space, and the forms of individual appearances.” The Fifth Symphony, written in 1901 and 1902, is an interior drama devoid of any programmatic indication, moving through heroic struggle, a delirious funeral march, a wild, sprawling Scherzo, and a dreamily lyrical Adagietto to a radiant, chorale-driven finale. The triumphant ending was perhaps the one conventional thing about the piece, and in the Sixth Symphony, which had its premiere on May 27, 1906, eleven days after the Austrian premiere of Salome, Mahler took the triumph back. Strauss’s opera had been called “satanic,” and, as it happens, the same adjective was applied to Mahler’s symphony in the weeks leading up to the first performance. Mahler, too, would see how far he could go without losing the vox populi.
The setting for the premiere of the Sixth was the steel town of Essen, in the Ruhr. Nearby was the armaments firm of Krupp, whose cannons had rained ruin on French armies in the war of 1870–71 and whose long-distance weaponry would play a critical role in the Great War to come. Unsympathetic listeners compared Mahler’s new composition to German military hardware. The Viennese critic Hans Liebstöckl began a review of a subsequent performance with the line “Krupp makes only cannons, Mahler only symphonies.” Indeed, the Sixth opens with something like the sound of an army advancing—staccato As in the cellos and basses, military-style taps of a drum, a vigorous A-minor theme strutting in front of a wall of eight horns. A little later, the timpani set forth a marching rhythm of the kind that you can still hear played in Alpine militia parades in Austria and neighboring countries: Left! Left! Left-right-left!
The first movement follows the well-worn procedures of sonata form, complete with a repeat of the exposition section. The first theme is modeled on that of Schubert’s youthful, severe A-Minor Sonata, D. 784. The second theme is an unrestrained Romantic effusion, a love song in homage to Alma. It is so unlike the first that it inhabits a different world, and the entire movement is a struggle to reconcile the two. By the end, the synthesis seems complete: the second theme is orchestrated in the clipped, martial style of the first, as if love were an army on the march. Yet there is something strained about this marriage of ideas. The movement that follows, a so-called Scherzo, resumes the trudge of the opening, but now in superciliously waltzing three-quarter time. A sprawling, songful Andante, in the distant key of E-flat, provides respite, but Mahler’s battery of percussion instruments waits threateningly at the back of the stage. (During the rehearsals in Essen, Mahler decided to switch the middle movements, and retained that order in a revised version of the score.)
As the finale begins, the march rhythm—Left! Left! Left-right-left!—comes back with a vengeance. No composer ever devised a form quite like this one—wave after wave of development, skirling fanfares suggesting imminent joy, then the chilling return of the marching beat. The movement is organized around three “hammerblows” (or, in the revised version, two), which have the effect of triggering a kind of collapse. For the premiere, Mahler had a gigantic drum constructed—“the hide of a fully grown cow stretched on a frame a meter and a half square,” one critic wrote in sarcastic wonder—which was to have been struck with a mallet of unprecedented size. In the event, the drum produced only a muffled thump, to the amusement of the musicians. Like Strauss in Salome, Mahler is employing shock tactics on his audience, and he saves his biggest shock for the very end. The work is poised to die away to silence, with a three-note figure limping through the lower instruments. Then, out of nowhere, a fortissimo A-minor chord clangs like a metal door swung shut. Correctly performed, this gesture should make unsuspecting listeners jump out of their seats.
After the last rehearsal, Mahler sat in his dressing room, shattered by the power of his own creation. Alma reported that he “walked up and down … sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself.” Suddenly Strauss poked his head through the door to say that the mayor of Essen had died and that a memorial piece needed to be played at the beginning of the program. Strauss’s only comment on the symphony was that the final movement was “over-instrumented.”
Bruno Walter observed that Mahler was “reduced almost to tears” by the episode. How could Strauss have misjudged the work so completely? Or was Strauss possibly right? That summer, Mahler lightened the orchestration of the Sixth’s finale considerably.
After the events of May 1906, the friendship between the two men cooled. Mahler’s envy of Strauss metastasized, affecting his conception of music’s place in society. All along, in his letters to Alma and others, Mahler had recorded various indignities to which his colleague had subjected him, probably exaggerating for effect. “I extend to [Strauss] respectful and friendly solicitude,” Mahler wrote to his wife on one occasion, “and he doesn’t respond, he doesn’t even seem to notice, it is wasted on him. When I experience such things again and again, I feel totally confused about myself and the world!” In a letter the very next day, Mahler described Strauss as “very sweet,” which suggests not only that he had forgotten the snub of the previous day but that he had invented it.
In an essay on the relationship between the composers, the musicologist Herta Blaukopf cites the lopsided friendship of two young men in Thomas Mann’s story “Tonio Kröger.” Mahler is like the dark-haired Tonio, who thinks too much and feels everything too intensely. Strauss is like the fair-haired Hans Hansen, who sails through life in ignorance of the world’s horror. Indeed, Strauss could never comprehend Mahler’s obsession with suffering and redemption. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be redeemed from,” he once said to the conductor Otto Klemperer.
Mahler was still trying to answer the question that he had pondered on the train from Graz: Can a man win fame in his own time while also remaining a true artist? Doubt was growing in his mind. Increasingly, he spoke of the insignificance of contemporary musical judgment in the face of the ultimate wisdom of posterity.
“I am to find no recognition as a composer during my lifetime,” he told a critic in 1906. “As long as I am the ‘Mahler’ wandering among you, a ‘man among men,’ I must content myself with an ‘all too human’ reception as a creative figure. Only when I have shaken off this earthly dust will there be justice done. I am what Nietzsche calls an ‘untimely’ one … The true ‘timely one’ is Richard Strauss. That is why he already enjoys immortality here on earth.” In a letter to Alma, Mahler spoke of his relationship with Strauss in terms borrowed from John the Baptist’s prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ: “The time is coming when men will see the wheat separated from the chaff—and my time will come when his is up.” That last remark has been widely bowdlerized as “My time will come”—a statement of faith often quoted by composers who place themselves in opposition to popular culture.
With Mahler, though, the “untimely” stance was something of a pose. He cared mightily about the reception of his works, and danced on air if they succeeded, which they usually did. No Mahler myth is more moth-eaten than the one that he was neglected in his own time. The First Symphony may have baffled its first audience, but the later symphonies almost always conquered the public, critics notwithstanding. “In his mature years,” the scholar and conductor Leon Botstein writes, “Mahler experienced far more triumph than defeat and more enthusiasm than rejection by audiences.” Even at the premiere of the “satanic” Sixth, a critic reported that the composer “had to return to the platform to receive the congratulations and thanks of the crowded audience.”
In the summer of 1906, Mahler sought to cement his relationship with the public by sketching his life-affirming, oratorio-like Eighth Symphony, which he called his “gift to the nation.” The first part was based on the hymn “Veni creator spiritus”; the second part was a panoramic setting of the last scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part II. The Eighth inspired earthshaking applause on the occasion of its premiere, four years later. “The indescribable here is accomplished,” hundreds of singers roar at the end; the storm of applause that followed might as well have been notated in the score.
The glowing optimism of the Eighth belied the fact that the composer was growing sick of Vienna, of the constant opposition of anti-Semites, of infighting and backstabbing. He announced his resignation in May 1907, conducted
