MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 7

Symphony No. 7, “Song of the Night” (1904-1905)
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911) 

The Seventh Symphony was a product of the happiest years Gustav Mahler knew. His career as director of the Vienna Opera was at its apex (in 1904 and 1905, he introduced his highly regarded version of Fidelio, conducted an important production of Don Giovanni with decor by Alfred Roller, and prepared for revivals of Così fan tutte and The Abduction from the Seraglio). His life with Alma was satisfying, his family had grown to include two healthy daughters, and his music was gaining recognition. Just as the Sixth Symphony was being completed in September 1904, he quickly wrote the two Andantes that were to become the “night music” movements of the Symphony No. 7. His hectic performance and administrative schedule in Vienna during the winter months precluded further work on the new piece. When he returned to his lakeside summer home the following May, however, “Not a note would come,” he recalled. “I plagued myself for two weeks until I sank into gloom.... then I tore off to the Dolomites. There I was led the same dance, and at last gave up and returned home.... I got into the boat to be rowed across. At the first stroke, the theme (or rather the rhythm and character) of the introduction to the first movement came into my head—and in four weeks, the first, third and fifth movements were done.” The Symphony was completed in short score before Mahler returned to Vienna in the autumn and finished early in 1906. It was to be the last work of that halcyon period in Mahler’s life. 

Between the completion of the Seventh Symphony in 1906 and its premiere in Prague under the composer’s direction on September 19, 1908, Mahler’s life was turned upside-down. In 1907, three separate shocks befell him that crushed his happiness and hastened his early death at the age of fifty: in March, against the continuing background of budgetary distress, hide-bound conservatism, and muted but pervasive anti-Semitism, Mahler began to feel that his tenure at the Court Opera had been a failure, and resigned; three months later, Dr. Friedrich Kovacs of Vienna diagnosed a serious heart condition, and advised Mahler that he would have to cease all strenuous activity and limit his professional responsibilities if the disease were not to prove rapidly fatal; and in July, the composer’s beloved four-year-old daughter, Maria, died of scarlet fever and diphtheria. The man who conducted the premiere of the Seventh Symphony was much changed from the man who composed it. Alma recorded that he worked incessantly on revising the score’s orchestration during the long series of rehearsals, and that his stamina and self-confidence seemed particularly taxed by preparations for the performance. Though the Prague orchestra won Mahler’s approval, and the event generated considerable excitement, Alma reported that the piece had only a “succès d’estime... The Seventh was scarcely understood by the public.” The work was heard again during Mahler’s lifetime in Hamburg, Munich, Amsterdam and Vienna, but it failed to achieve wide acceptance, and came early in its history to be regarded as something of a step-child among the symphonies; it was not heard in the United States until Frederick Stock conducted it in Chicago in 1921. 

The first movement, amply endowed with such forwardlooking harmonic devices as superimposed fourths and incipient polytonality, is a vast sonata design prefaced by a stern introduction (led by the tenor tuba) containing motivic germs from which several later themes grow. An embryonic version of the main theme is given by unison trombones, only to be interrupted by another somber proclamation from the tenor tuba. The horns then take over the trombones’ theme to launch the main body of the movement. A sentimental melody, very Viennese in manner, is given by the violins to provide contrast. The center of the movement is occupied by development of motives from the introduction and main theme. Solos in the bass and tenor trombones and the tenor tuba lead to the recapitulation. 

The Symphony’s three central movements (Night Music I—Scherzo—Night Music II) are grouped together within the massive bulwark of the opening movement and the Rondo-Finale. The Nachtmusik I, in an unsettled C major-minor tonality, is one of Mahler’s most fantastic inspirations. Burnett James found here “a sense of tattered ghostly armies marching by night, of bugle calls and responses as well as those of birds and beasts; not so much barbarous armies that clash by night, as of remnants of those which have clashed.” Bright dawn does not immediately follow this musical night, however, since the ensuing Scherzo is among the most haunted, spectral and disquieting movements in the symphonic literature. “A spook-like, nocturnal piece,” Mahler’s friend and protégé Bruno Walter called it; Ronald Kinloch Anderson allowed that if the surrounding movements are “night” music, this Scherzo might well be “nightmare” music. “A glimpse of darkness, of the skull beneath the skin with its mocking grimace, of the essential horror,” wrote James. This devil’s waltz of a movement is followed by the delicate Nachtmusik II, whose simplicity, quietude and gentle guitar and mandolin sounds serve to quell the apprehension of the Scherzo and to prepare for the sunburst of the Symphony’s close. 

The Rondo-Finale has, with justification, been criticized for a lack of coherence and an uninhibited boisterousness sometimes bordering on the banal. In the context of the Seventh Symphony, however, the finale is an appropriate emotional and stylistic closure to the expressive and formal progression circumscribed by the earlier movements, achieving a mood that Paul Stefan said is “on top of a mountain.”