Gustav Mahler’s excruciating beautiful music is laden with the melancholy and presentiment of hopelessness that often infused late nineteenth-century Romanticism. His large-scale symphonic works often require large numbers of performers (in great variety), and can challenge the endurance of the audience, as well as that of the players. More recognized in his time as conductor than as composer, he assiduously composed in summers, while pursuing a strenuous conducting career that was brought to an early end by heart disease. He was married in 1902 to the famous–some would say infamous–and beautiful Alma Schindler, a woman almost twenty years his junior. They had two winsome daughters, one of whom, Maria (“Putzi”) died tragically at the age of four in 1907. It is said that Alma bitterly blamed him for tempting fate by writing his Songs on the Deaths of Children.
Constant bickering with singers and the virulently anti-Semitic press in Vienna led Mahler to New York City in the same year, where he became a star conductor with the Metropolitan Opera. His success there led him to an appointment with the New York Philharmonic in 1909 as principal conductor–a rival of Toscanini. Life was fulfilling, for he enjoyed working with the professionalism of the players there; but that year was marked not only by great success with the première of his Eighth Symphony, but by grief at the discovery of Alma’s affair with the famous young architect, Walter Gropius of Bauhaus renown. She married the latter after Mahler’s death, and later enjoyed a dalliance with the equally famous painter, Oskar Kokoschka, as well as with other artistic geniuses. Mahler was heartbroken, and even consulted Sigmund Freud. After one more season in New York Mahler’s ill health forced his return to Europe, where he died of bacterial endocarditis in May of 1911.
Against this backdrop of personal stress and grief, Mahler seems today to be the perfect creator of intense, existentialist reflections on the duality of banal, yet transcendent, nature of human existence. His personal–and to my mind it is uniquely so–rumination on life’s meaning can be somewhat prolix and repetitive at the symphonic level, or penetratingly aphoristic in his songs. His wrote primarily symphonies and songs–some would say that even in his symphonies he is speaking through song. His first symphony was completed in 1900, and he was in the midst of composing his tenth at the time of his death.
His first four symphonies are often grouped together, united by the important part that vocal solos and choral sections play in them. These four symphonies are closely associated with his many song settings of the poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and are rife with folk-like melodies. Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the Boy’s Magic Horn), an important document of early German romanticism, is a collection of hundreds of German folk poems and songs published very early in the nineteenth century by the poets, von Arnim and Brentano. The collection’s appeal is fostered by the variety of basic emotions and subject matter in it (children’s songs, soldiers, animals, love, death, nature–tragic to humorous) and their association with a burgeoning interest in simple reflections of the “folk.” Mahler, like almost all other German-speaking people, fell completely for them—it would be difficult, indeed, to over-emphasize their importance in his musical psyche. They fitted perfectly his predilection for simple reference to “nature and life” without the aid of high literary art. And by extension—regardless of the source of his extra-musical inspiration—Mahler is fundamentally a composer of songs. Song is his natural voice; it speaks directly from the core of his being, and a very useful way of considering his other focus—the symphony—is simply as the redoubled effort in resources writ large to sing his essential song. Thus, there should be no surprise at all in the symphonies—especially the first group of them—for him to marshal songs to join the unprecedented orchestral colors and forces of his large orchestras. Almost no resources were too unusual to help conjure his images in sound, and it must have seemed to audiences of the time that almost every resource was there.
While the first three symphonies are imposing and long works, exploring themes of desperation in love, life’s suffering, and the relationship of the natural world to humankind, the fourth is the most accessible in mood, length, and instrumentation (no low brass). Consequently, it does enjoy rather more frequent performances by orchestras with more limited resources.
It received its première in Munich in November of 1901, with the composer conducting. Mahler had labored more than expected over the symphony, not withstanding its shorter length and modest style. He made several revisions and fine-tuning of it before the première—but to no avail. Its reception was not a happy one: hisses in the audience, and more. Its intentions were just too ambiguous.
On the surface it does seem a more cheerful work than its imposing predecessors, opening as it does with jolly bells and ending with a youthful soprano singing of the joys of heaven. Nevertheless, it is infused with the clouds of a subtle, typical Mahlerian undertone. Indeed, the composer, writing of the primordial terror in the work that also found in the third symphony, opined that the typical naïve listener of the fourth has no sense of those fears. The famous opening bells (with flutes) of the first movement is a case in point: Mahler remarked that they are not the happy sleigh bells of childhood, but rather are the bells that traditionally appear on the caps of fools.
Soon the first theme arrives, and in its gentle dance-like grace, only a Viennese could have written it. As with the first theme, the second one, with its winsome Gemütlichkeit, arrives rather quickly. And like the first, it has been compared to the straightforward, clear themes of Mozart and Schubert–coming as a bit of a surprise from the Mahler of the earlier symphonies. That clarity and relative brevity is completely dashed by the length and complexity of the treatment of them in the following development section. It’s delightfully varied, and did somewhat confound the early audiences of the work for its many sections. In them one can hear a rich exploration of distant keys and a thematic connection to another movement. It all ends with a crushing dissonance and a trumpet fanfare. One will quickly connect the latter with the famous trumpet solo that opens the fifth symphony. After a more or less conventional recap that puts us back on track, the movement ends surprisingly serenely, beginning—as at the opening–with the chirping “Fool’s Cap” bells.
The following scherzo—not in the usual third position—has two, rather than the usual single, contrasting sections in the middle (the “trios”). Mahler indicates in the score that it should be played “in a leisurely movement, without haste.” And that’s in contrast to so many scherzos that sail ahead in a dizzy dance; think of the hammering one of Beethoven’s Ninth. But, there’s more. The main section—heard three times–is scored for a solo violin that is tuned a step higher, giving it a somewhat coarser (scratchy?) tone quality. This enhances the rôle given it by Mahler as the “fiddle of death.” The image of an anthropomorphic death playing a deadly tune on his fiddle was, of course, a trope of German folklore, and the composer’s reference would have been well understood by contemporary audiences. The metaphor was carried by Mahler’s “eerie,” snaky, fiddle melody.
After a brief horn solo, the first section begins with the “leisurely” fiddle of death. Snippets of motives are thrown back and forth between woodwinds, fiddle, and harp “pings” in a kind of kaleidoscopic texture–no big tunes, here. A few notes from the basses and solo horn leads to the first trio, featuring the clarinet, with a simple, attractive tune in the style of a traditional Austrian Lãndler. The rest of the winds, including horns, join in the relaxed pleasure. Soon, as at the beginning, the horn summons the return of the first section. Shortly, a few notes from the trumpet herald the second trio, which continues the warm, blissful mood of the first trio, with new ideas and colors. This time the fiddle changes its guise, and decidedly does not evoke death. A varied reprise of the beginning—with lots of flashes of sparkling color–ends the movement.
The following adagio—Mahler simply marked it “calm”–takes us from the world of death playing his fiddle to that of what has to be heaven. And it is a superb example of one of the composer’s hallmarks: an almost painfully slow movement whose long, sinewy melodies wind their way into transcendent, almost painful, beauty. The previous symphony ended in this manner, and here it plays its integral rôle as the counterpoise to darkness and death—the essential contrast of the work. Technically, it is in the simple form of set of double variations. That, is two main themes, each varied separately and successively—here, only a few times. The ‘cellos have the tune in the first section, and pizzicato basses introduce the solo oboe in the second section. The following first variation of the first theme is much more dynamic and lively. After the second section undergoes its substantial variation, the ‘cellos of the opening return to begin a spritely third working through of the first section. After a serene conclusion, the following coda provides a stunning surprise. A triple forte chord, Mahler’s transcendent orchestration, and harmonic surprise, as well, leads to a totally out of context, gushing crescendo and accelerando in a smashing dénouement, led by the brass. It seems like a presage of the final movement’s evocation of heaven. But it soon ends in a soft luminous fade.
The last movement is essentially a setting of a song from the afore-mentioned Des Knaben Wunderhorn—source of the song texts from the earlier symphonies. For this symphony he chose “Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life), a perfect foil for the dark and light juxtaposition in the work. Scored for soprano soloist, Mahler was intent that the rôle be sung by a light voice with child-like naïveté. Leonard Bernstein even used a boy soprano for the part in one recording. A short orchestra prelude opens the movement with the solo clarinet. What follows are five verses of the text, sung by the soprano, interspersed with vivid orchestra interludes (the third and fourth verses are sung consecutively). What is of importance here is to understand the great musical contrasts between the set verses of the song with that of the orchestral interludes—they are of two different worlds.
Those two worlds are the fundamental dichotomy of the symphony. The child sings of a unique kind of heaven and the orchestra answers with a bitter, ironic picture of life on earth. The text is unusual, to be sure, picturing in the first verse a place of “heavenly pleasures” and “sweetest peace.” But, the bells return (with shrill flutes, now) and remonstrate with a different vision that is almost violent. But in the second verse (in a minor key and a decidedly somewhat darker mood) the slaughter of the innocents is invoked, and the lamb and the oxen are slain for an angelic feast. Again, the bells and orchestra return to make a short ironic comment. The heavenly feast continues in verses three and four (set together), replete with images of asparagus, apples, pears, and grapes from the heavenly garden. Venison, hare, and joyous fish round the repast out.
Again, bells herald the orchestral interlude, but now it soon yields to a serene coda that, in Mahler’s words, should be “very gentle and mysterious.” The final verse of the text enters this blissfully swaying context, singing of heaven’s music, for which there is “no music on earth to compare.” The orchestra then gradually fades away into a peaceful void of silence. The composer’s enigmatic musing over existential issues that troubled him all of his life is over—if only for a short while.
To be sure, after the grandiose, extravagance of Mahler’s previous three symphonies, it is understandable that generations have tended to see the Fourth as “classic, accessible, light, Mozartian”—any number of descriptors of that ilk. But, no, it is not. Those who peel beneath the deceptive surface elements of it will see that it speaks with a voice that is one of Mahler’s darkest ruminations on life on this orb.
–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2025 William E. Runyan