Symphony No. 7
Gustav Mahler was born at Kalischt (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He composed the second and fourth movements of what became his Seventh Symphony during the summer of 1904 and added the remaining three movements the following summer. Mahler himself conducted the first performance, on September 19, 1908, in Prague.
The score of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 calls for 4 flutes and 2 piccolos (doubling 2nd and 3rd flutes), 3 oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, 4 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, tenor horn in B-flat, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, cowbells, tubular bells, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, bass drum), mandolin, guitar, two harps, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, double basses).
Gustav Mahler composed his Seventh Symphony over two summers (1904, 1905) at the fabled Alpine lake, Wörthersee, working in the small “composition hut” near the villa he had recently built. In contrast to his early symphonies—which incorporate his own songs and flout formal conventions—the symphonies 5 through 7, all composed in that same studio, reflect Mahler’s rapprochement with tradition. Just as his friend Richard Strauss responded to the new century in his creative process (even initially dedicating Also sprach Zarathustra to “the 20th century”), Mahler returned to symphonic conventions as a means of sustaining tradition in a modern era. In an 1899 conversation, Mahler framed the issue in terms of personal maturity: earlier he would defy conventions “in outward form,” much as a young man dresses in a conspicuously individual manner, but now he strives for “inward difference,” preferring “to pour my content into the usual form and avoid all innovations when they are not necessary.”
A noticeable “inward difference” in the symphonies 5-7 is rich counterpoint—an overlay of boldly contrasting instrumental colors. Mahler composed for a large orchestra, with novel additions in the Sixth Symphony (including a large hammer, to critics’ chagrin) and Seventh Symphony (cowbells, mandolin, and guitar). For years Mahler worried whether to reveal to the public his titles for movements and specific ideas conveyed in the music, since “program music” was held in lower esteem than “absolute music,” and his cues were easily misconstrued. After avoiding descriptive movement titles in symphonies 5-6, Mahler seemed reconciled to the idea that no meaningful opposition existed between program music and absolute music. In the Seventh Symphony, two contrasting movements bear the same broad title, “Night Music,” yet no further labels or descriptors constrain how the listener should interpret the music.
The vast differences in character between the Sixth and Seventh symphonies are arresting because, apparently for the first time, Mahler began the latter while still composing the former. While correcting proofs for the Fifth Symphony and completing the finale of the Sixth—arguably his most demanding on listeners—Mahler also composed the second and fourth movements for the Seventh Symphony, perhaps his most accessible. From a practical standpoint, as he pushed toward unprecedented dissonance and density in the finale of the Sixth Symphony, it made sense for Mahler to explore a different path in his next symphony, one marked by transparent texture and masterful coloration.
Yet given the imperative of unity across the movements of a symphony, Mahler then faced a conundrum, since he had completed two “inner” movements of the Seventh in summer 1904 before sketching any ideas for how it would begin. Never before, it seems, had he written symphony movements out of order. Determined to finish the Seventh the following summer, Mahler faced a nearly insurmountable creative block. He sought inspiration as he had so often by hiking in the Tyrolean Dolomites. The trip proved recuperative, yet his writer’s block persisted. Fearing that he would produce nothing that summer, Mahler returned to Wörthersee. As he stepped onto the boat to reach his villa, the oars’ splashing sparked the idea for the “rhythm and the character” that would open the symphony. From there, the music flowed almost uninterrupted, and he completed the remaining three movements in just seven weeks (he later recalled—proudly—that it took only four).
On September 19, 1908, while on vacation back in Europe following his first season with the Metropolitan Opera, Mahler conducted the premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Prague. His severance agreement with the Vienna Court Opera barred Mahler from conducting in Vienna, and he retained a fond connection to Prague dating from his brief appointment as Kapellmeister of the city’s Royal German Theater years earlier. The performance of this celebratory yet technically dazzling score was a fitting culmination to an extended exhibition marking the sixtieth anniversary of Franz Josef’s accession to the Habsburg throne. The Czechs having largely snubbed Vienna’s season-long celebrations of the anniversary, German businesses similarly ignored the Prague festivities, turning them into a celebration of Czech national pride.
Buoyed by the largely warm response in Prague, Mahler finalized plans to conduct the Seventh in Munich in October 1908, stipulating that a superb orchestra be engaged and that the first trumpet and first French horn be of the highest caliber. Mahler made the same requirement regarding the first trumpet when Willem Mengelberg invited him to conduct the Seventh with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in October 1909. The trumpet writing—especially for the principal player—is exceedingly taxing in the outer movements (the trumpet players can recuperate during the fourth movement, scored without trumpet).
The Seventh Symphony opens with an ominous dotted rhythm, evoking a funeral march, cast in dark hues that prepare for the stunning avowal (“grand tone!” Mahler insisted) of the tenor horn, an instrument associated with band repertoire, which appears only in this movement. The slow tempo of the introduction exposes the gravitas of its inexorable rhythmic drive and broad thematic impulse, serving as a potent buildup to the first movement proper, when four horns in unison launch the Allegro risoluto in searing intensity, couched in an austere E minor.
Following convention, the second theme—set in a bright C major that anticipates the finale—contrasts in every respect. Its sumptuously languid violin melody, enriched by warm horn counterpoint, swells and climbs into the highest register, until the march theme reasserts itself. Within the central development section, Mahler creates what Theodor Adorno famously termed a “breakthrough,” as if time momentarily stops: the tempo and volume suddenly drop, the first violins shimmer in tremolo, and three trumpets exchange subdued fanfares. The winds enter with a gentle chorale, scarcely recognizable as a transformation of the march theme—a moment of striking beauty. This alternate world is dispelled by the solo violin, still subdued but agitated in character, with hints of G minor. A second “breakthrough” is more extended, culminating in a broad, luminous B major. The strings’ lyricism is tender, punctuated by the passionate harp chords and warm woodwind trills, gradually building—through isolated cymbal strokes—toward the greatest moment of tension in traditional sonata form: the return of the opening material in the recapitulation.
The second movement may have been inspired by Rembrandt’s 1642 Night Watch, a painting Mahler found gripping on his first trip to Amsterdam roughly eight months before composing the work. Night Music I opens with horns echoing one another, conjuring an outdoor scene of exquisite delicacy among the woodwinds, eventually joined by pizzicato strings. Pastoral elements abound: off-stage cowbells, gentle triplet figuration, and chirping trills, with woodwinds and horns prominent throughout.
The Scherzo follows the broad outlines of Classical form—scherzo, Trio, scherzo—yet its “shadowlike” character (“Schattenhaft” in the score) aligns with the surrounding “Night Music” movements. The opening scherzo section embodies this otherworldly sound world; even the tempo marking is elusive (“flowing, but not fast”). These eerie wisps of an introduction—melodic fragments and incomplete harmonies—recur throughout in a dream-like logic, projecting the movement’s uncanny atmosphere. Scurrying figures in the strings create a hazy backdrop for the plangent oboe melody. Twice, a waltz intrudes—bolstered with an um-pah accompaniment—and briefly gathers momentum, only for the scherzo to dissolve back into its shadowy introduction. The Trio’s entrance is clearly signaled: a “sweet” oboe melody set off by a lengthy trill that passes from muted violins to horns to clarinet. Its lush woodwind texture and gentle lilt suggest an outdoor nocturnal scene; the solo viola interrupts with a thematic fragment from the first movement, accompanied by a lighthearted um-pah figure in the horns.
The fourth movement, according to Alma Mahler, was inspired by the great German Romantic author Joseph Eichendorff, though she provided no details other than referencing the poet’s “murmuring springs.” Her memoirs, written long after Mahler’s death and often demonstrably unreliable, appear to confer literary weight to a movement she described as a “serenade,” evidently out of concern that the music might be dismissed as programmatic, given Mahler’s own designation in the score, “Andante amoroso,” and the unusual additions to the orchestra, mandolin and guitar.
The composer Arnold Schoenberg drew attention to the novelty of this movement in a lecture on Mahler the year after the latter’s death, praising its unprecedented scoring and remarking that “among the most beautiful sounds are the delicate, fragrant ones.” Night Music II, moreover, has a quality of movement: its sudden changes in dynamics suggest a protagonist walking toward and away from the sound source. The ABA formal design is lucid, with the impassioned B section ushered in by the French horns and then cellos. The reprise of the A section is gently prepared: ever-softer strings, sweeping harp chords and a poignant oboe fragment. The final, broad climax subsides abruptly, leaving gentle trills, muted violins, and other evanescent sonorities to vanish into the night. The diaphanous texture—pizzicato or staccato chords accompanying the melodic line—has the effect of clearing the air for the gleaming and exultant movement that follows.
The finale is unlike any other symphony movement by Mahler, though its exuberance is prefigured by his other rondo (ABACA etc.) finale, in the Fifth Symphony. At early performances of the Seventh, audiences delighted in the finale—clear, direct, and affirmative. As Mahler’s contemporaries observed, it completed the narrative arc of the three nocturnal movements, offering the full radiance of day. The main theme, proclaimed by the trumpet near the outset, is designed to slice through the orchestral mass: a blend of fanfare and stepwise ascent. Its declamatory—rather than developmental—character is perfectly suited to rondo form, where the opening “ritornello” recurs in alternation with contrasting episodes.
At two climactic moments, the strings play in unison (or octaves) punctuated by the bass drum, with other instruments initially recessed or absent—a texture that some commentators have linked to an invocation of Turkish style in Western music (e.g., in Mozart and Beethoven). Yet the most thrilling moment for early reviewers was the return of the first movement’s main theme in bold proclamations—each time a half-step lower (D minor, C-sharp minor, C minor, B minor), giving the effect of digging ever deeper into harmonic space, until its final transformation in major (D-flat). To be reminded of the first movement while nearing the end of the finale was an effective way to impart unity to a lengthy and large symphony. Whether or not audience members consciously connected the outer movements, the strategy of quoting an earlier movement contributed to the weight and significance of the finales in several Mahler symphonies.
Some commentators have been perplexed by the finale’s unflagging optimism. Is the music parodic—taunting music critics who regarded the symphony as a museum piece rather than a viable medium for contemporary artistic endeavor? Mahler, however, remains faithful to the ideas of contrast and return embedded within Classical rondo form, which—given the vivid colors of his orchestration—invite a spatial type of listening. The succession of sharply distinctive sections comprising Mahler’s sprawling rondo glistens in the mind’s ear, whether one is captivated by the chiseled thematic writing or transfixed by the musicians’ virtuosic playing.
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.
The first American performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 was given by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on April 15, 1921.
The first Boston Symphony performances of the Mahler Seventh were given by Serge Koussevitzky in October 1948.