Concerto finale

The Fifth Symphony and the Advent of a New Style

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is home to the celebrated Adagietto, a piece renowned for its ethereal, rarefied simplicity. Yet the symphony’s defining hallmark lies in the soaring architectural mastery displayed in its other movements and in the intricate polyphonic complexity of the writing. How can such a contradiction be explained? What connects the Adagietto’s transparency with the bold contrapuntal textures of the Scherzo or the final Rondo?

In the summer of 1901, as Mahler began composing the Fifth, a major stylistic shift was taking place. The composer would later refer to this period as the emergence of “ein ganz neuer Stil”—a completely new style.

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“A Completely New Style”

With the composition of the Fourth Symphony, Mahler’s Wunderhorn period came to a close—a phase defined by the Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies, all featuring vocal interludes and references drawn from his settings of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The final song of that cycle, Der Tamboursg’sell, was composed in 1901.

The foundation for this “new style” was again rooted in song. Mahler, with the distinctive fusion of literary and musical identity that characterized his work, now turned to the poetry of Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866). He translated Rückert’s lyrical world into a musical idiom defined by refinement, clarity, and sharply contoured instrumental lines. Most notably, Mahler’s new approach to orchestration shaped this transformation: he moved away from the densely woven, often fantastical symphonic textures typical of the Wunderhorn symphonies. Instead, he focused on writing for pure, isolated timbres—unaccompanied by doublings—resulting in a sound world that may be less idiomatic but cuts with the precision of an ink drawing made in fine pencil.

Ugo Duse warns that this new timbral and coloristic orientation should not be interpreted through an “impressionistic” lens. Rather, it serves the clarity of a renewed contrapuntal and polyphonic design—transparent in Mahler’s Rückert songs but brought to full structural expression in the symphonies. In 1901, Mahler was experimenting with this technique in the first three Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”) and the first seven of his Rückert-Lieder, as well as in the Fifth Symphony itself—a work he would revise twice, first in 1904, then again in 1911.

The presence of the Lied remains strong in the symphonic world inaugurated by the Fifth Symphony, even in the absence of words. The Adagietto, structured and orchestrated like a Lied ohne Worte (with strings and harp only), serves as the prototype. But further allusions to Rückert’s songs appear even in the more formally complex movements. Though the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh have been called “symphonies without singing,” the relationship between symphonic and song worlds remains rich and fertile.

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Architecture and Narrative

Simplicity, purity, and complexity coexist in Mahler’s new stylistic language. But what is the architectural shape of the Fifth Symphony?

Mahler constantly sought new formal solutions, and these often had narrative implications. He remained loyal to the symphonic tradition insofar as he preserved its formal archetypes (the Allegro, Adagio or Andante, Scherzo, Finale), yet he avoided the programmatic tendencies of the symphonic poem. His was not a blind adherence to “absolute music.” Even when no program is made explicit (as in the Fifth), Mahler’s inner “programs” suggest narrative arcs—hypothetical but plausible—shaped by formal designs resembling the chapters of a novel.

The Fifth, in particular, comprises five movements yet is structured in three parts, with the third movement—the Scherzo, the longest in all of Mahler’s symphonic output—at its center. Before and after the Scherzo lie two sections made up of paired movements in a slow-fast sequence: the opening Funeral March serves as an introduction to the stormy Allegro of the second movement. These two form the first part, linked by shared themes and recurring motifs. The Adagietto, on the other hand, functions as the prelude to the final Rondo; together they comprise the third part. Long pauses separate the sections before and after the Scherzo—reminiscent of a novelistic “many years later.”

Though the formal architecture centers on the Scherzo, the narrative trajectory is linear: the curtain rises on a funeral procession, a mood of defeat underscored by the tempestuous Allegro. The Scherzo then works its way backward toward life, contrasting in character like light and shadow. According to Specht and Adorno, it echoes Goethe’s image of the world’s unstoppable ride, propelled by time’s relentless advance. The Adagietto—described by Mahler’s disciple Willem Mengelberg as a “declaration of love to Alma”—marks a turning point. The final Rondo, with its relentless structural energy, offers an affirmative message centered on the virtue of operosità, industrious labor—suggested by its dense contrapuntal fabric.

Bruno Walter once claimed the Fifth is “pure music,” asserting that “not even the faintest trace of a metaphysical problem enters its purely musical development.” Yet the journey “from darkness to hope” is hard to overlook. It is no coincidence that Mahler composed the work’s most tragic, death-obsessed movements—the first two—in the summer of 1901, when he confessed to thinking about death for the first time. During that same period, he also composed the somber Revelge and Um Mitternacht, in addition to the Kindertotenlieder. By contrast, the iridescent Adagietto was written later, after he had met Alma, whom he would marry in 1902—the beginning of a new life.

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The First Part

Listening more closely, the first two movements should be heard as a single section populated by the same “characters.” The most striking example is the second trio of the Funeral March: a dancing, pulsing theme in the violins, which reappears as the second theme of the Allegro tempestoso. Numerous other thematic elements recur from the first to the second movement, as if they were novelistic figures undergoing shifts in emotional state—mirrored by the narrator’s own evolving voice. Occasionally, secondary ideas from earlier in the work are developed and brought to the fore—Adorno likened this to a novelist’s technique of promoting a character once relegated to the background.

The Funeral March opens with a trumpet fanfare, followed by a sorrowful procession echoing Der Tamboursg’sell. This block, presented in various guises or “psychic states” (see the transformation of the theme into a sweetly desolate major key, drawn from the first Kindertotenlied), alternates with two trios. The first is a wrenching rupture: rather than nostalgic recollection, as in many traditional funeral marches, it “gestures and cries out in terror as if confronted with something worse than death,” Adorno wrote. The second trio, after a reprise of the march, is the aforementioned dancing, pulsing episode.

The Allegro tempestoso juxtaposes a frenzied first theme group with the pulsing motif from the previous movement, now markedly slowed down. The irreconcilability of these two themes, set within a dense web of echoes—including those from the Funeral March—culminates in a radiant chorale: a moment of exultation that soon reveals itself as fleeting and illusory.

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The Scherzo

The key musical event in the Scherzo—the “pivot” of the symphony and a movement unusually long for one inspired by Ländler and Waltzer—is the entrance of a dreamlike episode led by solo horn, recalling the posthorn solo in the Scherzo of the Third Symphony. Citation? Reminiscence? Autobiography? The label matters less than the way Mahler lets it gradually surface, as if from a distant recess of memory. The contrast with the Scherzo’s main theme, bold and even brash, and its more hesitant Viennese-waltz-like secondary theme, could not be sharper.

The entire form is then repeated twice, with various omissions, in a sustained surge of life force that nevertheless encounters resistance. Mahler once wrote of “a chaos that eternally gives birth to a world that lasts only an instant before dissolving again”—a reflection of the malaise misunderstood by early critics, who interpreted it as “optimism.”

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The Third Part

With the Adagietto, the symphony enters its third section. Formally an interlude preparing the final Rondo, it also marks a profound expressive shift. Not only is it structured like a Lied ohne Worte, but it also bears a striking resemblance to Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (“I am lost to the world”), a Rückert setting Mahler composed in 1901—particularly the section where the poet claims to have “died to the world’s clamor.” There are also unspoken allusions to Tristan (and the second Kindertotenlied), clearly linked to the supposed dedication to Alma. Its static ternary form (ABA), tonally and thematically stable, is a near-provocative contrast to the Weltgetümmel—the chaos of the world—surrounding it.

The Rondo-Finale begins with a stream of fragmented ideas and self-references. The recurring refrain, introduced by the horns, alternates with a lyrical theme (derived from the Adagietto—another link between adjacent movements!), but above all with a series of intricate fugato episodes. These culminate in a chorale-like theme in the coda, which is immediately “desanctified”—absorbed into the rhythmic vitality of the movement and its ceaseless creative momentum.

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Andrea Estero