Richard Strauss. Mahler

The  Fifth Symphony marks a kind of transition phase in Mahler’s work. His first four symphonies are based on sung intonations and include song as a movement or a section of a movement, making use of the spoken word either directly or indirectly – through a quotation from the refrain of a song. This is the first circle of Mahler’s “creation of the worlds” – from the life of one man through the contemplation of this life (Mahler on his Second: “What did you life for? What did you suffer for?”) to the creation of the universe in the Third, where the movements “should imprint upon the succession of everything living” (Mahler), to the Fourth – proofs of disappointment, weariness and the refutation of struggle. The  Fifth Symphony lies at the border between two periods. The  composer rejected any written explanations of his ideas here for the first time. This does not at all indicate an actual refutation of his previously developed principles for creating symphonic cycles, of that meaning of “creating a world” which Mahler gave them. Moreover, there is a direct indication as to the existence of the composer’s programme in the Fifth: in one of his letters to Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, speaking of his impressions of the music in the Fifth Symphony, wrote in particular: “I saw your naked spirit, completely naked, it lay exposed before me, like a wild and mysterious landscape with its frightening depths and ravines, with its wonderful, joyous meadows and peaceful, idyllic corners. I saw it as a natural storm with its horrors and troubles and with its enlightening, alluring rainbow. And what is it to me that your “programme”, which you told me of later, seems to have little in common with my emotions? Should I understand correctly if I have suffered and felt? I have sensed the struggle for an illusion, I have seen how forces of Good and Evil oppose one another, I have seen how man ticks in a torturous struggle to attain inner harmony, I have feltthe man, the drama, the truth…”