Gustav Mahler
Mahler was a conductor by profession and composed in the summers. He knew the orchestra from the podium and wrote for it with unusual precision: solo instruments marked to play like a folk musician, offstage brass, cowbells, a hammer blow. His scores carry more performance instructions than almost anyone else's because he wanted a specific sound, not a general one.
He kept the symphony but stretched it. Movements can run half an hour, symphonies can have five or six movements, and voices appear inside them: a soprano in the Fourth, chorus and soloists in the Second, an alto and a boys' choir in the Third. Song is not decoration in his work. Several symphonies quote or grow out of his own songs, and the Fourth's finale is a song about a child's view of heaven.
The material is deliberately mixed in level. A funeral march can be built on a nursery round, a military band can interrupt a slow movement, a Ländler (an Austrian country waltz) can turn grotesque. That collision of the popular and the tragic is the point, not a lapse of taste. The Ninth's outer movements move towards silence, the finale fading rather than ending.
What to listen for
- Marked solos: a clarinet told to sound vulgar, a horn told to sound distant. Mahler writes the character into the part.
- Ländler rhythm in scherzo movements: a slow, heavy three, closer to a peasant dance than a Viennese waltz.
- Offstage or spatially separated players, especially in the Second and the Third.
- Endings. The Ninth ends with the strings dying away over several minutes; the silence after it is part of the piece.
Source: Gustav Mahler