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Work

Adagio, from Symphony No. 10

Composer

Gustav Mahler

Mahler’s Adagio from his Symphony No. 10 is a soul-searching movement whose emotional intensity is in part a reaction to his learning that his wife Alma was considering leaving him.

Mahler composed the extant music of his Symphony No. 10 primarily in summer 1910; it was left incomplete upon his death in May 1911. In 1924, his widow Alma asked the composer (and her son-in-law) Ernst Křenek to complete in full score the most substantial movements, nos. 1 (the Adagio) and 3 (“Purgatorio”); these were premiered in October 1924. The BSO first performed music from the Tenth Symphony—the Adagio alone—under Richard Burgin’s direction in the 1953-54 season. (Charles Munch paired the “Purgatorio” movement with the Adagio in December 1959; Simon Rattle led Deryck Cooke’s “performing version” of the five-movement symphony in January 1996.) Niklaus Wyss led the first Tanglewood performance of the Adagio on July 14, 1979.

Working on the Tenth Symphony at his mountain-cradled lakeside retreat in Toblach (Italy), Gustav Mahler could not have known that the summer of 1910 would be his last. Signs of illness emerged months later, amid the demands of directing the New York Philharmonic; his condition worsened during his journey back to Europe in April 1911 and deteriorated further in Vienna, where many paid homage to the great composer and conductor on his deathbed in May. 

But the summer of 1910 was difficult for other reasons. After the Philharmonic season, Mahler traveled with his family to Paris to conduct concerts of his music. Back in Vienna, he immersed himself in preparations to conduct his Eighth Symphony, attending rehearsals in Leipzig and Munich. Meanwhile his wife Alma, struggling with depression, left with their young daughter and a British governess to recuperate at a spa near Graz—where she began a love affair with the young architect Walter Gropius.

Alone in Toblach on his 50th birthday, Mahler composed in contented isolation and with unrelenting focus. As was typical, his work as a conductor, anticipating the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, did not directly affect his creative work. As exhilarating as it would be to conduct the “Symphony of a Thousand” (as it was promoted by the impresario), the vexing logistics of mounting a performance with so many musicians led to compromises Mahler would seem to regret. While the Eighth is monumental in scale, with lucid form and conservative tonality, the Tenth Symphony ventures further into the sparse textures and harmonic temerity of Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony.

Mahler made good progress on the opening Adagio, composing in solitude, and his family arrived in mid-July. When the movement was near completion, a love letter from Gropius was mistakenly addressed to Mahler, shattering his world. Mahler sought help from Sigmund Freud, who was on holiday in Leiden. During a four-hour walk, Freud offered advice on repairing the marriage. Still, the trauma left traces on the Tenth Symphony, Mahler’s desperate love etched in his sketches for later movements. 

After Mahler’s death, Alma withheld the manuscript of the Tenth for thirteen years, uncertain whether the unfinished work would advance his reputation or expose a creative breakdown attributable to her. When the gifted composer Ernst Křenek married their daughter Anna, Alma asked him to prepare a performing edition of the Adagio and brief middle movement (Purgatory), which the Vienna Philharmonic premiered on October 14, 1924, to mixed reviews. It would be decades before Alma, impressed by Deryck Cooke’s performing edition of the Adagio, asked Cooke to prepare a full performing score for the remaining sketches. To this day the Adagio, as the only movement Mahler completed and orchestrated, is often performed on its own. 

Typical of Mahler’s late works, the Adagio defies traditional form. Instead, the drama emerges through contrasting moments. Unprecedented in the symphonic literature, the Adagio opens with a contemplative solo for violas, hushed and inward, as if suspended in time. What follows is Mahler at his most lyrical: a luxuriant melody in the first violins, followed by a hushed theme in minor hues. Yet progress is disrupted when the exploratory viola solo returns. As if the Adagio must rebegin, the viola solo ushers back the sweeping violin theme and minor-tinged second theme. Now everything appears to falls into place, and this extended opening section gradually unwinds—until the haunting viola solo returns. 

Convention would dictate a central development of the main themes, followed by a third part that mirrors the first. In Mahler’s Adagio, the developmental exploration is brief. We then return to the luminous violin theme in shimmering clarity, followed by the hushed second theme. Large-scale repetition, while comforting to listeners, here builds towards calamity. The orchestra dies away, preparing for the unthinkable: the eerie viola solo is transferred to the first violins, which trace a fragile arc, the second violins suspended above. Then comes the searing climax, which Mahler added to the score as his marriage imploded. The full orchestra erupts into a raw dissonance, led by fortissimo brass. The only motion is frantic harp arpeggios, drawing in the strings while the basses remain in ominous stasis. Mahler briefly prepares for the next blast—a famously dissonant chord, this time without swirling strings or harp. The orchestra vanishes, leaving the trumpet, then seizes again upon the same pungent chord.

As the sound recedes below the resounding trumpet, the original two themes lead to a gentle ending. The broad falling motion induces utter calm across the orchestra; the accompaniment hovers on a singular chord or pitch, as strings and upper winds breathe in transcendent bliss. 

This Adagio is perhaps Mahler’s most philosophical symphony movement. The listener isn’t thrust into an all-encompassing symphonic process but instead encounters novel ideas that evolve into familiar reminiscences. Unlike the expansive scoring of his earlier symphonies (a large orchestra, occasionally off-stage brass), this music turns inward with often austere textures. Mahler, who habitually revised his scores, could have made changes had he lived to complete the other movements. Yet the Adagio perfectly reflects the composer’s vision at a moment in time during the fateful summer of 1910.

Without knowing the Tenth Symphony would be his last, Mahler likely regarded the work as late in his symphonic oeuvre. Spooked by the myth of great composers who perished after their ninth symphony (Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner), Mahler followed his Eighth Symphony with Das Lied von der Erde. His Ninth and especially the Adagio of the Tenth show hallmarks of “late style”: Austere texture, trills (the quiet second theme), dissonance, and rejection of conventional form are also characteristic of late Beethoven. Banishing concerns about tonality, in the Adagio of the Tenth, Mahler superimposes alien chords and assigns unrelated melodic strands to different orchestral voices in simultaneity. With stretches of effusive lyricism yet perhaps the gentlest symphonic ending in the repertoire, the Adagio charts a complex psychological journey with poignant intimacy, standing as a testament to Mahler’s profound encounter with modernism.

KAREN PAINTER

Karen Painter, Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, was previously on the faculty of Harvard University (1997-2007) and Dartmouth College (1995-1997). She is the author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 and editor of Mahler and His World.