The Symphony No. 6 in A minor by Gustav Mahler is a symphony in four movements, composed in 1903 and 1904, with revisions from 1906. It is sometimes nicknamed the Tragic (), though the origin of the nickname remains unresolved.
Mahler conducted the work's first performance at the Saalbau concert hall in Essen on 27 May 1906. He composed the symphony during an exceptionally happy time in his life, as he had married Alma Schindler in 1902, and during the course of the work's composition, his second daughter was born. This contrasts with the tragic, even nihilistic, ending of the symphony. Both Alban Berg and Anton Webern praised the work when they first heard it. Berg expressed his opinion of the stature of this symphony in a 1908 letter to Webern:
Nickname of The status of the symphony's nickname is problematic due to its lost history. Mahler did not title the symphony when he composed it, when it was first performed or when it was first published. When he allowed Richard Specht to analyse the work and Alexander von Zemlinsky to arrange the symphony, he did not authorize any sort of nickname for it. He had, as well, decisively rejected and disavowed the titles (and programmes) of his earlier symphonies by 1900. Only the words (Sixth Symphony) appeared on the programme for the performance in Munich on 8 November 1906. Nor does the word appear on any of the scores that C. F. Kahnt published (first edition, 1906; revised edition, 1906), in Specht's officially approved ('thematic guide') or on Zemlinsky's piano duet transcription (1906). By contrast, in his Gustav Mahler memoir, Bruno Walter claimed that "Mahler called [the work] his Tragic Symphony". Additionally, the programme for the first Vienna performance (4 January 1907) refers to the work as .
Although not using the title, Alma Mahler's famous statement has influenced the association of the symphony with tragedy:
Instrumentation The symphony is scored for a very large orchestra, the largest purely instrumental forces Mahler ever wrote for, consisting of the following:
Woodwinds piccolo (used only in movement 4) 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling 2nd and 3rd piccolos) 4 oboes (3rd and 4th doubling 2nd and 3rd cor anglais; 2nd cor anglais used only in Scherzo) cor anglais (used only in movement 4) E clarinet (doubling 4th clarinet) 3 B and A clarinets bass clarinet 4 bassoons (4th used only in movement 4) contrabassoon Brass 8 horns 6 trumpets (5th and 6th used only in movement 4) 4 trombones (4th used only in movement 4) tuba Keyboards celesta (doubled or tripled if possible)
Percussion 6 timpani (two players) bass drum 2 snare drums (used in movements 1 and 4) several pairs of crash cymbals suspended cymbals several triangles cowbells (offstage in movements 1 and 4, onstage in Andante) hammer (see description below) 2 tam-tams (standard and deep) rute (to be struck on the bass drum case, used only in movement 4) small wooden stick (to be struck on the bass drum case, used only in the scherzo) deep, untuned bells (used only in movement 4, offstage) glockenspiel xylophone Strings 4 harps 1st violins 2nd violins violas cellos double basses
Listed above is the full, original orchestration of the sixth symphony. The critical edition does not account for everything listed, especially regarding the very large percussion section. The number of harps specified is ambiguous; Mahler called for two in his list of instruments, but at one point he called for four harps in the score. Due to costs, however, most performances use only two.
In addition to very large woodwind and brass sections, Mahler augmented the percussion section with several unusual instruments, including untuned bells, offstage cowbells, and the famous "Mahler hammer". The sound of the hammer, which features in the last movement, was stipulated by Mahler to be "brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe)." The sound achieved in the premiere did not quite carry far enough from the stage, and indeed the problem of achieving the proper volume while still remaining dull in resonance remains a challenge to the modern orchestra. Various methods of producing the sound have involved a wooden mallet striking a wooden surface, a sledgehammer striking a wooden box, or a particularly large bass drum, or sometimes simultaneous use of more than one of these methods. Contemporaries mocked the use of the hammer, as shown by a caricature from the satirical magazine .
Structure The work is in four movements and has a duration of around 80 minutes. The order of the inner movements has been a matter of controversy. The first published edition of the score (C. F. Kahnt, 1906) featured the movements in the following order:
Mahler later placed the as the second movement, and this new order of the inner movements was reflected in the second and third published editions of the score, as well as the Essen premiere.
The first three movements are relatively traditional in structure and character, with a standard sonata form first movement (even including an exact repeat of the exposition, unusual in Mahler) leading to the middle movements – one a scherzo-with-trios, the other slow. However, attempts to analyze the vast finale in terms of the sonata archetype have encountered serious difficulties. As Dika Newlin has pointed out:
I. The first movement, which for the most part has the character of a march, features a motif consisting of an A major triad turning to A minor over a distinctive timpani rhythm. The chords are played by trumpets and oboes when first heard, with the trumpets sounding the loudest in the first chord and the oboes in the second.
This motif reappears in subsequent movements. The first movement also features a soaring melody which the composer's wife, Alma Mahler, claimed represented her. This melody is often called the "Alma theme". A restatement of that theme at the movement's end marks the happiest point of the symphony.
II. : The scherzo marks a return to the unrelenting march rhythms of the first movement, though in a 'triple-time' metrical context.
Its trio (the middle section), marked ('old-fashioned'), is rhythmically irregular ( switching to and ) and of a somewhat gentler character.
According to Alma Mahler, in this movement Mahler "represented the unrhythmical games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand". The chronology of its composition suggests otherwise. The movement was composed in the summer of 1903, when Maria Anna (born November 1902) was less than a year old. Anna Justine was born a year later in June 1904.
III.
The provides a respite from the intensity of the rest of the work. Its main theme is an introspective ten-bar phrase in E major, though it frequently touches on the minor mode as well. This theme, which is repeated three times, is actually a quote from , the first song of Kindertotenlieder. The movement's second theme eventually returns in the violins, leading to climax played by the horns, with cowbells loudly clashing with the rest of the orchestra. The strife is short lived, however, and the music finds solace in its final bars.
IV.
The last movement is an extended sonata form with an introduction and coda, characterized by drastic changes in mood and tempo, the sudden change of glorious soaring melody to deep agony.
The movement is punctuated by two hammer blows. The original score had five hammer blows, which Mahler subsequently reduced to three, and eventually to two.
Alma quoted her husband as saying that these were three mighty blows of fate befallen by the hero, "the third of which fells him like a tree". She identified these blows with three later events in Gustav Mahler's own life: the death of his eldest daughter Maria Anna Mahler, the diagnosis of an eventually fatal heart condition, and his forced resignation from the Vienna Opera and departure from Vienna. When he revised the work, Mahler removed the last of these three hammer strokes so that the music built to a sudden moment of stillness in place of the third blow. Some recordings and performances, notably those of Leonard Bernstein, have restored the third hammer blow. The piece ends with the same rhythmic motif that appeared in the first movement, but the chord above it is a simple A minor triad, rather than A major turning into A minor. After the third 'hammer-blow' passage, the music gropes in darkness and then the trombones and horns begin to offer consolation. However, after they turn briefly to major they fade away and the final bars erupt in the minor.
Order of the inner movements and performance history issue Initial history Controversy exists over the order of the two middle movements. Mahler conceived the work as having the scherzo second and the slow movement third, an arrangement adumbrated in such earlier large-scale symphonies as Beethoven's No. 9, Bruckner's No. 8 and (unfinished) No. 9, and Mahler's own four-movement No. 1 and No. 4. It was in this arrangement that the symphony was completed (in 1904) and published (in March 1906); and it was with a conducting score in which the scherzo preceded the slow movement that Mahler began rehearsals for the work's first performance, as noted by Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange:
Alfred Roller, a close collaborator and colleague of Mahler's in Vienna, communicated in a letter dated 2 May 1906 to his fiancée Mileva Stojsavljevic, on the Mahlers' reaction to the orchestral rehearsal of the work in Vienna on 1 May 1906 in its original movement order:
During those later May 1906 rehearsals in Essen, however, Mahler decided that the slow movement should precede the scherzo. Klaus Pringsheim, another colleague of Mahler's at the Hofoper, reminisced in a 1920 article on the situation at the Essen rehearsals, on Mahler's state of mind at the time:
Mahler instructed his publishers to prepare a "second edition" of the work with the movements in that order, and meanwhile to insert errata slips indicating the change of order into all unsold copies of the existing edition. Mahler conducted the public premiere on 27 May 1906 and his other two subsequent performances of the Sixth Symphony, in November 1906 (Munich) and 4 January 1907 (Vienna), with his revised order of the inner movements.
History from 1911 to 1960 In the period immediately after Mahler's death, scholars such as Paul Bekker, Ernst Decsey, Richard Specht, and Paul Stefan published studies with reference to the Sixth Symphony in Mahler's second edition with the Andante/Scherzo order. One of the first occasions after Mahler's death where the conductor reverted to the original movement order is in 1919/1920, after an inquiry in the autumn of 1919 from Willem Mengelberg to Alma Mahler in preparation for the May 1920 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam of the complete symphonies, regarding the order of the inner movements of the Sixth Symphony. In a telegram dated 1 October 1919, Alma responded to Mengelberg:
Mengelberg, who had been in close touch with Mahler until the latter's death, and had conducted the symphony in the "Andante/Scherzo" arrangement up to 1916, then switched to the "Scherzo/Andante" order. In his own copy of the score, he wrote on the first page: