When I played the Mahler 4th with you, the words that kept on coming back to me was chamber music, chamber music, chamber music. Yet you look at this score, this is woodwinds and fours, four horns. What’s going on here?

Well, he very rarely uses the whole complement, actually only twice in the entire piece. In the first movement, there is one gigantic climax, and it’s terrifying. I mean, it’s absolutely blood-curdling intensity and loudness, but it lasts a very brief time and then it’s all over until the climax of the third movement just before the end of the third movement for the passage which we know as the Opening of the Gates of Heaven, this is where he moves into E major, a key, which Mahler always associated with heaven for some reason. Bach did the same. Maybe it was those four sharps that looked like the wings of angels. I have no idea. But certainly E major was a key which he associated with heaven.

And just before the last movement, which tells the story of a young boy waking up in heaven at that moment, he uses the full force of this orchestra. No trombones. No tuba. So it’s limited brass, but still three trumpets and percussion in full flight, and everybody in the orchestra playing as loud as they can to suggest this overwhelming power. Other than that, the entire symphony works as chamber music. It’s using a vast palette of instruments, but with such delicacy and such precision and such clarity that you never get the feeling you’re dealing with a big orchestra, certainly not being overwhelmed. At the moment, we’re working with the 7th Symphony, which we’re performing next week, and the 7th Symphony has an overwhelming sense of power, of complexity, of things piled one on another and he surely uses every member of the orchestra and the size of the orchestra. Not in the Mahler 4th. Mahler 4th, you can almost eavesdrop on the intimacy of the language. And of course, that fits the story of the Mahler 4th. It’s a very intricate, very delicate expression and tells intimate stories.

What are these intimate stories? What is he getting at?

Well, it points towards the last movement. The last movement he wrote first. He wrote it originally as the final movement of the 3rd Symphony. And it was supposed to culminate the journey of the 3rd Symphony, which goes, as you remember, from the beginning of the birth of the Earth through what the animals say, what the plants say, what the animals say, what human beings say, what angels say, and finally, what divine love says. And beyond that, for Mahler, interestingly enough, was what the child says. For him, that was the highest point. The insight of the child was the greatest insight. And so he originally intended that as the end of the 3rd Symphony, but then he saw that it was not going to work, that it had to be the final adagio-

He had already entered the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest symphony, so-

The longest symphony. And any anyway, the last movement of the 3rd culminating as it does in a great paean of praise for divine love, incidentally, one of the greatest expressions of togetherness that I think we could possibly imagine, the final movement of the 3rd Symphony, like an anthem for humanity. And beyond that, he had to delay what the child tells us to the 4th Symphony. And of course, he had that movement already written. So he had to write the symphony in a sense backwards, like Merlyn who lived his life backwards. So he had all the themes already in place, which he does in the most intricate way, how he re-orchestrates, recreates the piece backwards.

So everything is pointing towards this extraordinarily uplifting, beautiful end. The soprano enters, Jane West, who sings that part, I think, as beautifully as anybody has ever sung it with that childlike quality and yet with deep insight. It’s what Mahler asked. He asked for a child, not actually a child, but somebody who could sound like a child but with the wisdom of maturity, singing about the joys of heaven, about what it’s like and this is after all the same child who in the earlier song had died of starvation. So now this child is celebrating endless food and drink and the great abundance of life in heaven.

And especially the music.

And of course, above all the food for the soul, which is music. And Mahler writes some of the most beautiful music ever written to describe the heavenly music.

And I think as we’re listening to it and we’re listening to her singing it, we can actually imagine this might indeed be the music of heaven. And it ends in this ineffable beauty of E major, disappears to nothing. So everything in the 4th Symphony is pointing to the last movement.

The third movement, which contains that great moment of the Opening of the of the Gates of Heaven, begins with this beautiful melody rising line in the cellos, which is the theme for a set of variations.

He had an image for that opening of the third movement. He apparently saw there the face of his mother, who he adored. She was a invalid and she was a tender and delicate creature, and she suffered enormously. She suffered both from the loss of many children in childbirth and early childhood, but also from the brutality of her husband who was an angry man and often beat her and so on. However, as Mahler described it, she always managed to smile through tears, and she always kept that angelic demeanor. And he was describing her at the beginning of the third movement of the 4th Symphony.

A very Viennese expression, smiling through tears.

Right. Smiling through tears. And then he does a set of variations on that theme. And then comes another theme of great sadness and darkness, almost one of the most poignant themes in all of Mahler that rising (singing). You feel that, which means keening, weeping, wailing, and you feel the sadness and the pull of that. And then he builds a set of variations on that theme too. So you’ve got a double variation set in the third movement, and this is the single most beautiful extended adagio in all of Mahler. I believe that is the thing that draws so many people to the 4th Symphony as their favorite symphony. There’s nothing more beautiful.

Fittingly we’re talking through the symphony backwards.

Backwards.

So let’s go back to the second movement.

Second movement, which is one of the strangest movements. He asked-

What’s the violin doing?

Well, the violin, he’s asked the violin to tune his instrument up one whole tone, not a halftone, but a whole tone, which creates_… You already know about the highly strung person, which is of course referring to a normal violin. Now we’re talking about a violin that strung up an additional tone, which makes it positively hysterical. And this is to describe a strange phenomenon. He described this as, “Brother Death dances it with me.”

This is a dance with the violin as the representative of the devil, as he often is in the history of music, many, many, many times, from the Devil’s Trill and the Soldier’s Tale and all these other pieces. The violin is the instrument of death. And here the violin is asked to play not only one tone higher but some of the strangest, most macabre sounds. Not, I must say, really frightening, but frightening in the way that a child might be frightened. These are the dark shadows of the nursery. But still it’s a strange and weird world. In between, there are these tender little Landler movements, which in Mahler is earthly waltz, which brings in the whole Viennese gestalt and_… Makes for a very, very strange world, I must say, a bizarre and wondrous, not entirely comfortable world.

Going backwards then, you have the first movement, which is also a very strange movement. It begins simply with this characteristic gesture of the sleigh bells, like that. There’s sleigh bells, which certainly have never had place in a symphony. I remember when I was 12, I heard the 4th Symphony of Mahler for the first time. That was the first Mahler Symphony I ever heard. My parents took me to hear that piece. And I remember thinking, “What a weird world this was.” And that question has haunted me ever since. I’ve been with Mahler ever since.

And then the first theme. One of the most characteristically Viennese melodies or themes that you could ever possibly imagine. But what he does with that theme, he takes it into the strangest world, again, macabre and bizarre and more complex, I think, than anybody would give credit for, because the Mahler 4th Symphony, that’s always the simple one, the one that everybody can understand, but you listen carefully to the first movement and what he does and how he transforms each motif until it becomes unrecognizable. And that’s the mastery of Mahler at this stage of his life. He could take any theme and turn it in a thousand, like a kaleidoscope in so many different directions, so we see it from this side and from that.

We see_… There’s one spot in the first moment I think is really wonderful in which it gets really angry and really dark and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh. Only kidding.”

Where suddenly you realize that the recapitulation has already taken place while you weren’t watching. The first theme (singing) has already been buried in the previous music. I mean, this is a mastery of compositional craft that is unsurpassed.

It really is a end point for Mahler. I would imagine if he finished this symphony, it’s like, “What am I going to write next?”

And in fact, what he did do was make a gigantic leap into a completely different style for the 5th Symphony. And he said, indeed, that he had learned nothing. Nothing that he’d written had prepared him for the 5th Symphony. So the big gulf was between the first four, which are after all_… We’re not talking kids stuff here. This is some of the greatest symphony writing for the 2nd Symphony, the 3rd Symphony-

And now the 4th Symphony.

And the 4th, which is the culmination of that early the Wunderhorn song symphonies, where he actually took music from the song cycles and embedded it in the symphony, which was such an original idea. Nobody had ever done that before. And then he made the great leap into the five, six and seven, which are the three completely instrumental, orchestral pieces without any words. And then he comes back for the 8th. Oh, it’s an amazing journey. I mean, these symphonies are riveting, riveting, in their originality and the depth of their expression and where they take us. They take us to places in our soul that we cannot actually reach any other way than through this music.