No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
It is clear that all the experience I had gained in writing the first four symphonies completely let me down in this one- for a completely new style demanded a new technique.
Twenty-Five years ago a prominent Mahler enthusiast could describe the finale of Mahler's Fifth Symphony as ‘a windy, uninspired stretch of note-spinning, literally scraping the barrel in search of music’. Few people nowadays would subscribe to this view: indeed the upsurge of interest in the work of other ‘late Romantic’ composers has perhaps served to sharpen our admiration for Mahler's exceptional powers of invention and his no less extraordinary mastery of large-scale form. Yet we are not really any closer to explaining just how such extended works are held together and given shape, particularly in the absence of specific extra-musical concepts such as those of the ‘Wunderhorn’ symphonies.
1 Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed Knud Martner (London, 1979), 372Google Scholar
2 Philip Barford, ‘Mahler A Thematic Archetype’, Music Review, 21 (I960), 297-316Google Scholar
3 This is one of Constantin Floros’s aims in his Gustav Mahler (Wiesbaden, 1977)Google Scholar
4 See Barford, ‘Mahler. A Thematic Archetype’Google Scholar
5 See Edward W Murphy, ‘Sonata-Rondo Form in the Symphonies of Gustav Mahler’, Music Review, 36 (1975), 54-62. This study is largely concerned with the labelling of lengthy sections of, thematic and tonal contrast His proposed plan of V/5 is discussed below in the section dealing with rondo and sonata principles.Google Scholar
6 A term used m David Epstein’s Beyond Orpheus. Studies in Musical Structure (Cambridge, 1979) to refer to those processes particular to each work which determine internal musical energiesGoogle Scholar
7 See William S Newman, The Sonata since Beethoven (rev edn, Chapel Hill, 1972), 140-6Google Scholar
8 Leonard Β Meyer, ‘Exploiting Limits Creation, Archetypes and Style Change’, Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 109 (1980), 177-205Google Scholar
9 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (repr London, 1980), 453Google Scholar
10 V Kofi Agawu’s thesis, ‘The Structural Highpoint as a Determinant of Form in Nineteenth-century Music’ (Ph D, Stanford University, 1982), has postulated an axiomatic dynamic curve 
as a basis for understanding the compositional dynamic of nineteenth-century music, in which the structural highpoint may be explained in terms of the processes which generate itGoogle Scholar
11 Rosen, The Classical Style, 274, 276Google Scholar
12 The shifting relationship between composer and work of art, from the sixteenth century onwards, has been shown to exert considerable influence on the methodology of music history, being discussed at length in Carl Dahlhaus’s penetrating study, The Foundations of Music History (trans J B Robinson, Cambridge, 1983) Dahlhaus contrasts the importance of detachment and objective representation in eighteenth-century aesthetics with a nineteenth-century belief in art as Lebensphilosophie and as the expression of personality See especially ‘Historicism and Tradition’, pp 53-71, and ‘Hermeneutics in History’, pp 71-85Google Scholar
13 Agawu’s recent article, ‘Structural “Highpoints” in Schumann’s DichterLIebe’, Music Analysis, 3 (1984), 159-80, represents the compositional dynamic of selected songs by a ‘narrative curve’ (see also above, note 10) whose realization depends on the contextual interaction of various parametersGoogle Scholar
14 Christopher Ballantine, The Twentieth Century Symphony (London, 1983), 108Google Scholar
15 For a study of specific long-range processes in Mahler’s mid-period symphonic finales, see my thesis, ‘Tonality and the Evolution of the Finale in Mahler’s Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies’ (Mus M, University of Manchester, 1984)Google Scholar
16 See John Williamson, ‘The Development of Mahler’s Symphonic Technique with Special Reference to the Compositions of the Period 1899-1905’ (D Phil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1975), Chapter VGoogle Scholar
17 See George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (London, 1971), 13-48, Carl E Schorske, Fin-de-siécle Vienna. Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 3-22, 181-203; William J McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974), 87-120Google Scholar
18 Letter of 19 July 1894, cited in Gustav Mahler-Richard Strauss Correspondence, 1888-1911, ed Herta Blaukopf (London, 1984), 37Google Scholar
19 An ambiguity arises here, since V is used to represent both the dominant chord and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony However, it is felt that the particular meaning of the symbol should be self-evident from the context in which it is usedGoogle Scholar
20 It would be grammatically accurate to write the 
as a 
, in view of the function of this chord, though Mahler notates an 
, and not a 
, for the horn in F (see bar 520)Google Scholar
21 Allen Forte has suggested that D major is ‘an implicit tonic sonority’ in bars 63-71 - see his article, ‘Middleground Motives in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony,’ 19th Century Music, 8 (1984), 153—63. He also suggests that the transition to the return of the opening music at bar 72 is determined not so much by harmonic considerations as by motivic counterpoint However, he does not attempt to° relate the manipulation of motivic cells to the dissipation of dominant harmonic tension after a dominant pedal on A lasting 9 bars, a process central to the effect of this passageGoogle Scholar
22 The Adagietto returns first at bar 191 in B major, later achieving its radiant D major at bar 373.Google Scholar
23 A structural comparison of B and B1, justifying the labels used, is advanced below, and will explain why bars 95-100 and 297-306 are structurally analogousGoogle Scholar
24 Rosen, The Classical Style, 448Google Scholar
25 Schorske, Fin-de-stècle Vienna, 3-22Google Scholar
26 Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 25Google Scholar
27 The relationship between F minor and 
major in 1/4 is clearly one of ‘calculated contrast’, a term used in Dika Newlin, Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg (rev edn, New York, 1978), 149, pointing to the lack of internal coherenceGoogle Scholar
28 Williamson has also referred to the prominence of the melodic movement 
VI-V in the thematic material of the opening funeral march See his article, ‘Liszt, Mahler and the Chorale’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 108 (1981/2), 115-25 (p 122)Google Scholar
29 The penultimate bar of VII/5 is also disturbed by the flat sixth, which had previously determined long-range tonal movementGoogle Scholar
30 The studies of Beethoven presented in Rosen, The Classical Style, 379-448 and in Lionel Pike, Beethoven, Sibelius and ‘The Profound Logic’ Studies in Symphonic Analysis (London, 1978), 31—78, point to this feature as one of the most essential to his symphonic methodGoogle Scholar
31 The same question arises in VII/5, where a return of the opening C major march after the more relaxed mood of the 
section suggests the close of the first phase, followed by thematic combination and harmonic developmentsGoogle Scholar
32 See I/I, II/l, II/4, III/l and IV/IGoogle Scholar
33 Mahler’s orchestration gives special emphasis to the renewal of d and a at bars 483 and 487 as the thematic statements are projected out of frantic activity, and imparts an extra declamatory dimension, a less conspicuous feature of earlier contrapuntal passagesGoogle Scholar
34 Murphy, ‘Sonata-Rondo Form in the Symphonies of Gustav Mahler’, 59Google Scholar
35 The situation becomes even more confused due to the pitch conflicts in the brass (bars 566-74 conflict between triads on 
over a dominant pedal on G) just before the ♭VI interruption (see Example 5)Google Scholar
36 Williamson, ‘Liszt, Mahler and the Chorale’, 124Google Scholar
37 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler Memories and Letters, trans Basil Creighton, rev and ed Donald Mitchell and Knud Mariner (London, 1973), 47-8Google Scholar
38 See Peter Franklin, ‘“Funeral Rites” - Mahler and Mickiewicz’, Music and Letters, 55 (1974), 203-8Google Scholar