Symphony No. 5 in C# Minor

The performance offered here, by Gary Bertini (1930-2005) and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, from 20 March 1981, is a “literalist” rendition quite faithful to the composer’s intentions. The 1902-04 symphony represents Mahler’s initial break from his former, “song” style, based on his settings of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, poems celebrating the creative power of youth.
The Fifth is set in three parts: Part I: a Funeral March reverberating with the rhythm of Beethoven’s 5th and a succeeding Stormy movement. Both of the opening movements exploit the dissonance of a minor 9th chord, with turbulent, chromatic energies. Part II begins with an expansive Scherzo that features a prominent 4-horn part, just as the first movement exploited the trumpet. This music plays both as rustically countrified and extremely anguished and distraught. Part III begins with the famous Adagietto, originally conceived as a love-letter to Mahler’s future wife, Alma Schindler. Scored for strings and harp, the music is passionate and intimate. The last movement, Rondo-Finale: Allegro, demands precision for its emphases on counterpoint, its references both to the Adagietto, Austrian dance music, and elements of church chorales. The coda arrives after 42 measures of graduated crescendo, capped by a manic Presto, abrupt conclusion.
The music synthesizes personal aspects in Mahler with impulses of his contemporary Vienna, always a source of cultural contradiction. In the midst of its glamorous cosmopolitanism, Vienna continued to harbor anti-Semitism, forcing Mahler to declare his distance in faith in order to preserve his position at the Vienna Opera. His relationship with Alma became intricate and tormented, and the range pf expression in the music nods to Wagner, Liszt, Debussy, and points to Schoenberg. All the while, Mahler’s obsession with death plays its part, his continuous “intimations of mortality.” The Scherzo movement, most of all, depicts the grotesque fragility of his mental and spiritual condition.