Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 4 in G major

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 was the last of three symphonic works by the composer with music closely linked to his song settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). This anthology of folk verse, brought out in four volumes between 1806 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, inspired German musicians throughout the 19th century, providing texts for songs by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber, Brahms and Richard Strauss, among others. Mahler discovered the collection in 1886 and immediately felt attracted by its strange blend of worldliness and spirituality, innocence and wisdom. Those were precisely the qualities he was striving to capture in much of his music, and over the next 14 years he composed numerous settings of the Wunderhorn verses.
In addition to the cycle of 9 songs published under the collective title Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler used music he wrote to poems in the Brentano and von Arnim collection in both his Second and Third Symphonies, completed in 1894 and 1896 respectively. The composer originally planned to end the latter work with an elaboration of a song called Das himmlische Leben (“Heavenly Life” or “Life in Heaven”), which he had written in 1892 in a setting for voice and piano. But as the Symphony No. 3 took shape, he began to realize that the work’s monumental proportions and essentially serious tone made Das himmlische Leben an inappropriate finale. The song, which conveyed an unblemished innocence, required a musical context appropriate for its childlike vision, and Mahler eventually decided that his Third Symphony hardly provided this. He therefore excised Das himmlische Leben from that work. In doing so, he began the genesis of his Symphony No. 4, since Mahler remained determined to use the song in a symphonic setting. With Das himmlische Leben set as its last movement, Mahler began writing the rest of this
composition in the summer of 1899. He finished the composition in most essentials the following year and completed its orchestration in the spring of 1901.
Das himmlische Leben not only provided the creative impulse for the Symphony No. 4 but gave rise to its broad emotional and structural outlines as well. Each of the first three movements were planned to complement the song, making its appearance at the end of the work a logical and conclusive event. Moreover, composing backward from the finale, as it were, Mahler was able to incorporate into the first three movements certain thematic references whose significance becomes clear with the arrival of Das himmlische Leben.
The symphony’s opening movement is deliberately archaic in its use of mock classical themes and accompaniment figures, as well as in its relatively lean textures (Mahler’s orchestra here is smaller than usual) and adherence to traditional sonata form. For these details, the music seems, at times, a nostalgic recollection of the age of Mozart and Haydn. This is not a matter of Mahler actually imitating the style of those composers; he doesn’t, any more than Tchaikovsky did in his “Mozartiana” Suite or Variations on a Rococo Theme. Indeed, many passages here and elsewhere in this symphony bear unmistakably Mahler’s musical fingerprints. We detect these especially in the juxtaposition of seemingly sublime and grotesque expression during the movement’s central “development” episode, and in the highly original use of orchestral sonority throughout the composition.
Still, the generally placid tone with which this portion of the symphony begins and concludes appears calculated to impart a sense of classical-period poise and elegance. There is also an intimation of youthfulness, and perhaps even naïveté in much of the music. Of the several thematic ideas whose expansion and variation provide the substance of this opening movement, two deserve particular attention: the jingling motif, sounding like distant sleigh-bells, heard at the very outset; and a flute solo midway through the movement, which seems a joyous call from on high. Both figures will reappear in striking fashion later in the symphony.
In contrast to this mostly blithe first movement, the second is a Totentanze, a scherzo with a macabre aspect. Indeed, Mahler’s manuscript bore the inscription “Friend Hein strikes up,” a reference to a minstrel of German folklore who, like a sinister pied piper, was said to have used music to lead his followers to the realm of death. It is, specifically, a fiddle that “Friend Hein” strikes up, his playing on that instrument taking the form of a seemingly rustic or inebriated violin solo, performed in an unorthodox tuning. Two trio episodes, introduced by brief flourishes in the horn and trumpet respectively, provide graceful contrasts to the almost surreal dance that surrounds them. (The term “trio” here indicates, of course, not a composition for three instruments but the relaxed central sections of a dance or scherzo movement.)
If the second movement considers death with grotesque humor, the third envisions it serenely. Mahler once told the conductor Bruno Walter that the opening theme was suggested by “a vision of a church sepulcher showing a bas relief of the deceased reclining with arms crossed in eternal sleep.” The movement presents various transformations of this theme, moving through a series of episodes (some of them surprisingly distant in tone from the calm spirituality of the main theme’s original presentation) and culminating with the return of the flute call from the first movement, now heard resoundingly in the brass.
The finale, Mahler’s setting of Das himmlische Leben, assures us that the passage through death leads to a blissful afterlife. With its opening moments we are made to realize that the first movement’s flute theme did indeed represent a voice from heaven. Here, the clarinet melody that plays at the start of the movement is a variant of that earlier subject. Its contour of sustained high tones are followed by gently lilting rhythms: a pastoral transformation of the heretofore robust theme. Passing to the soprano soloist, that same melody reveals itself to be a celestial song. Moreover, the return of the “sleigh-bell” motif leaves no doubt that heaven was our destination from the symphony’s very first measures.

PAUL SCHIAVO © 2008

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