The lone trumpet call that opens the symphony #5 launches a whole new chapter in Mahler’s music. Gone is the picturesque world of the first four symphonies—music inspired by folk tales and song, music that calls on the human voice and is explained by the written word.
With the Fifth Symphony, as Mahler’s friend Bruno Walter put it, Mahler “is now aiming to write music as a musician.” Walter had nothing against the earlier works; in fact, he was one of the first serious musicians to understand and to conduct those pieces long before it was fashionable to champion the composer’s cause. Walter simply identified what other writers since have reemphasized: the unforeseen switch to an exclusively instrumental symphonic style, producing music, in Symphonies 5 through 7, that needs no programmatic discussion.
In fact, the break in Mahler’s compositional style is neither as clean nor as radical as we might at first think. The trumpet call that opens this symphony is a quotation from the climax of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony—a direct link, in other words, with the world Mahler has left behind.
And Mahler has hardly given up song for symphony. In fact, the new focus on purely instrumental symphonies seems to have freed Mahler to produce, at the same time, an extraordinary outpouring of songs, including most of his finest. And, although they are not sung—or even directly quoted—in Symphonies 5 through 7, their presence, and their immense importance to Mahler, is continually felt.
Here is conductor Georg Solti leading a performance of this amazing work:
