Mahler’s Symphony No. 4
Notes by TŌN percussionist Luca Esposito
What better way to begin the 2024–25 TŌN season than with Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony? The shortest and most performed of Mahler’s symphonies portrays a child’s vision of what heaven could look, feel, sound, smell, and even taste like. In order to understand the sentiment behind this playful, gentle, heavily contrapuntal yet “minimally” orchestrated masterpiece, it is important to acknowledge the poetry from which this work derives.
The fourth movement sums up the symphony with a soprano singing “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), a song Mahler composed in 1892 based on a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), a collection of German folk poetry. Some of the text includes descriptive phrases of joyous nature such as:
“Good greens of all sorts grow in heaven’s garden!…”
“All live in gentlest peace! We lead angelic lives!…”
The character of the poem perfectly matches the character of the symphony. The very first thing that the listener hears is the jingling of sleigh bells, which foreshadows the dance-like elegance of the movement. The violin plays a key role with its various melodic lines, as well as the winds, trumpets, and a cantabile horn solo right before the last “dance” of the first movement.
The second movement is a scherzo that even further highlights the solo violin, this time tuned higher than normal to depict a country fiddler. Clarinets, trumpets, and horns continue to trade melodies as the mood remains calm, gentle, and sweet, with various lines often happening together.
The third movement is a beautiful, patient adagio that gives the celli and lower strings their time to shine. It is slow, simple, and pretty, as heaven likely would be. This movement can be seen as a theme in variations, with special shout-outs to the oboe solo, horn, harp, and timpani sostenutos.
The child’s vision of heaven is finished off by the calm singing of the soprano in the final movement, with returning themes and colors from the previous movements.
The Fourth Symphony is perhaps Mahler’s most calm and peaceful, as it does not feature any low brass, nor does it use extensively loud dynamics. The premiere was received with mixed interpretations and sentiments, and the symphony gained much more popularity after Mahler’s death in 1911.