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Introduction | Chronology | Filmography

SYMPHONY NO. 6

Having completed his Fourth Symphony, Mahler set off in a new direction, renouncing not only the human voice (and, with it, words) but also 'programmes'. As a result, we often have to rely on the most slender evidence to unravel the sense or 'message' of the three instrumental symphonies that followed. The journey taken by the imaginary hero of the Fifth had seemed relatively straightforward, leading, as it does, from the opening Funeral March to the joyful Rondo-Finale: a case, quite clearly, of per aspera ad astra. In the Sixth Symphony, by contrast, the grim determination and aggression of the opening movement are merely emphasised in the final Allegro moderato which, in spite of everything, ends on a note of defeat, the bitterness of which is altogether unalloyed. Such defeatism and bitterness are all the more surprising since there was nothing in Mahler's life at this time that appears to justify such dark pessimism.

Composition

Mahler began work on the Sixth Symphony in 1903 at a time when he had finally succeeded in imposing his authority and original ideas on the Vienna Court Opera, not least through what was to prove to be a longstanding collaboration with the great painter and designer Alfred Roller. Mahler was slowly beginning to gain recognition as a composer and in C.F. Peters had found one of the leading publishers in Germany to sell and market his new work, the Fifth Symphony. Unfortunately, very little information is available on the actual composition of the Sixth Symphony since, unlike Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Alma Mahler was never a particularly scrupulous observer of her husband's creative life. Through cross-checking, however, it can be established that Mahler—newly married and the father of a little daughter—arrived at Maiernigg on 10 June 1903 and set to work without delay. Alma recalls that he returned from his Häuschen one day and told her that he had tried to evoke her in a theme. 'Whether I've succeeded, I don't know; but you'll have to put up with it'. The theme in question is one of the few 'positive' gestures in the work: it is the second subject of the opening movement, an ascending and descending line in the major, energetic and willful, over which Mahler has written the word 'Schwungvoll' (con brio) in the full score. Whenever he had completed a section of his work, Mahler habitually felt the need to distance himself from it, and his work on the Sixth Symphony was no exception: on 20 July he left Maiernigg for a short train journey to the Dolomites, taking his bicycle with him. Five weeks later, when he returned to Vienna, he had already completed the two middle movements in short score and had undoubtedly sketched the first.

At the beginning of the following summer (1904), Alma's arrival in Maiernigg was delayed by more than two weeks because she had still not recovered from the birth of her second daughter, Anna (known as 'Gucki'). Throughout the month of June, heaven and earth seemed to conspire to prevent Mahler from resuming work on the score. The weather on the Wörthersee was appalling during these long days of solitude and forced inactivity: the sky was overcast, with frequent storms and torrential rain. Mahler read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Tolstoy's grim Confessions. He desultorily played Brahms and Bruckner at the piano, but all the music he looked at left him disillusioned. It was his own lack of creativity, however, that weighed most heavily on him. When he finally returned to his work, it was to complete the Kindertotenlieder. Time passed, and the Sixth Symphony had still not advanced by a single bar, consciously at least. The anxious feeling that so often assailed him—namely, that the well-spring of his art had run dry—continued to obsess him, although he attempted to 'pick up the pieces of his inner self'. By early July, the weather had improved, but suddenly the heat became unbearable. Incapable of enduring it a moment longer, Mahler rewarded himself for the completion of his song cycle and treated himself to a lightning tour of the Dolomites to last until Alma arrived. And it was among the ragged peaks of the Sextener Dolomiten around Sesto that he finally found the inner drive and inspiration that allowed him to finish his new symphony.

By the end of August, when he was preparing to return to Vienna, Mahler was able to announce the completion of the Sixth Symphony to his friends Guido Adler and Bruno Walter. However brief his remarks, they were heavy with evident pride. Yet he had no illusions about the fate that lay in store for his latest symphony, which he knew would have just as much difficulty as its predecessors in establishing a place for itself in the repertory: 'My Sixth will pose conundrums that only a generation that has absorbed and digested my first five symphonies may hope to solve'. Immediately after completing it, he took Alma's arm and solemnly led her to his Häuschen to play the work through for her. By her own admission she was moved to the very depths of her being by the score: 'The Sixth is the most profoundly personal of his works. [...] Not one of them came so directly from his inmost heart as this'.

A young female friend of Alma's has left a highly detailed account of life at Maiernigg during the summer of 1904. Within his family circle, Mahler played Bach at the piano, quoted Goethe and went boating on the lake. To all appearances this was the most peaceful of all the summers that he spent in Carinthia. How, then, can we explain the fact that it was at precisely this time that he wrote the most tragic of all his works? According to Alma, he later recognised in the three hammer blows of the final movement a premonition of the three blows of fate that were to fall on him in 1907: the death of his elder daughter, the diagnosis of a potentially dangerous heart condition and his departure from Vienna.

Be that as it may, none of these catastrophes had struck by May 1906 when Mahler travelled to Essen in the Ruhr to conduct the first performance of his new symphony at the annual festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein. Yet Alma describes his almost pathological state during the rehearsals, his anxiousness, nervousness, instability and the doubts that never ceased to beset and torment him. All the young musicians in his entourage did what they could to rally round and to offer him their advice and support during the rehearsal period. Even more than usual, he kept on polishing and correcting details of the orchestration. If we believe Alma, he 'was so afraid that his agitation might get the better of him that out of shame and anxiety he did not conduct the symphony well'. After the concert, the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg expressed concern about his state of health. All in all, it seems as though the fateful work terrified even its creator.

Form

In comparison to that of its predecessors, the four-movement form of the Sixth Symphony might appear to represent a return to Classical norms. The Fifth, after all, had been in five movements, the Third in six. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the work surpasses all that Mahler had previously written in terms of its boldness and the dimensions of its final movement. One of the main questions that Mahler asked himself during the rehearsals regarded the order of the two middle movements. Initially, the order was Allegro, Scherzo, Andante and Finale. This is the order generally adopted today. It was, however, at Essen that Mahler probably allowed himself to be influenced by a number of his friends who pointed out the striking similarity between the opening of the Scherzo and that of the initial Allegro, and he was persuaded, therefore, to place the Andante in second position, an order he retained in Munich at the time of the work's second performance in November 1906. But in the course of rehearsals for the Viennese première a few weeks later in January 1907, he decided to revert to the original order and later asked his friend Willem Mengelberg to consider this order definitive. These hesitations and reversals on numerous points of detail and even on a matter as important as the order of the movements are confirmed by Mahler's contemporaries. As was so often the case, Mahler felt while writing the Sixth Symphony that he was the instrument of a power greater than himself. On this occasion, however, that power was mysterious, tragic and implacable, plunging him into a state of insurmountable anguish.

A programme after all?

What is this power with which Mahler's symphonic heroes are forced to contend and to which they often succumb, as is the case at the end of the Sixth Symphony? It is a struggle that Mahler himself had to face, as he made clear in a striking remark when, after the final rehearsal, one of his friends asked him: 'But how can someone who is so good express so much cruelty and harshness in his work?' To which he replied: 'They are the cruelties I've suffered and the pains I've felt!' One thinks in the first instance of the enemy that Mahler fought ceaselessly throughout his life, the hostile and often overwhelming force of mediocrity, inertia, habit, routine and what he called 'der Alltag'—the daily round. But in Mahler's life there was also a genuine drama, namely, that of his failed relationship with Alma, the beautiful and lively woman whom he had resolved to marry—perhaps unduly hastily—some three years earlier. At no point in their married life did Alma share her husband's aspirations. Many years later she vented all the rancour and frustration that had been building up inside her, and in her two books of reminiscences even went so far as to reproach him for having wanted to stifle every vital spark within her.

Plan: cyclical unity

Every work of art worthy of the name must satisfy two contradictory demands: unity and diversity. In his Sixth Symphony, Mahler meets both these requirements by adopting solutions as magisterial as they are novel. Never before had he taken such pains to create a network of cyclical relationships between the different movements and to draw on what was in fact a very limited reservoir of thematic cells in order to produce an infinite number of themes and motifs. In writing the Sixth he was keen, he said, 'to obtain a maximum of different characters from a minimum of original materials'.

From the outset Mahler defines the work's negative, pessimistic character with a harmonic leitmotif that reverses the traditional order of modes, prefacing the minor with a major mode. This order is repeated on numerous occasions, almost always accompanied by another, rhythmic, leitmotif.

Instrumentation

It is worth adding a few words about the orchestral resources that Mahler demanded for the Sixth Symphony. Whereas the woodwind department is relatively normal, the brass is notably larger, with eight horns, six trumpets, four trombones and a tuba. But it is the percussion family that includes the most unusual additions: it includes two sets of timpani, a bass drum, a triangle, a switch [rute], a tam-tam and, for the first time in any of Mahler's works, cowbells and two or more deep bells of indeterminate pitch. Also appearing for the first time in any of his symphonies are a celesta (a member of the metallophone family of instruments with metal plates suspended over resonating boxes and struck by means of hammers activated by a keyboard), a xylophone and the famous hammer, whose strokes were to be 'short, mighty but dull in resonance, with a non-metallic character, like the stroke of an axe'. Mahler initially experimented with a huge wooden chest, stretched with hide, that he had made to his own specifications. But the result was inconclusive and he was forced to abandon it. In the concert hall, these hammer blows, about which so much ink has flowed, are very rarely audible, and it seems probable that Mahler would have welcomed an electronically produced sound here. In one of the final versions of the score, he suppressed the third hammer blow, a move that merely serves to underline the symbolic importance that he attached to these blows.

Analysis

1. Allegro energico, ma non troppo. A model of Classical balance, the opening Allegro is cast in first-movement sonata form with an exposition involving the traditional repeat. Here Mahler takes his definitive leave of the world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn that could still be glimpsed in certain episodes of the Fifth Symphony. There is no longer any trace here of the earlier realm of legends and childhood memories, which is replaced by a world that is cruel and almost willfully unappealing: angular, sometimes even unattractive themes characterised by wide intervals; ostinato rhythms and a tense, strained and anguished atmosphere. The hero of the symphony departs for war to an energetic march rhythm articulated on a percussion instrument borrowed from the world of military music, the side drum. A double exposition of the principal subject is followed by a transitional episode on the woodwind, a bridge passage in long note-values in the form of a chorale divested of its normal contents and imbued, instead, with a sort of hollow formalism and bizarre harmonies. Unlike the songs of triumph and faith that play an essential role in Bruckner's symphonies, this is a 'negative' chorale and, as such, one of the symphony's most striking innovations. As Theodor Adorno has shown, it leads nowhere and prepares for nothing—certainly not for the 'Alma' theme, which enters in a moment as a veritable intrusion.

This second thematic element is one of a large family of ascending (and, hence, optimistic) motifs that had earlier produced the main themes of the final movements of the First and Second Symphonies. But it seems to embody not so much the reality as the idea that Mahler had (or wanted to have) of Alma: it is neither the charm nor the beauty of his young wife that he evokes here but a willful, if not forced, optimism. No doubt Mahler had already guessed that Alma would not always perform the ideal role of sister in arms and companion in which he had cast her in a moment of ingenuousness. Moreover, a number of elements of the initial subject are soon combined with this second theme, a combination that casts doubt on its 'positive' nature.

A section of the development deserves particular attention, the moment of idyllic calm in which the woodwind and brass exchange fragments and variants of Alma's theme against a background of violin tremolandi. Here for the first time we hear the sound of cowbells, a symbol of contented isolation far removed from the turmoil of human existence. The movement ends in A major, but it is a tonality that sounds bombastic rather than genuinely triumphant, as if the 'hero' wanted to convince himself that he had triumphed, without really believing in his own victory.

2. Scherzo. Wuchtig (Weighty). For this movement, Alma provided a 'key' that could scarcely be less convincing: it represented, she claimed, 'the arhythmic games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand' in the garden at Maiernigg. But in 1903, when these two middle movements were written, Anna had not yet been born and Putzi was no more than eight or nine months old. One is tempted, rather, to hear in this Scherzo a neo-medieval Dance of Death of the kind introduced by the 'Funeral March in Callot's Manner' of the First Symphony. I say 'dance', but it must be admitted that this eerie Scherzo never really dances, or, rather, it dances with a limp, since the triple rhythm is incessantly contradicted by accents placed on the weak beat in each bar. The general atmosphere is gloomy and grimacing, a mood to which the orchestration contributes with its use of instruments such as the piccolo, E-flat clarinet and xylophone notable for their shrill sonorities. With its changes of time signature, rhythmic instability and formal and old-fashioned counterpoint, the Trio is no less disquieting. Grotesque marionettes dressed in fusty clothes seem to perform an ungainly dance with an almost pathetic clumsiness.

3. Andante moderato. It is left to the Andante to introduce a note of contrast into the symphony's cruel and hostile world. Indeed, its expansive lyricism makes it Mahler's only authentic symphonic Andante, with the exception of that in the Fourth. Its opening theme, often accused of 'banality' by Mahler's contemporaries, was analysed in detail by Arnold Schoenberg, who underlined its asymmetries and ellipses and, above all, the fact that it is never restated in its original form. Melodically speaking, it still belongs to the world of the Kindertotenlieder but without the atmosphere of mourning. Two contrasting episodes follow, the first on the strings, the second in the minor on the winds, but they are soon combined and even confused. Triplets that turn back on themselves, trilling birdsong and cowbells evoke the blissful calm of nature from which Mahler drew the greater part of his creative energies.

4. Finale: Sostenuto; Allegro moderato; Schwer (Heavy); Marcato; Allegro energico. With the exception of Part II of the Eighth Symphony, where the form is prescribed by the text (the final scene from Goethe's Faust), this epic finale is the longest of Mahler's movements. An immense, forty-minute musical 'novel' whose elements, as always, are in a state of perpetual evolution by virtue of a principle defined by Adorno as 'the irreversibility of time', this movement is structured around a fourfold repetition of its slow introduction.

With the opening bars of this introduction, the blackest of nights envelops us, a chaos suggestive of the end of the world. Fragments of themes shoot up through the darkness, only to fall away again. After a great initial 'cry' that rises to the violins' highest register before plunging down to the cellos' lowest notes, we hear, in succession, the symphony's double leitmotif, harmonic and rhythmic; an ascending octave-motif on the tuba recalling the opening movement's initial theme, followed by an arpeggiated motif borrowed from the Scherzo and, finally, an anticipation of the second theme, which is the only optimistic element in this final movement. But the most striking element in this introduction is undoubtedly the episode marked 'schwer' on the winds, another chorale-like passage but even more paradoxical and negative than that of the opening movement. What does it symbolise? The resistance of matter? Implacable destiny from which none of us can escape? Death? Whatever the answer, its immobility, rigidity and formalism, together with its low-pitched timbre, invest it with a profoundly hostile character.

The principal theme of the Allegro is made up of all the elements that have been previously introduced. In the first reprise of the introduction, the initial 'cry' is inverted (descending, then ascending, and differently harmonised), in which form it introduces the development section, a section that defies all attempts at succinct analysis. In its dimensions it is entirely at one with the rest of the work, extending, as it does, to almost 300 bars out of a total of 822. Two hammer blows separate the main sections of this epic struggle. In the recapitulation, which is considerably foreshortened, the order of the two principal thematic elements is reversed, the major preceding the minor as in the symphony's principal leitmotif.

A final variant of the opening 'cry', accompanied in its final bars by both the major-minor and the obsessive, rhythmic leitmotifs, heralds the final catastrophe. No other piece of music approaches this coda for its sense of devastation and desolation. A slowed-down version of the ascending-octave motif is passed to and fro among the orchestra's lowest instruments in a sort of sombre threnody or stricken dirge. The movement ends with a final reprise of the octave motif, this time on the lowest strings. It is brutally interrupted by a fortissimo minor chord (not preceded on this occasion by the major) that is underpinned by the rhythmic leitmotif as it gradually dies away. All that remains is despair, the dark night of the soul and the sense of defeat summed up by this haunting rhythm.

Is there any need to speculate further on the meaning of an ending described by Adorno as 'all's ill that ends ill'? For my own part, I think that all human beings pass through such moments of absolute despair and that Mahler is just as much himself here as he is in the triumphant tones of the Eighth Symphony. As a creative artist he was bound to explore the dark and desolate landscapes of the Sixth before discovering, in his subsequent works, other pathways leading to other horizons. The blackness of the Sixth Symphony was an indispensable stage in his evolution that would lead him to the radiant optimism of the Eighth and later and entirely naturally, to the 'azure horizons' and luminous vistas that, at the end of Das Lied von der Erde, open to eternity.