies are his operas; his Gesamtkunstwerke, all-inclusive art works; his universal statements about
life, death, love, redemption, religion, God, nature, resignation, and the human condition in all its glory and
folly.
D. Mahler’s symphonies are unique. No other body of work, by any composer, traverses such expressive
range, so brilliantly combines absolute orchestral/symphonic music with vocal music, so clearly and
profoundly defines its creator, and is so honest and deeply felt.
VI. Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand, was composed during the good times of
1906.
A. It was premiered in Munich on September 12, 1910, three years after his daughter’s death, two months
after his discovery of Alma’s affair, and two and a half weeks after his meeting with Freud.
B. The premiere was the single greatest triumph of Mahler’s compositional life. It offered some small
consolation for the terrible events that had occurred in the years since its composition.
C. Mahler’s eighth symphony was premiered by an orchestra of 171 players and 858 vocalists, including an
adult chorus, children’s chorus, and soloists.
1. Spiritually, the eighth symphony begins where the second leaves off. The opening movement, a setting
of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, is a thanks to God for the peace and joy of resurrection and
redemption. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 8, movement 1, opening [1907].)
2. The work is dedicated to Alma, and Mahler wrote of it: “It is the biggest thing I have done… Imagine
the universe beginning to ring and resound. It is no longer human voices. It is planets and suns
revolving in their orbits…” (Cardis).
3. The premiere was an indescribable success and provoked Thomas Mann to pay homage to Mahler as
“the man who, as I believe, expresses the art of our time in its profoundest and most sacred form.”

Vocal Texts
Lecture Two
Excerpt from Das klagende Lied (The Song of Lament, 1878)
German text by Gustav Mahler
Vom hohen Felsen erglänzt das Schloss From the high cliff the castle shines
Die Zinken erschall'n und Drometten. Cornetts and tabors ring out.
Dort sitz der mutigen Ritter Tross, There sits the band of brave knights,
Die Frauen mit goldenen Ketten. And ladies with golden necklaces.
Was will wohl der jubelnde, fröhliche Schall? Why these jubilant, merry sounds?
Was leuchtet and glänzt What glows and gleams
In Königssaal? In the great hall?
O Freude, heiah! Freude! Oh Joy! Hey-ho! Joy!
Lecture Three
Excerpts from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1883-5) German text by Gustav Mahler
Ging heut' morgen übers Feld. This morning I went across the field.
Tau noch auf den Gräsern hing; Dew still hung on the blades of grass;
Sprach zu mir der lust'ge Fink: The merry finch spoke to me:
"Ei du! Gelt? "Hey you there! Don't you think so?
Guten Morgen! Good morning!
Ei gelt? Du! Hey you! Don't you think so?
Wird's nicht eine schöne Welt? Isn't it a beautiful world?
Schöne Welt? Beautiful world?
Zink! Zink! Chirp! Chirp!
Schön und flink! Beautiful and nimble!
Wie mir doch die Welt gefällt! How I love the world!"
Auch die Glockenblum' an Feld Even the bluebells in the field
Hat mir lustig, gutter Ding' Merrily rang their morning greeting for me
Mit den Glöckchen, With their little bells,
Klinge, kling, klinge, kling, Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling;
Wird's nicht eine schöne Welt? Isn't it a beautiful world?
Kling, kling! Ding-a-ling,
Kling, kling! Ding-a-ling
Schönes Ding! Pretty thing!
Wie mir doch die Welt gefällt! How I love the world!
Heia! Hey-ho!
Und da fing im Sonnenschein And right there, in the sunshine
Gleich die Welt zu funkeln an; The world suddenly began to sparkle;
Alles, alles, Ton und Farbe gewann Everything took on color and sound
Im Sonnenschein! In the sunshine!
Blum' und Vogel Flower and bird
Gross und klein! Big and small!
"Guten Tag, guten Tag! "Good day! Good day!
Ist's nicht eine schöne Welt? Isn't it a beautiful world?
Ei du! Gelt? Hey, you! Don't you think so?
Ei, du! Gelt? Hey, you! Don't you think so?
Schöne Welt!" Beautiful world!"
Nun fangt auch mein Glück wohl an? So, will my happiness begin now?
Nun fangt auch mein Glück wohl an? So, will my happiness begin now?
Nein! Nein! No! No!
Das ich mein', That, I fancy, will never, never

Mir nimmer, nummer blühen kann! Be for me!
Antonius zur Predigt (St. Antony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's
Magic Horn, 1888-9)
Edited and selected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (pub.1808)
Antonius zur Predigt When it's time for his sermon
Die Kirche find't ledig. Antony finds the church empty.
Er geht zu den Flussen He goes to the river
Und predigt den Fischen! And preaches to the fishes!
Sie schlag'n mit den Schwanzen, They clap with tails that
Im Sonnenschein glanzen. Gleam in the sunshine.
Die Karpfen mit Rogen The carps with roe
Sind all hierherzogen; Are all gathered here;
Hab'n d'Mauler aufrissen, Their mouths agape,
Sich Zuhör'n's beflissen, They listen intently;
Kein Predigt niemalen No sermon has ever
Des Fischen so g'fallen. Pleased the fish more!
Spitzgoschete Hechte, Pointy-nosed pike,
Die immerzu fechten, That are always fencing,
Sind eilends herschwommen, Swim up in a hurry,
Zu hören den Frommen! To hear the saint!
Auch jene Phantasten, And those visionaries
Die immerzu fasten: Who constantly fast:
Die Stockfisch ich meine, The cod, I mean,
Zur Predigt erscheinen Appear for the sermon.
Den Stockfisch so g'fallen. Pleased the cod as much.
Gut Aale und Hause, Fine eels and sturgeons
Die vornehme schmausen, That feast like lords,
Die selbst sich bequement, Deign to hear,
Die Predigt vernehmen! The sermon!
Auch Krebse. Schildkroten, Even crabs. And turtles,
Sonst langsame Boten, Usually slowpokes,
Steigen eilig vom Grund, Climb up from the bottom,
Zu hören diesen Mund! To hear the talker!
Den Krebsen so g'fallen! Pleased the crabs more!
Fisch' grosse, Fisch' kleine, Big fish and small fish,
Vornehm' und gemeine, Noble and common,
Erheben die Kopfe Raise their heads
Wie verständ'ge Geschöpfe Like intelligent creatures,
Auf Gottes Begehre At God's command,
Die Predigt anhören. To listen to the sermon.
Die Predigt geendet The sermon over,
Ein jeder sich wendet. Each one wends his way.
Die Hechte bleiben Diebe, The pikes remain thieves,
Die Aale viel lieben; The eels, big lovers;
Die Predigt hat g'fallen, They liked the sermon, but
Sie bleiben wie Allen! They don't change their ways!
Die Krebs' geh'n zurücke, The crabs still move backwards,
Die Stockfisch bleib'n dicke, The cod are still fat,

Die Karpfen viel fressen, The carp guzzle a lot,
Die Predigt vergessen! The sermon forgotten!
Die Predigt hat g'fallen, They all liked the sermon, but
Sie bleiben wie Allen! They don't change their ways!
Lecture Four, Vocal text from Symphony No. 2, movement 4

Urlicht (Primordial Light) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn)
O Röschen rot! Oh, little red rose!
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Not, Man lies in the greatest need,
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Pein Man lies in great pain,
Ja lieber möcht ich im Himmel sein. I would much rather be in heaven.
Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg, I came upon a broad highway,
Da kam ein Englein An angel came
Und wollt' mich abweisen And wanted to turn me away.
Ach nein! Ich liess mich nicht abweisen Oh no! I would not be rebuffed.
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott! I am from God and will return to God!
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtlein geben, Dear God will give me a light,
Wird leuchten mir Will light my way
In das ewig selig' Leben Into eternal blissful life.
Lecture Four, Vocal text from Symphony No. 2

Excerpts from Aufersteh'n (Resurrection), German text by Friedrich Gottlieb Kopstock (1724-1803)
Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du Arisen, yea, arisen shall you be
Mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh! My dust, after a brief respite!
Unsterblich Leben Will immortal life be given
Wird, der dich rief, dir geben? To you, who sought it?
Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du Arisen, yea, arisen shall you be
Mein Herz in einem Nu! My heart, in an instant!
Was du geschlagen What you have overcome
Zu Gott wird es dich tragen. Will carry you to God.
Lecture Six, Vocal text from Symphony No. 5, movement 1

Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn (Now the sun will rise as brightly) from Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death
of Children, 1902)
German text by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866)
Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn, Now the sun will rise as brightly
Als sei kein Unglück As if nothing bad happened
Die Nacht geschehn! During the night!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein! The tragedy only happened to me!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein! The sun shines regardless!
Du musst nicht die Nacht You must not clasp the night
In dir verschränken, In your arms,
Musst sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken! You must steep it in eternal light!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt! A little lamp went out in my home!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt! All hail to the joyous light of the world!
Lecture Seven
Excerpt from Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth) from Das Lied
von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1908)
German text by Hans Bethge (1876-1946) after the Chinese of Li-Tai-Po

Schon winkt der Wein The wine beckons
Im gold'nen Pokale, From its golden goblet,
Doch trinkt noch nicht, But don't drink,
Erst sing' ich euch ein Lied! Before I sing you a song!
Das Lied vom Kummer The song of sorrow
Soll auflachend Shall burst out laughing
In die Seele euch klingen. In your soul.
Wenn der Kummer naht, When sorrow draws close,
Liegen wüst die Gärten der Seele, The gardens of the soul are laid waste,
Welkt hin und stirbt die Freude, Der Gesang. Joy and song wither and die.
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod. It is a gloomy life, a gloomy death.
Excerpts from Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely One in Autumn) from The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der
Erde)
German text by Hans Bethge after the Chinese of Tchang-Tsi
Herbstnebel wallen A blueish, autumnal haze wafts
Bläulich uberm See: Over the lake:
Von Reif bezogen stehen all Gräser; The grass is all covered with hoarfrost;
Man meint ein Künstler It looks as if an artist
Habe Staub von Jade Has strewn jade dust
Űber die feiner Blüter ausgestreut. Over the lovely blossoms.
Mein Herz ist müde. My heart is tired.
Meine kleine Lampe My little lamp
Erlosch mit Knistern, es gemahnt Went out with a sputter,
Mich an der Schlaf. Reminding me to sleep.
Ich komm' zu dir, traute Ruhestatte! I come to you, trusty resting place!
Ja, gib mir Ruh', Yes, give me peace,
Ich hab' Erquickung not! I am in need of respite!
Lecture Eight
Excerpts from Von der Jugend (Of Youth) from The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde)
German text by Hans Bethge after the Chinese of Li-Tai-Po
Mitten in dem kleinen Teiche In the middle of the little pond

Steht ein Pavillon aus grünem Stands a pavilion of green
Und aus weissen Porzellan And white porcelain.
Wie der Rücken eines Tigers Like a tiger's back
Wölbt die Brucke sich aus Jade The bridge forms an arch of jade
Zu dem Pavillon hinüber. Across to the pavilion.
Excerpt from Von der Schönheit (Of Beauty) from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth)
Junge Mädchen plfücken Blumen, Young girls pick flowers,
Pflücken Lotosblumen an demUferrande. Pick lotus blossoms on the bank.
Zwischen Büschen and Blättern sitzensie. They sit among the bushes and leaves,
Sammeln Blüten in den Schoss und rufen Collecting blossoms in their laps
Sich einander Neckereien zu. They call out, teasing each other.
Der Trunkene im Frühling (The Drunkard in Spring) from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth)

Wenn nur ein Traum das Leben ist, If life is only a dream,
Warum denn Müh und Plag? What's the use of cares and woe?
Ich trinke, bis ich nicht mehr kann, I drink until I can drink no more,
Den ganzen, lieben Tag! The whole live-long day.
Und wenn ich nicht mehr trinken kann And when I can no longer drink
Weil Kehl' und Seele voll, Because body and soul are full,
So tauml' ich bis zu meiner Tür I stagger back home
Und schlafe wundervoll! And sleep wonderfully well.
Was hör' ich beim Erwachen? Horch! What do I hear upon awakening? Listen!
Ein Vogel singt im Baum. A bird is singing in the tree.
Ich frag' ihn, ob schon Frühling sei. I ask it if spring is on its way.
Mir ist als wie im Traum. It seems like a dream to me.
Der Vogel zwitschert: Ja! The bird warbles: Yes!
Der Lenz ist da, Spring has arrived,
Sei 'kommen über Nacht! It came overnight!
Aus tiefstem Schauen lauscht' ich auf. Aroused from deep contemplation, I listen.
Der Vogel singt und lacht! The bird sings and laughs!
Ich fülle mir den Becher neu I fill my beaker again
Und leer' ihn bis zum Grund And empty it to the last drop
Und singe, bis der Mond erglänzt And sing until the moon glitters
Am schwarzen Firmament! In the black firmament!
Und wenn ich nicht mehr singen kann And when I can no longer sing,
So schlaf' ich wieder ein. I fall asleep again,
Was geht mich denn der Frühling an? What do I care about spring?
Lasst mich betrunken sein! Let me stay drunk!
Excerpts from Der Abschied (The Farewell) from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth)
German text by Hans Bethge after the Chinese of Mong-Kao-Yen and Wang Wei
Die Sonne scheidt hinter dem Gebirge, The sun goes down behind the mountain,
In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder Evening descends into all the valleys
Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühling sind. With its deep, cooling shadows.
Die liebe Erde allüberall The good earth everywhere springs
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Into blossom and turns green again!
Allüberall und ewig Everywhere, and forever,
Blauen licht die Fernen! The far distance shines bright blue!
Ewig! Ewig! Forever! Forever!
(English translations by Maggie Lyons)

Publication Credit
Professor Greenberg quotes excerpts from the following publication:
Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, Alma Mahler.

Used by permission of John Murray, Ltd., London, UK.

Timeline
1860 ................................................ Born July 7 in Kalischt, Bohemia (Czech Republic), to Bernard (1827–1889)
and Marie Hermann (1837–1889).
1865 ................................................ The Mahler family moves to the nearest large town, Iglau, where Bernard opens
a modest distillery/saloon. They live close to a military barracks; the trumpet
calls and military march music Gustav hears influence him deeply.
1866 ................................................ Mahler begins piano lessons.
1870 ................................................ First public concert as a pianist.
1871 ................................................ Mahler moves in with teacher Alfred Grunefeld in Prague. He is abused by the
Grunefeld family but bears it stoically.
1872 ................................................ Mahler returns to his family in Iglau.
1878–1879 ...................................... Attends the Vienna Conservatory.
1878–1880 ..................................... Writes his first significant composition, Das klagende Lied.
1880 ................................................ Takes a post conducting operettas in a summer theater in the northern Austrian
town of Bad Hall. He has no experience as a conductor but desperately needs
the work.
1881 ................................................ Mahler is denied the Beethoven Prize in Composition but is engaged as
conductor at the Landestheatre in Laibach. He conducts his first opera, Il
Trovatore, on October 3, 1881.
1883 ................................................ In January, Mahler is hired as conductor at the Stadttheatre in Olmutz. In
October, he assumes the post of assistant conductor at the Kassel opera.
1883–1885 ...................................... Mahler falls in love with soprano Johanna Richter. The unhappy affair leads to
the composition of Mahler’s first masterpiece, The Songs of a Wayfarer. He also
begins the first symphony.
1885 ................................................ Mahler assumes a one-year position as assistant conductor at the Landestheatre
in Prague.
1886 ................................................ Mahler is engaged at the Neues Stadttheatre in Leipzig as one of three assistant
conductors to the world-famous Arthur Nikisch.
1887–1888 ...................................... Nikisch falls ill, and Mahler takes on the duties of first conductor, along with his
own assistant conductor responsibilities.
1888 ................................................ Mahler completes Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Die drei Pintos and his own
Symphony No. 1. He is appointed music director and first conductor of the
Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest.
1891 ................................................ Mahler assumes the post of conductor at the Hamburg Stadttheatre.
1892 ................................................ Mahler begins composing again after a hiatus of four years. He resumes work
on the second symphony.
1894 ................................................ Symphony No. 2 is completed.
1896 ................................................ Symphony No. 3 is completed. In addition to his opera responsibilities, Mahler
conducts the Hamburg Symphony during the 1895–1896 season.
1897 ................................................ Mahler applies for the position of conductor of the Vienna Opera. He converts
to Catholicism and is hired; within a year, he is appointed music director as
well.

1901 ................................................ Mahler falls in love with Alma Schindler (1879–1964).
1902 ................................................ Alma and Gustav are married. She is ten weeks pregnant. Symphony No. 5 is
completed. Mahler’s daughter, Maria Anna (1902–1907), is born.
1904 ................................................ Symphony No. 6 is completed. Mahler’s second daughter, Anna Justine (1904–
1988), is born.
1901–1905 ...................................... Kindertotenlieder are completed
1906 ................................................ A campaign against Mahler, led by the anti-Semitic press in Vienna, gains
momentum.
1907 ................................................ Symphony No. 8 is completed. In June, Mahler submits his resignation as
director of the Vienna Opera, effective in December. In July, his elder child,
Maria Anna, dies of scarlet fever and in August, Mahler is diagnosed with a
serious heart condition.
1908–1909 ...................................... Mahler assumes the position of conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New
York.
1909–1911 ...................................... Mahler becomes music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The
Song of the Earth is completed.
1910 ................................................ Symphony No. 9 is completed. Symphony No. 10 is begun; it will remain
incomplete at Mahler’s death.
1911 ................................................ In February, Mahler falls ill in New York. He arrives in Vienna on May 12 and
dies on May 18. His last word: “Mozart.”

Glossary
Atonality: The absence of an established tonality, or identifiable key.

Cadenza: Virtuoso music designed to show off a singer’s or an instrumental soloist’s technical ability.
Classical musical style: Designation given to works of the later eighteenth century, characterized by clear melodic
lines, balanced form, and emotional restraint. The style is brilliantly exemplified by the music of Franz Joseph
Haydn.
Concerto: Musical composition for orchestra and soloist(s), typically in three movements.
Consonance: Two or more notes sounded together that do not require resolution.
Crescendo: Gradually increasing volume.
Dissonance: Two or more notes sounded together that require resolution.
Exposition: Opening section of a fugue or sonata-form movement in which the main theme(s) are introduced.
Gesamtkunstwerk: Wagner's term for his music dramas; an all-inclusive musical work that combines drama,
music, poetry, song, painting, and design.
Movement: Independent, self-standing piece of music within a larger work.
Musical form: Overall formulaic structure of a composition, such as sonata form; also the smaller divisions of the
overall structure, such as the development section.
Overture: Music that precedes an opera or play, often played as an independent concert piece.
Pedal note: Pitch sustained for a long period of time against which other changing material is played. A pedal
harmony is a sustained chord serving the same purpose.
Polyrhythm: The simultaneous use of contrasting rhythms.
Polytonality: The simultaneous use of two or more different keys (major and/or minor) or modes.
Requiem: Mass for the dead, traditionally in nine specific sections.
Rhythmic asymmetry: Rhythms that do not use regular accents.
Short score: Two- or three-staff score that can be played on the piano and serves as the basis for a full orchestral
score.
Sonata: Piece of music typically in three or four movements, composed for a piano (piano sonata) or a piano plus
one instrument (violin sonata, for example).
Sonata form: Structural formula characterized by thematic development; usually used for the first movement of a
sonata, symphony, or concerto.
String quartet: (1) Ensemble of four stringed instruments: two violins, viola, and cello; (2) Composition for such
an ensemble.
Symphony: Large-scale instrumental composition for orchestra, containing several movements. The Viennese
classical symphony typically had four movements.
Voice: A range or register, commonly used to refer to the four melodic ranges: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Biographical Notes
Bauer-Lechner, Natalie (1858–1921). Professional violist and friend of Gustav Mahler from their days at the
Vienna Conservatory. She undoubtedly loved Mahler and was one of the first people to recognize his greatness. The
journal she kept of her recollections and discussions with Mahler remains the primary source of information on his
life up to 1901, the year he met Alma Schindler.
Epstein, Julius (1832–1926). Mahler’s piano teacher and champion at the Vienna Conservatory. Mahler studied
with him from 1875–1877.
Mahler (nee Schindler), Alma (1879–1964). Mahler’s wife. Nineteen years Mahler’s junior, she married him in
March 1902, already ten weeks pregnant. A beautiful, petulant, intelligent, and gifted young woman, she was
woefully unprepared for the demands her marriage placed on her. Nevertheless, she was Mahler’s essential source
of strength and inspiration during the last nine years of his life.
Mahler, Anna Justine (1904–1988). Mahler’s younger daughter.
Mahler, Ernst (1861–1875). Mahler’s brother. Of all the Mahler siblings, he was the closest to Gustav in both age
and affection. His death at the age of fourteen permanently scarred his brother.
Mahler, Justine (Justi) (1868–1938). Mahler’s sister. She managed Mahler’s household affairs from 1889 until his
marriage in 1902.
Mahler, Maria Anna (1902–1907). Mahler’s daughter. Her death in 1907 devastated him.
Mildenburg, Anna von (1872–1947). Soprano. A passionate, hot-headed diva of the first order, she was, as a
performer, Mahler’s creation; he developed her talent at Hamburg between 1895–1897. They were also lovers. She
went on to a brilliant career, specializing in Wagnerian roles.
Nikisch, Artur (1855–1922). Austro-Hungarian conductor. He was the principal conductor at the Neues
Stadttheatre in Leipzig when Mahler was hired as one of the three assistant conductors, in 1886. When Nikisch fell
ill, Mahler assumed his conducting duties.
Richter, Johanna (ca. 1860–?). Soprano at the Kassel Theater. An attractive woman, though a singer of only
modest abilities. Mahler’s infatuation with her in 1883–1884 led to his writing the poems and composing the music
that became the Songs of the Wayfarer.
Schönberg, Arnold (1874–1951). Composer. Despite their generational and musical differences, Schönberg
became one of Mahler’s most ardent fans and supporters. Mahler, in turn, helped to support Schönberg both
financially and emotionally.
von Bülow, Hans (1830–1904). German pianist and conductor. He used his considerable influence to help Mahler
get the position of conductor of the Vienna Opera.
Walter, Bruno (1876–1962). At the age of eighteen, Walter became one of Mahler’s assistant conductors at
Hamburg and, in 1901, he joined Mahler in Vienna as his principal assistant. Walter was closer to Mahler than any
other musician and conducted the posthumous premieres of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No. 9.
Walter continued to champion Mahler’s music for the remainder of his life, inspiring, along the way, a young
Leonard Bernstein and the Mahler revival of the 1960s.

Bibliography
Bauer-Lechner, Natalie. Recollections of Gustav Mahler. Cambridge University Press, 1980.*

Blaukopf, Kurt, and Herta Blaukopf. Mahler: His Life, Work and World. Thames and Hudson, London, 1976.
Cardus, Neville. Gustav Mahler: His Mind and His Music. Gollancz Ltd., London, 1965.
Carr, Jonathan. Mahler. Overlook Press, New York, 1997.
De La Grange, Henry-Louis. Mahler, volume 1. Doubleday, New York, 1973.*
. Mahler, volume 2. Oxford University Press, 1995.*
. Mahler, volume 3. Oxford University Press, 1999.*
Floros, Constantin. Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies. Amadeus Press, Portland, OR, 1994.
Greene, David B. Mahler: Consciousness and Temporality. Gordon and Breach, New York, 1984.*
Hepokoski, James. Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. DG booklet, 413 459-2.
Lea, Henry. Gustav Mahler: Man on the Margin. Bouvier, Bonn, 1985.
Mahler, Alma. Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, third edition. University of Washington Press, 1975.*
Matthews, Colin. Mahler’s Third Symphony. DG booklet, 410 715-2.
Raynor, Henry. Mahler. Macmillan, London, 1975.
Schonzeler, Hans-Hubert. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, volume 13. Grove/MacMillan, 1980.
Slonimsky, Nicholas. Lexicon of Musical Invective, second edition. University of Washington Press, 1953.
Walter, Bruno. Gustav Mahler. Knopf, New York, 1958.
*Denotes essential reading.

TTC - Great Masters - Mahler - His Life and Music (Guidebook) PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

TTC - Great Masters - Mahler - His Life and Music (Guidebook) PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music

Professor Robert Greenberg

THE TEACHING COMPANY ®

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i

ii ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1

2 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 3

4 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 5

6 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 7

8 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 9

10 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11

12 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 13

14 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 15

16 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 17

18 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 19

20 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 21

22 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 23

24 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 25

26 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 27

28 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 29

30 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 31

32 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Lecture Four, Vocal text from Symphony No. 2, movement 4

Lecture Four, Vocal text from Symphony No. 2

Lecture Six, Vocal text from Symphony No. 5, movement 1

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 33

Mitten in dem kleinen Teiche In the middle of the little pond

34 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 35

Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, Alma Mahler.

36 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 37

38 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Atonality: The absence of an established tonality, or identifiable key.

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 39

40 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Bauer-Lechner, Natalie. Recollections of Gustav Mahler. Cambridge University Press, 1980.*

*Denotes essential reading.

©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 41

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi