Love detached from the world, amidst abysses
A steamship approaches through the mist, accompanied by the ‘Adagietto’: it was with this image that Luchino Visconti made Gustav Mahler’s ‘Fifth’ world-famous. Yet the tender movement, which Mahler dedicated to his future wife Alma Schindler, is only one aspect of this symphony. Author Marco Frei traces the work through funeral marches, sudden outbursts and a ‘Scherzo’ that turns into a dance of death – and shows just how close love and the abyss lie to one another in Mahler’s work.
A steamship approaches from afar through the mist, accompanied by the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Thus begins the film Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti from 1971, based on the novella of the same name by Thomas Mann. It is not the first time that the famous Italian film director has used music by Mahler. As early as in Senso from 1954, Visconti quoted not only Mahler but also Anton Bruckner; however, this single quotation from the Fifth had the effect of making Mahler enormously popular.
Consequently, the Fifth has become firmly established in the concert world. Following two world wars and bans on the performance of Mahler’s music under National Socialism and Stalinism, his works have now become part of the core repertoire. For Visconti, the Adagietto is the perfect soundtrack for capturing the mysterious, unreal, ethereal and morbid atmosphere in Venice – if only because of its instrumentation.
For this fourth, penultimate movement of the Fifth is, uniquely in Mahler’s oeuvre, scored throughout for strings and harp alone: no timpani, brass or woodwinds. For Mahler himself, this Adagietto was a declaration of love to his future wife, Alma Schindler. At least, that is what his friend, the conductor Willem Mengelberg, recounts. In November 1901, Mahler met the daughter of the Viennese landscape painter Emil Schindler. In the summer of that same year, Mahler had told his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner about his initial ideas for the Fifth.
In Maiernigg on Lake Wörthersee, he also played six new settings of Rückert’s poems for her, including the song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, which also resonates in the Adagietto. With the Rückert Lieder, Mahler moves away from the world of the Wunderhorn Lieder, which characterise his Symphonies Nos. 1 to 4. Furthermore, the Mahler scholar Constantin Floros has identified in the Adagietto the visual motif from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; after drinking the love potion, the two title characters see each other in a new light, and a passion flares up.
All this confirms Mengelberg’s account. In this interpretation, the Adagietto contains a message of love detached from the world, surrounded by abysses. The first two movements alone – which together form the first of a total of three sections – bear witness to this. They are characterised by funeral marches, wild outbursts and violent collapses. In symphonic music, funeral marches have not been uncommon since Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony No. 3, and this is also the case with Mahler himself in the slow movement of the First.
However, he describes the opening movement of the Fifth as Funeral March. At a measured pace. Like a funeral procession. This is a novelty. The dotted funeral fanfare played by the solo trumpet at the beginning quotes Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Song Without Words, Op. 62 No. 3, for piano: a Funeral March in E minor. In the second movement, Stormy and agitated. With the greatest vehemence, a chorale interlude resounds once again towards the end, which in this context seems out of place. The resolution comes towards the end of the work in the rondo finale.
There, the same chorale theme builds to a euphoric climax. Suffering finally seems to have been overcome. Until then, however, the Scherzo of the third movement marks yet another abyss. It is one of the most abstract and, at the same time, most sinister pieces of music to have come from Mahler’s pen. Neither the solo horn nor the first trio, in the form of a – supposedly – harmless Valse, can distract from this. This Scherzo’s haunting quality soon takes on the characteristics of a dance of death.
For Floros, the scherzo is a ‘Media vita in morte sumus’, meaning ‘In the midst of life we are in death’. When the Fifthpremiered in Cologne in 1904, reactions were mixed. In a letter to Mahler in March 1905, Richard Strauss expressed his enthusiasm, referring in particular to the first three movements. He calls the Scherzo ‘brilliant’. Only the Adagietto had ‘somewhat dampened’ his enjoyment, but: ‘The fact that it was the part the audience liked best is, after all, quite right for you.’
Author: Marco Frei
