Stephanie G. Mathis In Maestro, Berstein’s biopic, we see the conductor conducting Mahler’s monumental Symphony No.2. Tar’s fictional conductor credits Bernstein as being both her inspiration and mentor. The film follows Lydia Tar, who, like Bernstein, completes Mahler’s cycle of symphonies by performing a live recording of Symphony No. 5.
These two films have introduced Mahler to new audiences, and the 70-minute Fifth Symphony, in particular, has gained new life and a whole new fan base since its release.
Mahler’s Symphonies reflect their times. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, the classical music genre was transitioning from late-romantic to early modernist. You can either see them as a piece of sincere late-romantic or ironic modernist music, depending on your perspective.
If you love the late-Romantic style, his symphonies are full of nostalgia for romantic times and bombast. If you’re a modernist, you will hear the tensions, fissures, and rifts that are typical to this genre.
Both symphonies have a distinct style. The Fifth Symphony occupies a unique place in Mahler’s oeuvre due to a stylistic divide between it and its predecessors, which highlights these two ways of appreciating Mahler.
The Fifth: A Symphonic Transition
These works, which were composed between 1901 and 1905, differ in structure and expression from the four first symphonies. The less linear progression of ideas and design is what sets apart the later works.
Mahler’s later symphonies often surprise his listeners by introducing sudden and drastic changes in instrumentation and texture. Mahler’s four first symphonies are tenderly nostalgic, while his middle three symphonies – five, six, and seven – look forward, anticipating modern art and man.
Adagietto is the shortest and most famous movement of the Fifth Symphony. This is a passionate and dreamy piece, which is also the most coherent of the whole work.
It is a piece in which the bass register is absent, and the brass section is kept quiet. Strings and harps are played without interruption to create a dense atmosphere. This movement is said by some to be Mahler’s love letter to his wife Alma, whom he married during the composition of the symphony.
The Adagietto dominates Tar. The Adagietto was also featured in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. A recording of Bernstein leading the Vienna Philharmonic is heard in Maestro.
Like many other famous symphonies of all time, the Fifth’s opening movement, “Like a Funeral March,” is almost the exact opposite. The march is both the beginning and end of the piece. It begins with a trumpet fanfare and then alternates between the violent sounds of the entire orchestra.
What is the breakthrough?
The dark sections of the middle movement are meant to enhance rather than contrast the mood of the piece. The second movement is also gloomy. Mahler uses the form musicologist Bernd Schopenhauer identified as the primary category of his works, which is called the breakthrough.
After a rhythmically indistinct, and in terms of expression, swaying, section, an ethereal choral for brass lifts the listener to a new sonic world above the shadowy amorphous one they have been living in up until now.
The stability of the harmonic and melodic structures is like the assurance that you have reached a safe harbor after a long voyage in the darkness. This stability is lost again without transition, and the movement ends in a suffocating whimper.
Mahler’s new concept, which he developed in previous symphonies, is thwarted by this movement. In many cases, the finale is a triumphant conclusion to the battles that took place in the earlier activities. This was the case with the famous Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies. In the Fifth Symphony, however, the final movement is again quite static, just like the opening. The end is not triumphant but loud. Like in the introduction, there isn’t much development, but the original idea is looked at from different angles.
Mahler uses Wagner, Beethoven, and Austrian military marches as well as trivial dance music and his songs in the Fifth Symphony. It is technically more difficult than his previous works, particularly when you consider its polyphonic structure and how much more demanding it is for the instrumentalists.
Mahler, an experienced and diligent opera conductor, claimed that he had pushed to the limit the technical limits of each instrument group in the Fifth. The dissimilarity between the ideas is immense and culminates at moments where several themes are played brutally at once.
Mahler once told Jean Sibelius, a Finnish composer (1865-1957), that his symphonies were meant to be the entire world. The Fifth Symphony is certainly its world. The piece is a collision of contradictory ideas: irony with nostalgia, triumph with collapse, and brutality with love.
