Mahler's Symphony No. 5, a story of uncertainty and triumph

00:00:00

John Banther: I'm John Banther and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's Evan Keeley, and we're exploring a symphony that almost defies words, Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5. It's a work that seems to include the entire world in 70 minutes and is a testament to one's desire to forge meaning from chaos and uncertainty. We show you what to listen for, how Mahler writes directions into the score, his unique characteristics and what it could all possibly mean.

This episode was recommended by Alexandra G. and Eileen B. Thank you so much for writing in. I'm sorry it's taken so long to get to this one, but we are here to explore a symphony by a composer who was really like no one else, Gustav Mahler. And if you can believe it, while these symphonies were premiered and they were heard, he wasn't really venerated or super famous for them, I think. He was actually a very well- known, very in- demand conductor. That's what he was doing. And he would use his time off in the summers to compose in a little composing hut next to a lake, I believe. And that's how he arrived to this symphony too, after he spent the summers of 1901 and 1902, composing this in Maiernigg, Austria when he is about 40 or 42 years old.

00:01:25

Evan: Yeah, he is in his early '40s. This is his fifth symphony obviously. And maybe it's just because of the company I kept when I was an undergrad in music school all those years ago, but I think of Mahler's Fifth Symphony in the same way I think of the Ode to Joy with Beethoven. This is the piece by Mahler. I hear the name Gustav Mahler, and I hear ( singing) in my head. This is just the piece that I associate with Mahler. Certainly not an uncharacteristic work by Gustav Mahler. Certainly, he's kind of moving in a new direction at this point in his career, and yet, if you want to get to know Mahler as a composer, this is as good a place to start as any because many of the elements of his style and his approach are present in this work.

00:02:16

John Banther: They are, and I like that, the Ode to Joy comparison because it really does feel like that. It's that calling card as I think Bill Bukowski likes to say of Mahler. And as we learned about his Symphony No. 1 in season four, episode 85, his music can be quite complex, and his fifth can also be very elusive, daunting, or even confusing for some new listeners. But still, I think you're right, this is a place that you can really start.

Now here's the thing. I think people who are newer to this music and have listened to Mahler's Fifth Symphony for the first time, maybe like a month or two ago, I think they might have more to say about this than I can. I don't want to say that about you necessarily, Evan, but for myself, I kind of feel that way. Because in part, this is music that from a young age when you're playing in an orchestra, you have to learn backwards and forwards. I mean, you study it with teachers, you study it in brass section classes. You are practicing it in different keys. You're doing score study. You know it so inside and out. Yeah, it's like, well, if I had to explain it, I probably wouldn't listen to it myself.

00:03:22

Evan: Yeah, these are your audition excerpts and your exercises, especially if you're a brass player, like John Banther, a wonderful tuba player. I'm not a brass player, so I don't relate to that same kind of experience personally. But I really agree that Mahler's Fifth Symphony can be elusive, can be confusing. It can be daunting, and it seems like the better you get to know it, maybe it's harder and harder to understand it or to figure out what to say about it. And yet, it's also exciting and captivating and heartbreaking and beautiful, and the more you get to know it, the more you experience those things as well. At least that's my experience. I think it's the experience of many listeners with this symphony. Getting to know this music is certainly a challenge, but it's a challenge worth accepting.

00:04:07

John Banther: It is a challenge worth accepting, absolutely. Now, thankfully, I was very happily surprised when I went on Google and searched for Mahler 5, first time listening, and I found reactions of people hearing it for the first time on an old Reddit thread from a deleted account. They wrote this, and I love this:

" I have been listening to classical music for around four years now, but most of what I've been listening to is fairly accessible. I decided I would give Mahler a try for the first time tonight and listen to his fifth symphony. Mahler absolutely took me on a trip. It felt like there was a constant war between beauty and cacophony with either one having the upper hand at a given point in the music, but the other never really disappearing. All of the gorgeous sections emerged out of chaos, but they still retained the residue. Even in the most harrowing moments, the tension was always there."

" As I was just settling in, the coherence would disintegrate, a cymbal clash or something else would break the coherence and we'd dive back down into the chaos. It really felt as though Mahler was orchestrating mankind's struggle to forge meaning and coherence out of the chaos of physical matter. At the end, though, I think beauty and order eventually went out, the ending coda is so triumphant and all the unease of the first 50 minutes vanish. I think the Fifth Symphony rivals Beethoven's Ninth as a triumphant testimony to mankind's ability to forge meaning out of nothing."

I love that, could almost just leave it there in terms of it's chaos out of nothing, a human's desire to form some kind of order out of chaos. And right there, other people agree too, Beethoven 9 is something like this.

00:05:49

Evan: And this struggle between beauty and cacophony, between order and chaos, between the coherent and baffling, and you're not always sure which is which with Mahler. And this person, whoever this person is, is articulating experiences that I think a lot of us, including myself have with Mahler and with this fifth symphony.

00:06:10

John Banther: And I also found a few YouTube channels of people doing live reactions to this. I'll try to mention that a little bit later because it was so fun to see some of those. But let's jump into the first movement, Trauermarsch, the opening here. It's one of the most iconic in all the repertoire and it tells us something critical to playing and understanding Mahler from the very first notes.

As you said, Evan, when you hear Mahler's name, you start to hear this entrance. And it's so characteristic and there's so much happening because of what Mahler is writing in the score. Now, in our music, we have instructions. It's mostly usually in Italian, sometimes in German or French, and it's usually pretty succinct information like poco a poco, accelerando, which just tells you start speeding up little by little. But there's no exact beginning or end tempo marking. It doesn't tell you if that's linear or if it speeds up more here than over here.

What Mahler does is he writes full sentences in plain German what he wants, and it really changes how we approach the music. It says under the very first notes of the trumpet, it says, " The opening triplets of this theme must always be presented somewhat hastily in the style of military fanfares." So as we listen, listen for how the triplets are actually compressed. They're a little hasty and it's especially compressed as it gets to the third iteration both times in the opening eight bars here. I mean, if you played this straight, it would not have the same kind of sound, would it?

00:08:21

Evan: No, and there's definitely a kind of, we talked about beauty versus chaos, and even literally from the very beginning. I mean, what is it about three short notes and a long note, like Beethoven's Fifth, right? ( singing). This is a very similar motif.

00:08:37

John Banther: Or Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

00:08:38

Evan: Exactly, exactly. There's fanfare, there's a sense of something portentous is unfolding. And yet, this sense of the military quality, this somewhat hastily, he marks it (German) is the German word for fleeting. And as you said, John, he writes these long instructions in German, these prose passages explaining in often very meticulous detail what he's trying to get out of the instrumentalist. But (German) , fleeting, what's the hurry? There's this sense of this anxiety. There's this sense of, I don't know, this haste that really drives this forward really from the very, very beginning. And you hear this throughout the symphony, how these triplets are sometimes very, very specifically articulated. It's a motif certainly throughout this movement and in a broader sense in the whole piece.

00:09:38

John Banther: But this makes the experience like the composer is in the hall during rehearsal with you a century after their death. It's so normal when you're premiering a new work in an orchestra, at one point, like the last rehearsal or something, the composer will be there. And they'll be sitting in the hall and you play the piece or parts of it and the conductor turns around and says, " Anything? What's going on?" And they might say, " Oh, I want more winds at letter B, or do this accelerando here." They might even say, " Oh, so- and- so, you have a wrong note in your part, write in this note."

00:10:12

Evan: Yeah, that should be an F natural in the second trombone part there, or let's make sure to do that crescendo at the end of that section. And you have this sense of Mahler talking to you when you're looking at one of these scores.

00:10:26

John Banther: And after this long, jagged opening, it's really only about a minute, we've got this rhythm that is evoking the dignity, the ( singing), but it's also kind of like death. It's like a funeral march, and we get to this section where this soft, slow melody is introduced and it sounds like a funeral march. And I love this because we're going from the sharpest attacks of the military instrument to a lament. And it's a lament where the violins are playing very low and the cellos are playing very high. So it gives this unique feeling, almost a little bit of a unison type of sound with these different sections. And then you hear in the background, very stern rhythm in the trombones. That's actually its own little motif that comes back again and again and again.

The trumpet tune from the opening does return and it gets big and actually quite fiery, but then we return to that slower melody before it can fully take hold. We see stuff like this in Tchaikovsky, I think, where he builds something up, then you take it back down, you build something up and you take it back down. But with Mahler, it feels like when you go back down, you are not in the same place as you were before.

And something with this symphony is that one mood is not always going to last for a very long time. Even though this is over an hour long, we move between things without you really quite noticing it. There's this great flute and clarinet line that transforms the melody that we've been hearing so far. And then with some cymbal also in the percussion, it starts to sound vaguely klezmer. And this is something we hear in Mahler's music, especially his first symphony, but this klezmer Eastern European Jewish type sound.

00:12:24

Evan: And this is a fascinating way of thinking about Mahler, who is much more than many composers really inflecting his own personality and his own feeling into the music in a very self- conscious way. This identity piece, who am I, what's my background, what's my heritage is a fascinating thing with Mahler. He was a Jewish man, grew up in a Jewish family in a German- speaking community in Bohemia, which is a predominantly Czech- speaking part of Europe. And he once remarked, " I am thrice homeless as a native of Bohemia and Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed." So there's this sense of he can never really figure out who he is or where he fits in, and he's embodying that struggle in his music.

So I hear this klezmer kind of sound in this section as we hear so often in Mahler's music. You and I had a conversation, John, about the first symphony a while back. And again, also there, you hear that sense of trying to figure out who he is as a person and trying to express that journey of self- discovery in his music.

00:13:39

John Banther: Listening to this and hearing you say that also makes me think more of he really does maybe view himself, and as he's writing this, as an outsider. Not like outsider art technically, but he definitely sees himself as viewing something as a foreigner. It's like when you live in a different country, even if you're there for years, there is still that implicit understanding or feeling in the back of your mind, this isn't home. I'm not the same, for example. And so I wonder if he sees maybe an outsider perspective with this music.

And that trumpet tune returns, but this is merely just for a moment and then we go into a completely different kind of march that I think this is what also makes people think of, well, this is kind of confusing or chaotic. I'm not sure what's happening.

00:14:38

Evan: We're suddenly in a new section and the instruction that Mahler gives in the score is (German) , suddenly faster, passionate, wild. And all of a sudden, we've had this very solemn march and then it's like something was being held back until now. Some uncontainable lamentation and fury just bursts forth. There's this frantic quality to this part of the movement, like it's trying to find a melody, can't quite settle down into one. And as you were saying, John, there's a bit of Tchaikovsky here, I think, or a Tchaikovsky- ish quality.

00:15:16

John Banther: I think you were the first to think about or point out the Tchaikovsky aspect of this when we were talking earlier. Are you thinking of, because when I hear it now on listening back, the ( singing), it sounds just like something out of Romeo and Juliet? It's like I turn around and I see Tchaikovsky just peering around the corner for a second.

00:15:36

Evan: Or there's maybe a Slavic quality or Russian quality. I don't know. I mean maybe I'm grasping at straws, but you definitely hear the influences in Mahler's music. He's looking back, he's looking forward. We will talk more about that as we go forward.

00:15:51

John Banther: And this is one of my favorite sections of this movement, of the symphony too. I love the emotions that everyone is portraying and how somehow it is all tied together. And when the trumpet comes back in with strings, it is this almost delirious, almost unexplainable for me feeling that comes forth. And the timpani is also making noise. The percussion has a lot of noise in this or noise- ish type things, but they're not in your face or obtrusive. They really feel like underneath the foundation.

00:16:33

Evan: In some ways, the percussion almost becomes melodious in some sense. Even when the timpani taps out, the melody that we associate with the trumpet, we don't often hear a timpani playing a melody line. And I think a lot of the percussion writing has that sense of it's not just emphasizing beats. There's a kind of direction to it that makes it even more exciting to listen to. And as we were saying earlier, Mahler is a very sort of self- conscious composer. He really inserts himself, his personality, his feelings, his experiences into his compositions. These long German instructions we were talking about earlier, John, that's a facet of that.

I remember a colleague in music school in my undergraduate days talking, we had language requirements for our degrees, and my friend was saying, " I want to learn German just so I can read those Mahler scores." And it's funny because it's true. I mean, you have these whole things you have to look up in a dictionary. You have to have a German dictionary just to understand. He really wants to tell you something about what he is feeling and what his vision is as a composer.

Also, feels like this is a conductor. As you mentioned, John, he was a very famous conductor, a very well- respected conductor, and there's a conductor- ly quality. This is someone who really knows the instruments of the orchestra, who really knows how an ensemble works. And he has a very, very specific set of ideas, very frequently about what he wants the ensemble to do, what he wants the individual instruments to do. And he is not shy about telling us in plain German, in plain language what those visions are.

00:18:18

John Banther: You're absolutely right. You do need, and there's often a German dictionary in this section, or maybe now it's just your phone, of course. And there's a great moment for the tuba, a moment after this as well. Mahler writes a lot of things for tuba in a solo sense here. And this is a great transition, and it's something I think we hear in Mahler where you have this line with the tuba that descends, and then what comes next, listen for, well, how it compares. What we hear is it's like the exact opposite. It's going in the other direction with the same rhythm as the tuba. So it's almost like we've passed through a mirror or something. That's kind of how I hear it.

And the timpani comes in with what you mentioned earlier, Evan, that is the trumpet motif. This has a very, very different sound. We're going from the harsh attack of a trumpet to something quite diffuse- sounding.

00:19:38

Evan: Very quiet timpani playing the melody, as I said. And I like what you said, John, about looking in a mirror or there's a sense of it's a shadow or fun house mirror. There's something that's kind of off, like where are we? We're remembering, half awake, something that we experienced with this sort of sense of an echo.

00:20:01

John Banther: And with Mahler, the idea of what key you're in or what this actual chord is, it's not always so clear cut. The symphony is in, quote, unquote, " technically C sharp minor," but Mahler doesn't call it that. It doesn't end in C sharp. It actually ends in D. We're all over the place. And one way he gets out of this situation going from D flat major to A minor, which they're not really related-

00:20:26

Evan: Yeah, very distantly related.

00:20:26

John Banther: ... yeah, he uses the timpani playing this line. And he changes this key by having the first violins interrupt the timpani before it can complete its line and then slide into A minor. It's such a simple thing, but it is so, so effective. And from here, the movement starts to wind down. This is a five- movement symphony and the first movement is about 12 to 13 minutes long, around there. And we start to wind down and it gets slower and slower and slower. The trumpet is playing soft. We have those motifs coming back in and then it's muted. And then the final utterance of it is on the flute before we get this resolute thud in the violas, cellos, and basses.

And even in these final notes, he's telling you exactly what to do. He's telling everyone to play those triplets slightly rushed. And that thud, I don't even know what to exactly make of it. I think we hear it again in a little bit. But ending it like this after that kind of opening, it is very intriguing.

00:21:49

Evan: Yeah, there's a kind of terrible finality to that thud and the door has slammed shut and we're just sort of out in the cold. I don't know. He talked about never feeling welcomed, always an intruder. And I feel I hear that thud like I'm being left out. I don't know, there's a finality there that's kind of terrible, and yet, it makes me want to listen to the next movement.

00:22:20

John Banther: And we more or less lead right into the next movement without totally realizing. In fact, if you are just listening, not looking at anything or whatever, you might not even realize we've really gone into a new movement. And so while this symphony is in five movements, Mahler groups them together in three parts. And part one is comprised of the first and second movements. So we're halfway through part one, which was a funeral march. And I guess for me, I think, Evan, what happened? What are we listening to here?

00:22:51

Evan: Yeah, why? Why is it a funeral March? For whom? I mean, Beethoven has one in his third symphony. We can kind of guess what that might've meant. This one is really kind of enigmatic. To me, it feels very different. You and I talked about the first symphony, Mahler has a funeral march in that one, which is kind of a joke. It's kind of this macabre joke, the animals with the huntsman's funeral and Frere Jacques in minor key. And so it's sad, but it's also kind of winking at you.

And I don't get any of that with this funeral march. This is a real grief. This is a real sorrow. This is a real solemnity, real mourning, dignity, outright lamentation in some places. It's, pardon the pun, dead serious. And there's even almost a wrathful quality to this funeral march. Dylan Thomas's famous poem, rage, rage against the dying of the light. There's this elegiac quality, but there's also this protest, this fury. Where's this anger coming from? Mahler often has that quality, but I think this particular movement is a pinnacle of that element of his creativity.

00:24:09

John Banther: And if I think back to another fifth to compare it to, when we talked about this season, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, if we think about that as the existentialism of the moment under authoritarianism, the real life and death of it, I think of Mahler's Fifth as an existential crisis of a person, not necessarily thinking, " Oh, it's all over next week." But understanding or coming to grips with the cruel uncertainties of life and death that we are forced to accept, and one that Mahler spent a lot of time thinking about.

Okay, jumping into the second movement now, just listen to the opening 30 seconds here and think about the melody, what is relating to it and so on. I mean, just try to pick apart what exactly is the melody, what is accompaniment, what is necessary, what might not be necessary, and you start to realize, well, this is all tangled together like a string of lights or something. And actually it reminds me of a YouTuber I found, Evan, recently, two of them actually doing live reactions to music, like they're hearing a piece for the first time. And some of them were doing this symphony and live reacting to it. And one of them was saying, " For a little bit, I was getting caught up in trying to listen to individual instruments. And that becomes difficult and almost you miss too much."

00:26:01

Evan: And earlier, John, you were talking about that Reddit thread you found where the person talked about a struggle between chaos and beauty, and you really hear that at the beginning of this second movement. Like you said, where's the melody? What should I be listening for? And also the sense of getting caught up listening to individual voices in the orchestra, individual instruments, your attention gets drawn to something surprising or something fascinating or something weird or something thrilling, and you're, " What am I supposed to be paying attention to?" And you get confused, and yet, I don't find it off- putting. But it is part of what's exciting about Mahler is that it's unsettling.

00:26:41

John Banther: And it's like a grand painting or picture in front of you in a gallery in which you can't take the whole thing in at once. And you're really almost just reacting to the emotions you have as you see it. And this dies down within a minute or so of the beginning of the second movement. And you'll hear another rhythmic idea very similar to that trumpet one. I think it's a more evolved one, a string of eighth notes that permeates a lot of this second movement, which is the end of part one. And similar to the first movement, Evan, we get, after a minute or two, a slow lamenting type of melody.

00:27:19

Evan: This lamentation kind of sound, this plaintive melody. And I'm reminded when I hear it, among other things, Mahler is a composer of leader. He writes for the voice. He loves poetry. He wrote many songs. Many of the symphonies have a choral and/ or vocal component. And even we talked about the first symphony and he was writing Songs of a Wayfarer, and some of that music ended up in the symphony. And there's this sense of was there a song that he's quoting, maybe a song that he never shared with anybody, threw it in the fireplace? There's almost that sense of singing here.

I hear this section with the woodwinds, and it sounds like Richard Strauss's music, like he should be sending him a note like, " Hey, thanks for the influence, Gustav." Or is Strauss influencing Mahler? Maybe it's going both ways. They were contemporaries. They were friends. They admired each other's music. They championed each other's music. They're very similar composers in certain ways. They're very different in some other ways. But in this passage, I really know the similarities.

00:28:30

John Banther: And some of the similarities are how they're able to create totally new sounds in the orchestra, and Mahler with this beauty and kind of grotesque sounds combined. I think the grotesqueness that he's able to pump into the music is from the nasally type sounds that he puts sometimes in the orchestra, like stopped horns or with mutes. Sometimes the winds like clarinet and oboe, they enter very forcefully, very sustained. And sometimes you see them lift their own instruments and their bell, and it's very direct also with like no vibrato on it. It's just very forceful in a way that starts to sound more compressed or nasally. Also in percussion, he uses some noise like that as well. Even putting a sheet over a snare drum like in the first movement, actually. I think that's a very important aspect of his sound. It's something I think you see other composers like Strauss jumping into too.

00:29:27

Evan: And even the string writing, we don't think of strings as having a nasal sound per se, but there's that sense of kind of a strident quality. Some of the very fast passages in this movement, there's really that sense of a jitteriness. And there's that same quality of a harshness that we would hear in a nasal, like a muted trumpet, for example.

00:29:49

John Banther: Something else that is so Mahler happens right here, and it happens in so much of his music. The example here, it's actually quite fast. Some might have caught it or not. There is what sounds like a glissando, like you're sliding between two notes and you're getting all the stuff in between. And you hear that in the strings, particularly with Mahler. And it adds a very characteristic type of sound, and you hear it semi- often. This is called portamento. It's similar to glissando, but with glissando, you're starting on a note and you're getting everything in between. With portamento, you may start up on a higher note, slide down maybe a third of the way or halfway, and then fall down immediately to the note that you're landing on. So it's a little bit less of a gliss, more stylized.

00:30:42

Evan: More of a swoop.

00:30:45

John Banther: Now in a symphony that is over an hour long, Evan, you can start to think about pacing. Well, what happens? Where is the momentum, kind of like in a movie, the first act, the second act, the climax and everything? We are towards the end of the second movement, 25 minutes in, and it sounds like a finale. It sounds like we are at the end of a symphony. How many symphonies are half an hour, 40 minutes long? This seems like we're right towards the end. But then we actually die away a little bit first and we have a sudden change of character to something more grotesque, maybe reminding us where we are. Before it ends with this quiet thud in the timpani, and what he writes before that actually is he writes in the music morendo, which is a common Italian instruction, which tells you to die away.

00:31:52

Evan: Die away, yeah.

00:31:53

John Banther: Not die in the sense of a meaning of death, but decay into nothing. Both movements end with some kind of thud. I wonder what that might even mean or not mean exactly.

00:32:25

Evan: Well, again, that sense of finality, and in this case, we're ending a section. We're ending part one of this three- part symphony with this thud.

00:32:33

John Banther: The idea of finality, I think is something I really hear in this section. It's almost as we're dying away, the string of eighth notes, this motif, it gets slower and slower. I imagine something like a ball rolling, bopping down a semi- rocky landscape slowly coming to a stop. And that's where it remains forever. When you throw a rock into the ocean or a lake and you're like, " I'm the last person on earth to ever touch that rock." There's some kind of finality.

00:33:01

Evan: It's done forever. Yes.

00:33:03

John Banther: Yeah. It's like we have so much uncertainty that we've experienced in half an hour, but there is still some type of resolution. And as you said, this is the end of part one. And even in the score it says there can be a long pause. You'll often see the orchestra retune at this point. I mean, this is an hour long symphony. That's pretty normal to see them retune.

00:33:27

Evan: Time for the audience to cough.

00:33:36

John Banther: So we jump into part two, and this is such a change in mood, and we get to the horn. Mahler wrote so well for the horn. I mean, might be my favorite composer writing for the horn. And he features it as a solo instrument throughout this movement like the trumpet did in the first. And it's a scherzo, and it might seem like the kind of movement that is maybe the shortest or most transitory or most transitory in a symphony. It's a light dance. It's something to give us some breathing room before we get to something else serious. But it's actually the longest movement out of the five, and you can hear it, this itself, in three different sections.

00:34:19

Evan: And just a brief comment about the word scherzo, which literally means joke. And you look at the scherzos of a composer like Chopin and so forth, which are not jokes at all, most of the time, many of them. And in this case, again, there's a lightheartedness perhaps on some level. There's a certain free spirited- ness, but it's also, there's a profound seriousness. And so the scherzo being the longest movement, it's kind of odd. And how did we get to this place where there's this ebullient quality from the very beginning? You talked about how wonderfully Mahler writes for the horn, and you really hear that in this movement in terms of writing for the horn as a solo instrument and also the group of horns and how they play together. They often play in unison with more than one horn or they have the harmonies. The horn section really is highlighted in this movement in a way that's so virtuosic. It really just carries the movement in such a powerful way.

00:35:23

John Banther: And it's quite Viennese sounding as well, this whole thing. I didn't think about this for a long time. I just thought, " Oh yeah, it's Viennese. It's a scherzo." You're focused on your part and your music, but reading more and more about it, I think Ivan Fischer was talking about this as is this a love- hate relationship that Mahler has because you hear this sort of love, but you hear that grotesqueness there as well. And I think Mahler thought some may play it too fast because is this like a waltz or is it like a landler, a slower, more folksy type thing? You hear this played in different tempos.

00:36:03

Evan: It feels like almost it's like a tribute to the Viennese Waltz, but it's also kind of a satire. Does he love the waltz and that wonderful tradition? Does he mock it? Is he doing both at the same time because he can't resolve in his own mind and his own heart how he feels about it? And again, that comment he made about everywhere, an intruder never welcomed. The guy from Bohemia ends up in Vienna where he wants to be appreciated. And he is appreciated in many ways, and yet, he feels that sense of not really belonging. He understands the music. He's a master of it, and yet, he's also an outsider. So there's that sense of this Viennese love- hate, like you said, John, he can't really resolve how he feels about it.

00:36:48

John Banther: And the moods are always shifting, they're always changing. Actually, one YouTuber that I saw, I think it was Time with Ly, as he was watching, reacting, saying, " I don't know what I'm feeling. It's as if I'm feeling something, but I only feel it when Mahler lets me feel it. You're not quite entirely sure." And so the moods are shifting and it feels like you're inside some kind of grand hall to suddenly being outside. And that's when I think we also get to some of the more rustic, slower in three type of dance, that landler, which I didn't know too much about. But it really is a bit slower than a waltz tempo.

00:37:27

Evan: Landler is maybe a precursor to the waltz, a dance in three, but you think of it as maybe having a more rustic origin. And then the waltz becomes this very elegant, very sophisticated thing in the salons and the aristocrats are dancing to this new style of music. And in this scherzo we're hearing, I'm hearing this sense of there's this very elegant, very sophisticated sound, but then there's this very sort of outdoor rustic, pesante kind of sound.

And I like this comment you were just sharing, John, this YouTuber who says, " I'm not sure what to feel, and maybe I'm feeling what Mahler lets me feel." People that don't like Mahler maybe accuse him of being manipulative. I don't experience that, but I can understand why someone would feel that way. There's a lot that's happening, a lot of tugging on your emotions. And if you're not prepared for that or you're not open to it, it can feel kind of assaultive. And Mahler has that sort of edge. Maybe he's mocking himself, maybe he's mocking the world, but there's also that love, that appreciation, that reverence, that passion. And it's all kind of jumbled together in a way that's confusing, but also very relatable.

00:38:43

John Banther: You got to let go. Mahler will guide you. Let Mahler-

00:38:46

Evan: Let him do it. He knows where he's going.

00:38:48

John Banther: Yes.

00:38:48

Evan: And if he doesn't, he's still worth following.

00:38:53

John Banther: And the scene of the crash will still be interesting, worth listening to. I mean, one thing that's maybe like a scene of a crash, these horns that are swelling in the music, it's quite unsettling, maybe grotesque to say a word too much. I really hear something very unusual in this moment. I only know of, I think it's Prokofiev maybe in the opera of Fiery Angel where he does something like this for 30 seconds of horn swells. And then we're into a slower introspective moment of this movement that contains fragments of things from the first movement. In fact, I think that's really something about Mahler in that he has these very recognizable tattoos or calling cards that are very easily grabbed quickly, almost like a leitmotif in other movements.

00:39:40

Evan: And John, I'm thinking about our conversation a while back about Bruckner's Symphony No.4 and an earlier version of that symphony had what he called an alpine scherzo. And I kind of feel that same feeling with these horn calls in this part of the scherzo of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. There's a little bit of that Ranz des Vaches, like the Swiss Alpine, this sense of in the third movement of the Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz has that where that's that call and response. And then the call, it goes out and there's no response and there's that kind of loneliness. And I feel some of that here with Mahler too.

00:40:22

John Banther: And it really does get quite lonely not too long after this. In fact, I think it's maybe the softest, most still moment of the symphony where there's pizzicato strings. And I do like this one. This is played a little bit slow. I think when it's fast, I think it loses some of the stillness of the night, so to speak of it. And then we get this oboe solo to clarinet, and it's all so soft and introspective. It feels like you are alone with your thoughts in a way that was maybe also challenging for someone like Mahler.

But we accelerate out of this into the third section of this scherzo and we get to something more similar to the opening. And of course, we've mentioned this is a big symphony for brass, and this particular section is a huge low brass excerpt. In fact, this whole symphony, but especially this movement is filled with really career, maybe not defining moments, but things that you have to play in audition and things that are very much a big part of your season. A wonderful horn solo that is also very, very taxing, at least that's how it sounds to me.

And we learned in our episode on the horn with Chandra Cervantes earlier this season, I think, that it's not uncommon for there to be an assistant sitting next to the principal to play the less critical section parts of that principal part so that they can play these moments as big and as much as they want without having to worry about pacing themselves, using too much of their embouchure. So that's definitely a moment. I think the horn player on stage is really-

00:42:46

Evan: It's very athletic writing.

00:42:48

John Banther: Yes, I almost said earning their paycheck, but they're earning their big standing ovation that they're going to get at the end too.

00:42:58

Evan: It's a marathon, not a sprint, is the phrase that comes to mind. A lot of hard work.

00:43:03

John Banther: Exactly. Really, the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas here, I chose this recording because it's an extremely clean recording. You can really hear things. And I like some of the tempos that he does. I mean, you have to think about one person trying to manage all of the pacing and everything from beginning to end and to make it make sense like a movie. Everyone's seen terrible movies where something just doesn't make any sense, the second act is so slow or too much of something. It takes someone like a director or a conductor to really manage that.

00:43:39

Evan: So many great conductors have performed this music over the generations. And I'm not comparing one is better than the other, but Michael Tilson Thomas, I so admire his cycle of the Mahler symphonies with San Francisco. I think they did it in the early 2000s.

00:43:53

John Banther: Yes.

00:43:54

Evan: This one is 2005. Such clarity in the orchestra, like you said, John. And Michael Tilson Thomas, I think has that combination of real intellectual acuity, but also that real passion and that leadership skill that is able to really bring those things out in such a powerful and eloquent way.

00:44:15

John Banther: And these were impactful recordings when they came out too. I remember I was in school and when these would come out, I remember you'd all get together and you'd have like a listening party. You'd listen to the entire thing. And it really is life changing, especially this huge build- up and rather sudden and glorious end, which is also kind of surprising and something else about Mahler. As you get to the end, it does not always feel like it. When you're listening to a symphony by someone else, you can tell the end is coming in Dvorak 8, you're practically in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You can see New York City in Dvorak 8.

00:44:53

Evan: Yeah. Yeah.

00:44:55

John Banther: But with Mahler, it is rather unexpected, but still very, very satisfying, and this is one of those moments.

00:45:10

Evan: There's often an abruptness about Mahler. There's a kind of brusqueness that leaves you a little stunned like, " Wait, I didn't see that coming." And it's part of what makes Mahler's music exciting, going unexpectedly from one mood to another, often with little or no warning or preparation. And this movement really feels to me like the most mercurial part of the symphony, like we're being invited into someone's inner thoughts as he's brainstorming. But the brain that's storming is the brain of a genius, and the brain is connected to the heart of a poet and the voice of a troubadour. There's that singing quality, that cantabile quality that also comes through with all that.

00:45:51

John Banther: Yeah, this is a movement that I don't totally, I love it. It's one of my favorites, so I guess they're all my favorite, but I truly love it. But it's also hard to think about, well, how does this relate to everything from before or after? Is part one a terrible daydream about your mortality? And then this part two is like a child walks in the room and now you're distracted and not feeling that anymore or what exactly? And that's also why I thought someone who's heard this recently might have more to say about that impact than us, because this is something we've heard for a very, very long time. But this is how part two ends. And part two is just this movement, but again, it's the longest movement of the symphony.

00:46:35

Evan: It's a very strange movement. And I can't be the only listener who finds this the most enigmatic part of the whole symphony. Like you said, John, how does it fit into the rest of the symphony? It does seem to fit, and yet, I can't really articulate how. And I'm also mindful that Mahler created some kind of written verbal program for his, I think the first three symphonies, but then he later repudiated those programs. And John, you and I talked about the Symphony No. 1, even the title, The Titan, he eventually discarded that. So I wonder if he skipped over the reveal with the fifth symphony.

Maybe there's a program, but he never wanted to tell anybody what it was. There's a sense of a narrative here. It doesn't feel like absolute music like a Brahms symphony does, although we could probably say that about pretty much everything Mahler wrote. There's always a sense of narrative, I think. Symphony No. 5 feels like a narrative. We don't know what it's about. I don't know where the story's going, especially in the scherzo, but it's still interesting. It's still exciting. It's still moving, it's still compelling. I want to know what it means. I don't know, but I still want to listen.

00:47:44

John Banther: And these are questions and ideas and feelings that continue from one movement to the next and to the next, and to this one, the fourth movement, Adagietto, and this is the beginning of part three, the final part of the fifth symphony. This is one that is probably the most famous, the most heard of Mahler. It's excerpted, played on its own. It's recorded on its own to tag along to another symphony, for example. This is one that people know, but also one, it's almost like you almost can't say that much about. It's just straight into your heart.

00:48:45

Evan: Yeah, I agree, John. It's probably the most famous piece by Mahler. It gets played a lot as a standalone movement, and it's wonderful to hear it that way. I wonder if people, even the people that say they don't like Mahler probably like this. It's so beautiful, and again, it almost feels wrong to talk about it. What can you say about this? And yet, here we are in a podcast.

There's a couple of things that are worth pointing out, one of which is the structure of the movement, which is an ABA structure. So there's a section at the beginning, and then there's a middle section that's different, and then it goes back to the first part, very similar like a Baroque opera aria, ABA, a da capo aria. And like many a Baroque aria in which the A section is slow and lyrical, the B section is more tense and dramatic. So this is a very old structure that Mahler's using here, but very effectively in a very modern way for the time.

00:49:44

John Banther: Yeah, this is one where you want to say something, of course you have to say something. That's what we're doing here, but words will fall short. In fact, one of the YouTubers I found goes by Gidi, he is literally the target audience for this podcast. He's got this YouTube channel where he listens, he's watching a performance, and then he talks afterwards, unlike someone else I found, he doesn't talk at all during the performance. So it's like you're watching a concert with someone except for one point out of the entire hour of him watching. He interrupted the music once, and that was in this movement to just say, " This is so beautiful. I just wanted to say that. Just, wow, that's it."

00:50:25

Evan: You can't help it.

00:50:26

John Banther: Yeah. But as you said, there are a few things we can zoom in on, one being the structure, ABA. Two other things that are going on that really I think affect how we're hearing this are the instruments and also tension and release. So with instruments, it starts with the harp, and it's like this steady pulse that's not quite steady. It feels kind of cascading, and it's a contrasting sharper attack to the sustained and long legato string line. So you have these long lines in the strings that almost have no beginnings and ends, and they're framed by the harp slowly giving this propulsion. So it feels like we are really moving forward, and it's beautiful, but it's also a very painful feeling as well at the same time. There is both of those in that.

The other thing that's happening in terms of tension and release that we're constantly hearing, there's something called suspension and retardation. Those are musical terms. And you'll notice with this many of the downbeats of these measures, and when you land on something, they're landing on notes that must continue moving to something else to resolve. We're landing on something that needs to go somewhere else. And he does this with one called retardation, which is when you have a previous note that is held over longer and then resolves upwards, so it creates that tension and then release. The other one is the opposite, that suspension. A note is held and then resolves downwards. There is so much of this that is happening that adds to the pulse and momentum of it so that it feels like we're long sustained legato, but we are really moving somewhere.

00:52:18

Evan: So we have this climactic moment, and like I said, it's an ABA structure. So we'll hear this similar moment again toward the end of the piece. And in both instances, it feels to me like Mahler is quoting Brahms. I'm not sure, but it's so similar to a moment in the first movement of Brahms's German Requiem, Ein Deutsches Requiem, also in F major, the same key as this movement in Mahler's symphony. And in the first movement of the German Requiem, Brahms is setting the text from the Beatitudes, blessed are they that mourn for the shall be comforted. And the passage that seems to me Mahler is quoting is on the words, (German) , they shall be comforted with a strong emphasis on the (German) , they shall, they shall be comforted. There's an emphatic quality there.

I don't know if Mahler was focused on the text. I don't know if he was quoting Brahms at all, but they're so similar. Mahler knew his Brahms, no doubt about it. And again, there's that sense of quoting, there's that sense of place, there's that sense of identity. We talked about a love- hate relationship with Viennese culture and that klezmer quality. And surely he knows his Brahms and his Mozart and his Bach. And certainly there's a Wagner quality, and he knew Bruckner personally, and he and Strauss influenced each other and so forth.

So I think Mahler's music is full of these little Easter eggs, these little quotes and these little scents, the sense of, " Oh, I'm doffing my cap here to this other composer, to this other tradition." And this passage here is so beautiful in this climactic moment, in this gorgeous movement. And yet, it sounds so much like that moment, also a beautiful moment in the Brahms German Requiem. I just have to point that out and wonder.

00:54:08

John Banther: Yeah, it is so fascinating for a symphony in which Mahler is deviating from leader and text and voice and stuff. Yet all of that, it's still here in a way, but not in a leader, song type of way. But rather he's using musical material, but it's still being drawn from some of these sources, it sounds like. And this is tough, this was brand new to me, for sure. Another thing we can look at for this movement is the tempo. Tempo was critical, especially when something is slow. If it's too slow, maybe it loses direction. And maybe with harmonic ambiguity, we don't need anything more to color the sound in terms of creating the ambiguity. We don't need to slow down.

In that video, I keep talking about, with Ivan Fischer, he talks about this piece as being, it's a poem and it has a certain flow. These lines come together naturally with commas and periods, and it's critical to understand all of this, to find a tempo that really, really works. So I think Michael Tilson Thomas takes it a little bit slow, but it still really works more than others who take it slow.

And one last thing, Evan, on this movement, right towards the end, we get one of the longest suspensions that I've heard in music. I'm sure Wagner has taken one a little bit longer, but it's like 20, 25 seconds sometimes of this thing resolving.

00:56:04

Evan: And the suspension, we talked about suspension and retardation as being key to how this movement works. It creates that tension. It creates that yearning. And as I've been saying, we've both been saying, John, Mahler is looking back, he's looking forward. The suspension in music is one of the oldest compositional techniques. You're going back to the 15th century. You can hear it in Josquin and composers like the Franco- Flemish.

00:56:31

John Banther: Like all those motets and stuff.

00:56:32

Evan: Yeah, all the polyphonic writing from the middle and high Renaissance, suspension is a way of creating tension in music going way, way, way back. So Mahler is taking that, but to do it for 25 seconds or however long it really is very, very effective. And what a way to end this movement. It's just that long, long suspension. You're waiting for it to resolve, waiting for it to resolve, waiting for it to resolve, and then it finally does resolve, and it just sort of dies away.

And then there's a fermata on the double bar. That's kind of weird. I mean, I guess not the only composer to do it, but Mahler has this fermata on a bar. It's not even a sound. It's just like hold the ending. And there's also, well, we'll get into the final movement, but it goes directly into the next movement. There's an attacca written in. Attacca is the Italian word, go on to the next movement right away. We often hear this as a standalone movement, so it's a little surprising if you're used to hearing it that way. And then the horn comes in to begin the finale, and oh, we're in a whole different world all of a sudden.

00:57:44

John Banther: As you said, we go right into the next thing, which is so wonderfully pastoral sounding to me. The horn comes in with that sustained A, it's repeated in low violins, then a very Mahler interval, A, D, A. That's such a tool he uses to frame a following little line, and harp, trumpet to flute in a lot of his music. And then we get these solo responses in bassoon and oboe, and we get one of the most deliciously rich sounds in the orchestra, in my opinion, which is when you have conical instruments playing low, perfect fifths. It's that pastoral sound, which here is created by the low horns. And then there's constant dovetailing. It's jubilant. After sitting for 45, 50 minutes, this has quite an impact, especially after such a long, slow end of the Adagietto.

00:58:36

Evan: I'm mindful too, that as you were saying earlier, John, Mahler really resisted calling this a symphony in C sharp minor. It really isn't. Obviously it starts there, but he's going in all these different directions tonally. I think we need to respect that and not call it a symphony in C sharp minor. The finale is in D major about as distant to key as you can possibly be. And the music theory could tell you distance of key relationships, but the music fact of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 is that there isn't any one key. And he's doing that on purpose.

It's not easy for me to make sense of this symphony as a whole, the tonality that's shifting around, what key is it in is one of the ways in which we're kind of going to all these different places. We started with this austere, somber funeral march, almost terrifying in its solemnity. We end with this rondo finale, which opens with this jocular, pastoral sense, this folk- like quality. You talked about the A, D, A that Mahler uses, this kind of rustic quality. How does it all fit together in one piece? And another question I have, it does fit together, but how? How is that even possible? Why is it coherent as a whole? But it is in ways that are hard to articulate.

00:59:57

John Banther: And that one YouTuber I mentioned, Gidi, I think it was him, he mentioned, " I don't know how one person came up with this entire thing. How do these simple instruments come together to create this type of sound?" And I think that's the relationship of counterpoint that we've mentioned before and is so important to Mahler. And talking about counterpoint, we're talking about how lines can be independent, melodically and rhythmically, but remain connected harmonically.

So if you hear this section right now, it sounds kind of fugal. We have flutes playing the same line as first violins. Clarinet and second violins are playing a line together, a different one. And then there's harmony and progression being outlined by basses, cellos, and a bassoon. So there's not that much music. They're not related melodically or rhythmically in a way necessarily, but it all comes together in a way that cannot be separated and sounds bigger than it is. Even here, when looking at the music, I thought, " Oh, wow, I thought that was more. That's it."

We eventually return, as you said, this is a rondo. We return to the opening line and those delicious fits that the horn gave us. But now the horn is pre- echoed by a trumpet, and those fits are played by bass, trombone, and tuba. So it's brought back, but now we are, Evan, even broader and larger with this iteration.

01:01:33

Evan: And to mention too, that the rondo is a very old form. So Mahler, again, looking back, looking forward. The rondo, like the mid to late 18th century, think of Mozart and Haydn. That's what he's evoking here. And he adheres to that. And yet, he also kind of explodes it in this post- romantic way. And again, you talked about the fugal writing. There's this fugue, it's sort of a fugue, but it's like this weird fugue. It becomes a fugue, and then it's not, but then it goes-

01:02:00

John Banther: It's imitating.

01:02:01

Evan: It's imitating, yeah. There's imitative counterpoint, very old- fashioned in its way, and yet, the way he does it is uncharacteristic of a fugue like Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance. So again, there's that clash between modernity and antiquity that's, I think, very deliberate. And then we see how this is a cyclical symphony. This is a symphony where the different movements spill over into one another very intentionally. And going into this section here where you hear very distinctly the melodic material from the Adagietto only. Where before it was this very slow, lyrical thing, now it's this kind of chugging along in this upbeat tempo, but it's still very, very distinct. There's no missing it.

01:02:47

John Banther: And maybe because we talked about Aaron Copland twice this season, there's a moment here that is so rustic. Honestly, if you played for me a few seconds and that was it, I might say, oh, is that Copland's rodeo? What was that? And that is a wonderful sound that he brings in here. And the theme, again, as a rondo, it returns and it becomes now even bigger and more propulsive than the second iteration that we heard.

And you're right, Evan. He's calling back to things from the past, but looking to the future, because I don't even necessarily hear this like a rondo, you'd hear by Mozart at all. I mean, for example, this comes back again. You think we are building up to something huge, a fourth iteration, the final big moment here. But actually, this buildup itself falls down and doesn't actually end up completing and all of this while we are just minutes away from the end of the symphony. We're running out of time.

So Mahler uses the final minute and a half to build up and this time sustain into something unbelievably glorious. And it's incredible that we go through 70 minutes practically to reach this point. And it's almost hard to believe this is about to end. If you think about a movie, you'll have a climax and then it might be 10, 15 minutes of things winding down, but we're right here at the end. He takes us right to the edge of the cliff in a way that is hard to almost explain. But I think of it being similar to Beethoven 9. I've never thought of Beethoven 9 this much with this symphony before. But I mean, the more I look at it, the more I kind of hear that. The end is final, but it's something of an enigma because where are we now, Evan? We started with a funeral march and now we're here.

01:05:48

Evan: And we often, as we were saying, John, this sense of not being prepared. He doesn't telegraph what's going to happen. You don't know what to expect. And when things do occur, there's a sense of rightness about them. There's a sense of honesty about them, but there's also a sense of, " Gosh, I didn't see that coming." And you feel a little almost, not like you've been tricked. But you feel a little confused maybe, or a little part of the thrill is the sense of the enigmatic nature in which he's expressing all these different things at once.

01:06:24

John Banther: Yeah. I mean, for me, I have a lot of feelings, I don't know what they are entirely. Is this triumph over our existential dread of the first movement? We know he was obsessed with his own mortality, but that just sounds too simplistic to me. Is this acceptance, a renewed love of life? Is it the understanding we are all stardust formed by supernovas or perhaps an ironic embrace of uncertainty from a composer who could not handle uncertainty? But no matter what here, I'm really drawn back to that anonymous post I read at the beginning. " It really felt as though Mahler was orchestrating mankind's struggle to forge meaning and coherence out of the chaos of physical matter. The ending coda is so triumphant and all the ease of the first 50 minutes vanish."

So I mean, on one hand, this episode has been trying to forge meaning and coherence out of the chaos of this symphony. Not quite of an accomplishment I think we're getting, as Mahler does with this. But maybe this is also a kind of transformation or rebirth. Not death and then something else, but rather some kind of enlightenment that changes our understanding of what pain or suffering is that we experienced in the first several movements. I have no idea and that's why, Evan, I sent you that link to that game, Jump to Conclusions office mat from Office Space. I don't know if you remember that, but I do feel like I'm jumping to conclusions, but that's how I'm feeling.

01:08:00

Evan: Yeah. Well, we feel like whatever answer we have to the questions that Mahler poses are going to be the wrong answers, and yet, our answers are going to be interesting. We'll all have different answers. And that's part of what makes Mahler's music so exciting that different people can experience it in such different ways. And there's that sense of only he really knows the secret and we'll never really figure it out, but we can't help but ask.

I keep thinking about that there's this famous comment that Mahler made in a conversation with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. And of course, John, you and I talked about Sibelius in an earlier episode. It seems especially fitting when we're talking about Mahler's Symphony No. 5. He said, " A symphony must be like the whole world. It must embrace everything." And the Symphony No.5 of Mahler in particular does seem to indeed embrace everything. It's like the whole world. It's like its own vast world. And like the world, this symphony can be confusing and brutal. And like the world, it can be glorious and stunningly beautiful.

01:09:08

John Banther: That is a beautiful way to end this, Evan. If you are still listening, one, congratulations and thank you for making it this far. I highly recommend you just look out for other podcasts or videos on YouTube because this is such a symphony. As you said, it's the entire world. Everyone is saying different things because there are different things to look at because there's just so much here. So this is just the beginning and what we've gleamed through our listens of Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown.org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@ weta. org. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banter. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.