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Updated: June 25, 2025
Exclusive of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarly dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and an Hebraic bitterness that the other has not.
This is often the case with artists in Germany; Hugo Wolf is another example of it. Mahler's case is really rather curious. When one studies his works one feels convinced that he is one of those rare types in modern Germany an egoist who feels with sincerity.
Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability for contrapuntal deformation and dissection.
He was one of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of a piece must condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonic poems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strove continually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal their programmatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers.
If there is any music that is eminently Kapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort of musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. The musical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappy compositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their very pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief Mahler's essential sterility.
But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest and dignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid music. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentably weak, often arid and banal.
Mahler's Fifth Symphony, whatever be its intrinsic merit, that can be decided only by time and wear, undoubtedly marks a high point of orchestral splendor, in the regard of length and of the complexity of resources.
Romain Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing its effectiveness.
Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht der Bruder seinen Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet!
For in poor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement. We feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying to manufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application of all the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally upon physical apparatus, upon sheer brute force.
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