There are many recording of this symphony. I chose John Barbirolli’s rendition. Barbirolli was not without his critics, especially in the U.S., where he directed the New York Philharmonic for a short period of time. However, I think that this recording is a good one, and the Mahler appeals to his sense of lushness. Of course, you are welcome to listen to any recording that you like. But I hope that you will give this one a try.
Gustav Mahler, (July 7, 1860, Kaliště, Bohemia, Austrian Empire — May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria), Austrian Jewish composer and conductor, noted for his 10 symphonies and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of 20th-century techniques of composition and an acknowledged influence on such composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.
Mahler was the son of an Austrian Jewish distiller and tavern keeper living in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt), in the southwestern corner of what is now the Czech Republic. Within months of his birth, the family moved to the nearby town of Jihlava (German: Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood and youth. He was afflicted by racial tensions from the beginning of his life. As part of a German-speaking Austrian minority, he was an outsider among the indigenous Czech population and, as a Jew, an outsider among that Austrian minority; later, in Germany, he was an outsider as both an Austrian from Bohemia and a Jew.
His musical talent revealed itself early and significantly. Around the age of four, fascinated by the military music at a nearby barracks and the folk music sung by the Czech working people, he reproduced both on the accordion and on the piano and began composing pieces of his own. The military and popular styles, together with the sounds of nature, became main sources of his mature inspiration. At 10 he made his debut as a pianist in Jihlava and at 15 was so proficient musically that he was accepted as a pupil at the Vienna Conservatory. After winning piano and composition prizes and leaving with a diploma, he supported himself by sporadic teaching while trying to win recognition as a composer. When he failed to win the Conservatory’s Beethoven Prize for composition with his first significant work, the cantata Das klagende Lied (completed 1880; The Song of Complaint), he turned to conducting for a more secure livelihood, reserving composition for the lengthy summer vacations.
The next 17 years saw his ascent to the top of his chosen profession. From conducting musical farces in Austria, he rose through various provincial opera houses, including important engagements at Budapest and Hamburg, to become artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, at age 37. As a conductor he had won general acclaim, but as a composer, during this first creative period, he immediately encountered the public’s lack of comprehension that was to confront him for most of his career.
Since Mahler’s conducting life centred in the traditional manner on the opera house, it is at first surprising that his whole mature output was entirely symphonic (his 40 songs are not true lieder but embryonic symphonic movements, some of which, in fact, provided a partial basis for the symphonies). But Mahler’s unique aim, partially influenced by the school of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, was essentially autobiographical—the musical expression of a personal view of the world. And for this purpose, song and symphony were more appropriate than the dramatic medium of opera: song because of its inherent personal lyricism, and symphony (from the Wagner and Liszt point of view) because of its subjective expressive power.
The first three symphonies contrasted widely with one another. The program of the purely orchestral Symphony No. 1 in D Major (1888; one of its five movements was later discarded) is autobiographical of his youth. The five-movement Symphony No. 2 (1894; popular title Resurrection) begins with the death obsession (the first movement’s “funeral ceremony”) and culminates in an avowal of the Christian belief in immortality (a huge finale portraying the Day of Judgment and ending with a setting of the 18th-century German writer Friedrich Klopstock’s “Resurrection” ode involving soloists and chorus). The even vaster Symphony No. 3 in D Major (1896), also including a soloist and chorus, presents in six movements a vision of a great chain of being, moving from inanimate nature to human consciousness and the redeeming love of God.
Most of the works of this middle period reflect the fierce dynamism of Mahler’s full maturity. These are all purely orchestral, with a new, hard edged, contrapuntal clarity of instrumentation, and devoid of programs altogether, yet each clearly embodies a spiritual conflict that reaches a conclusive resolution. No. 5 (1902; popularly called Giant) and No. 7 (1905; popularly called Song of the Night) move from darkness to light, though the light seems not the illumination of any afterlife but the sheer exhilaration of life on Earth. Both symphonies have five movements. Between them stands the work Mahler regarded as his Tragic Symphony—the four-movement No. 6 in A Minor (1904), which moves out of darkness only with difficulty, and then back into total night. From these three symphonies onward, he ceased to adapt his songs as whole sections or movements, but in each he introduced subtle allusions, either to his Wunderhorn songs or to his settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, including the cycle Kindertotenlieder (1901–04; Songs on the Deaths of Children).
The three works constituting his last-period trilogy, none of which he ever heard, are Das Lied von der Erde (1908; The Song of the Earth), Symphony No. 9 (1910), and Symphony No. 10 in F Sharp Major, left unfinished in the form of a comprehensive full-length sketch (though a full-length performing version has been made posthumously). The first of the three again revealed Mahler’s superstition: beginning as a song cycle (to Chinese poems in German translations), it grew into “A Symphony for Tenor, Baritone (or Contralto) and Orchestra.” Yet, he would not call it “Symphony No. 9,” believing, on the analogy of Beethoven and Bruckner, that a ninth symphony must be its composer’s last. When he afterward began the actual No. 9, he said, half jokingly, that the danger was over, since it was “really the tenth”; but in fact, that symphony became his last, and No. 10 remained in sketch form when he died.
Legacy
Modern critical opinion recognizes Mahler’s powerful influence during a period of musical transition. In his works may be found pervasive elements foreshadowing the radical methods employed in the 20th century: these elements include “progressive tonality” (ending a work in a different key from the initial one); dissolution of tonality (obscuring the perception of key through the constant use of chromaticism or harmonies not belonging to that key); a breakaway from harmony produced by the entire orchestra in favour of a contrapuntal texture (based on interwoven melodies) for groups of solo instruments within the full orchestra; the principle of continually varying themes rather than merely restating them; ironic quotation of popular styles and of sounds from everyday life (bird calls, bugle signals, etc.); and, on the other hand, a new way of formally unifying the symphony through the adoption of techniques subtly derived from Liszt’s “cyclic” method (the carrying over of themes from one movement of a work to others).
Taken from:
Cooke, D. V.. “Gustav Mahler.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 14, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustav-Mahler.