OCT 18 1904 Premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 in c sharp minor, in Cologne, with Mahler conducting. PIC A silhouette of Mahler by Hans Schliessmann

June 9 1902 Premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (first complete performance) at Krefeld, Germany, Mahler conducting. PIC The LCSO performance in Decorah, IA and La Crosse, WI

May 27 1906 Premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in a minor (Tragic) in the Saalbau in Essen, Germany, Mahler conducting. PIC Graham Jones of the Liverpool Philharmonic with the hammer for the final movement

MAR 16 1896 Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (orchestrated) was first performed by the Dutch baritone Anton Sistermans with the Berlin Philharmonic and Mahler conducting.

Except for the finale, which was composed as a song with piano accompaniment in February 1892, Gustav Mahler wrote his Fourth Symphony between June 1899 and April 1901.

Song and symphony are frequently intertwined in the work of Gustav Mahler. It is amazing to realize that one small song—”Das himmlische Leben” (Heavenly life), the one that serves as the finale for this symphony—inspired, influenced, and shaped so much important music.

Although it is the last music we hear in this symphony, the song was Mahler’s starting point. In the early years of the nineteenth century Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published an anthology of seven hundred traditional German poems known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The youth’s magic horn). Carl Maria von Weber was one of the first composers to see the musical potential of this collection, and, by coincidence, it was his copy of the Wunderhorn poems that Mahler picked up one day in 1887, while he was visiting the home of the composer’s grandson.

From that volume Mahler chose a few poems and set them to music at once. For the next fourteen years, Mahler used Des Knaben Wunderhorn as the source for all but one of his song texts. On February 10, 1892, he completed a setting for voice and piano of the poem “Der Himmel hangt voll Geigen” (Heaven is hung with violins), a child’s naive picture of celestial bliss. Mahler wrote his own title, “Das himmlische Leben,” at the top of the page. A month later, he finished the orchestral version, colored by the sounds of a harp and the tinkling of bells.

Mahler had a special affection for the song and he often included it in concerts of his music. But when it came time to publish his Wunderhorn settings, “Das himmlische Leben” was held back. Mahler had decided to use the song as the finale of his Third Symphony instead. The rest of that symphony was conceived as a sequence of answers to life’s questions, concluding with “What the child tells me,” or “Das himmlische Leben.” But as work neared completion, Mahler lopped off the finale and carried it with him to his next symphony, the finale not of one, but, in a sense, of two symphonies.

In planning his Fourth Symphony, Mahler knew how his piece would end before he wrote his first page; he then had to work backwards in a sense, so that his song would appear as the logical destination of the three new movements. With this goal in sight, he conceived a symphony that would explore the road from experience to innocence, from complexity to simplicity, and from earthly life to heaven.

To convey the journey toward innocence, Mahler’s first three movements gradually diminish in complexity as they approach the pure and serene threshold of the finale. Mahler suggests his goal with the symphony’s very opening bars, scored for the sleigh bells and piping flutes that will later greet us in heaven. In a work full of flashbacks and fast-forwards, this is a momentary glance and no more. Mahler quickly introduces a lovely melody, “childishly simple and quite unselfconscious,” in his own words, that, like many simple materials in music, will lead to the most complex developments.

Although Mahler left no titles for the movements in this symphony, fearing “their banal misunderstandings,” we know that the second movement originally was inscribed “Friend Hein Strikes Up,” after a character in German folklore, a sinister pied piper who plays his violin and leads his victims toward death. Alma Mahler amplified that hint by writing that here “the composer was under the spell of the self-portrait by Arnold Böcklin,

in which Death fiddles into the painter’s ear while the latter sits entranced. Mahler assigns the central role to the solo violin, instructs him to tune his instrument up a whole tone (to give it a harsher sound), and to play it “wie ein Fiedel”—like the fiddle one knows from the street, not the concert hall. The two landler-like trios hint at the music of “Das himmlische Leben” to come.

Mahler once admitted that the slow movement, a spacious and magnificent set of variations, was inspired by “a vision of a tombstone on which was carved an image of the departed, with folded arms, in eternal sleep.” There is one immense uproar near the end that would surely raise the dead, however, and when this great wave erupts from G major and plants us for the first time squarely in E major, the gates of heaven are within sight. But first we sink back into G major to await the song from which this music first sprang.

And then, with a few bucolic phrases from the winds and the gentle plucking of the harp and strings, we hear the human voice for the first time in this symphony. A soprano sings of an innocent pastoral world and Mahler’s pen sketches cloudless blue skies and the eternity of E major. Angels bake bread, Saint Peter fishes in a pond stocked daily by God, and “there is just no music on earth that can compare with ours.”

We enjoy heavenly pleasures
and therefore avoid earthly ones.
No worldly tumult
is to be heard in heaven.
All live in greatest peace.
We lead angelic lives,
yet have a merry time of it besides.
We dance and we spring,
We skip and we sing.
Saint Peter in heaven looks on.

John lets the lambkin out,
and Herod the Butcher lies in wait for it.
We lead a patient,
an innocent, patient,
dear little lamb to its death.
Saint Luke slaughters the ox
without any thought or concern.
Wine doesn’t cost a penny
in the heavenly cellars;
The angels bake the bread.

Good greens of every sort
grow in the heavenly vegetable patch,
good asparagus, string beans,
and whatever we want.
Whole dishfuls are set for us!
Good apples, good pears and good grapes,
and gardeners who allow everything!
If you want roebuck or hare,
on the public streets
they come running right up.

Should a fast day come along,
all the fishes at once come swimming with joy.
There goes Saint Peter running
with his net and his bait
to the heavenly pond.
Saint Martha must be the cook.

There is just no music on earth
that can compare to ours.
Even the eleven thousand virgins
venture to dance,
and Saint Ursula herself has to laugh.
There is just no music on earth
that can compare to ours.
Cecelia and all her relations
make excellent court musicians.
The angelic voices
gladden our senses,
so that all awaken for joy.

In the fall of 1901 Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, the beautiful daughter of Emil Schindler, a highly respected Viennese landscape painter and perhaps the most important Austrian visual artist of the nineteenth century. As the story goes, Mahler immediately sat down and composed this Adagietto as a declaration of his love (having written the first two movements of his Symphony No. 5 earlier that summer).
 Alma Schindler
The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, in his personal copy of the Fifth Symphony, wrote: “This Adagietto was Gustav Mahler’s declaration of love for Alma! Instead of a letter, he sent her this in manuscript form; no other words accompanied it. She understood and wrote to him: He should come!!! (both of them told me this!).” Mengelberg’s own description of the Adagietto was “love, a love comes into his life.”

The fact that the music included a reference to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde may have been an acknowledgment that Alma was herself an accomplished musician and composer and would immediately understand the reference.

Mengelberg also wrote a short poem into his conducting score, words to go with the melody in the first violins.

“Wie ich dich liebe, Du meine Sonne,
ich kann mit Worten Dir’s nicht sagen.
Nur meine Sehnsucht kann ich Dir klagen und meine Liebe.”

(How much I love you, you my sun,
I cannot tell you that with words.
I can only lament to you my longing and love.)

The music is written for only strings and harp. Mahler’s markings in the score clarify exactly what he wanted from a performance: espressivo, seelenvoll (“soulful”), and mit innigster Empfindung (“with the most heartfelt sentiment”). Beginning very quietly, this music is soon full of longing: its arcing, graceful melodies unfold with a bittersweet intensity, rise gradually to a soaring climax, and finally fall back to the peaceful close.

JULY 7 1860 Gustav Mahler born in the village of Kalischt (Kaliště) halfway between Prague in Bohemia and Brno in Moravia.

PIC Mahler birth house

NOV 20 1911 First public performance of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the Tonhalle in Munich. Soloists were the Americans Sara Cahier and William Miller with conductor Bruno Walter. Mahler had died 6 months earlier.

Contrary to popular belief Mahler did attempt several opera/stage works early on:

1875–1878 Herzog Ernst von Schwaben Ernst, Duke of Swabia for voices and orchestra not performed lost; both the music and the libretto by Josef Steiner are lost.

1878–1880 Die Argonauten for voices and orchestra not performed lost; music and libretto (by Mahler and Steiner) lost 

1879–1883 Rübezahl for voices and orchestra not performed libretto (by Mahler) held privately; music lost, but some may have been incorporated into early songs and/or parts of Das Klagende Lied

1884 Der Trompeter von Säckingen The Trumpeter of Säckingen for orchestra Kassel, 23 June 1884 incidental Music to play by Josef Viktor von Scheffel; most music lost; First number became the “Blumine” andante in the original version of Symphony No. 1.

1886–1887 Die drei Pintos The Three Pintos for voices and orchestra Leipzig, 20 January 1888 completion of opera by Carl Maria von Weber; Mahler arranged Weber’s sketches and other music from Weber’s minor works, and composed a small amount himself — Source Wikipedia

JULY 7 1860 Gustav Mahler born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. PIC Mahler’s birth house now has a small concert hall attached.