Gustav Mahler

A cycle of four songs Mahler composed, writing even the words himself, after Johanna Richter rejected him in Kassel. The melodies he made here soon migrate into the First Symphony.

• In the first song, ‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht’, the merry strains of a distant wedding feast alternate with the grief of the one left behind. Listen for the passage where the woodwinds' dance rhythm crosses the heavy breathing of the voice.
• The bright melody of the second song, ‘Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld’, was used almost unchanged as the theme of the First Symphony's first movement. Hear the two back to back and you can witness a song becoming a symphony.
• The third song, ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’, is an eruption of rage, with brass and percussion roughly depicting a pain that pierces the heart.
• The fourth song, ‘Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz’, begins at the pace of a slow funeral march and fades away as the wanderer falls asleep beneath a linden tree. The melody of this closing section returns in the middle of the First Symphony's third movement.

This was the work spurned at its Budapest premiere. The songs of a wayfarer, military bugles, the raucous sound of Bohemian bands—the sounds of the life Mahler had lived are all gathered within it.

• At the opening of the first movement, while the strings hold a very high, faint note, the clarinet sounds a cuckoo's call with two falling notes. The score is marked ‘like a sound of nature’.
• In the third movement a solo double bass brings out the nursery round ‘Bruder Martin (Frère Jacques)’ turned into a dark minor key, and the other instruments follow with the same tune in turn, building up a round (canon). Whether this solo—deliberately made to sound awkward in a high register—is given to a single player or the whole section varies with the edition and the conductor.
• In the middle of the same third movement, oboes and cymbals break in with a raucous tune like a village wedding band. Like a popular song heard beside a funeral procession, tragedy and the everyday sound on top of each other.
• At the end of the fourth movement, Mahler instructed the horn players to rise from their seats and play. The moment the row of horns stands up in the concert hall is counted among the work's great scenes.

This is the work he completed in his Hamburg years after finding its thread at Bülow's funeral. Its arc, beginning in death and ending in a chorus of resurrection, holds the religious questioning of Mahler at the time.

• At the opening of the first movement, cellos and double basses spew out a fiercely surging figure above roughly trembling strings (tremolo). Originally the stand-alone symphonic poem 〈Totenfeier〉, the movement depicts a hero's funeral.
• In the fourth movement, ‘Urlicht’, the solo alto sings very quietly, “Man lies in greatest need.” These few minutes of stillness, set between the colossal movements on either side, are the heart of the work.
• In the fifth movement, horns and trumpets hidden offstage sound from afar, and a flute imitates birdsong. This is the ‘great summons’ that calls forth the Last Judgment—listen for which direction the sounds are coming from.
• The chorus begins unaccompanied, singing ‘Aufersteh’n’ so softly it can barely be heard. Mahler directed the chorus to begin singing while still seated.

Begun after the hemorrhage of 1901 that nearly killed him, it was completed in the period when he met and married Alma. It opens with a funeral march, passes through the Adagietto of love, and arrives at a bright finale.

• The first movement opens with a solo trumpet sounding, all alone, a fanfare of three short notes and a long one. It is a funeral march that recalls the military bugles of Iglau.
• The third movement is a fast, playful dance movement (scherzo) in which a solo horn shines as if in a concerto. Some performances even call the horn player to stand at the front of the stage.
• The fourth movement, the Adagietto, is played by strings and harp alone. Mengelberg wrote that it was a love letter to Alma. Its length varies widely from conductor to conductor, from just over 7 minutes to more than 12, so there is real pleasure in comparing fast and slow performances.
• Through its use in Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice (1971), the Adagietto became the piece that brought Mahler to a wide public.

In a happy time when his two daughters were born and growing up, he wrote songs of a father who has lost a child. When his elder daughter Maria died three years later, the work came to be remembered as a prophecy.

• The first song, ‘Now the sun will rise as brightly,’ opens with two slender lines in oboe and horn intertwining like threads. It paints in sound the cruel composure of the text: though misfortune came in the night, the sun rises as if nothing had happened.
• Its orchestration is distinctive: rather than using the orchestra at full force, it treats it with the transparency of chamber music. Listen closely to a sound so thin that each instrument can be heard on its own.
• The fifth song, ‘In this weather, in this storm,’ begins with a storm raging through the orchestra, then, at the end, as the celesta (a keyboard instrument with a bell-like sound) enters, it settles into a lullaby. It is a consoling close: the children rest peacefully, as if in their mother's house.
• Both male and female singers perform it; compare a baritone, which sounds like the father's own voice, with a mezzo-soprano, which sounds like a wider grief, and the same work comes across differently.

Written at Toblach after he had lost his daughter and been diagnosed with heart disease. Leaning on Tang poetry, it sings of a farewell to life, and it avoided the name of a ninth symphony.

• In the first song, ‘The drinking song of the earth's sorrow,’ the refrain “Dark is life, dark is death” comes three times, each time a semitone higher and more desperate. The tenor part, which must cut through a dense orchestra, is notoriously difficult.
• The third song, ‘Of youth,’ uses a scale of only five notes (the pentatonic scale) to paint young people gathered in a porcelain pavilion, like an East Asian painting. The light sounds of piccolo and triangle are its hallmark.
• The sixth song, ‘The farewell,’ is as long as the five preceding songs combined. Amid low tam-tam strokes and birdsong-like ornaments in the flute, the soloist sings of parting alone.
• At the end the soloist repeats ‘forever (ewig)’ as the sound fades away, and over celesta and mandolin the final chord hangs in the air, never fully coming to rest.

The last symphony Mahler completed; he did not live to see its premiere. It is often heard as the farewell of a man facing death.

• The first movement opens with cellos and horns in a rhythm that halts unevenly. Leonard Bernstein heard it as Mahler's irregular heartbeat, a widely known reading but not a proven one.
• At the climax of the first movement, trombones and trumpets hammer out that rhythm with full force. The score bears the instruction ‘like a heavy funeral procession.’
• The third movement, ‘Rondo-Burleske,’ is marked ‘very defiantly.’ Its counterpoint, weaving several melodies together at once, drives on breathlessly, and it is counted the most demanding movement for the players.
• In the last few minutes of the fourth movement, the Adagio, the strings grow ever softer, ‘dying away,’ until they vanish. This ending quietly quotes a melody from the fourth song of Kindertotenlieder. How long the audience stays silent after the last note fades is also part of what sets a great performance apart.