Mahler

Gustav Mahler, 1860 to 1911, wrote nine numbered symphonies, left an unfinished Tenth, and wrote Das Lied von der Erde, a symphony in all but its number.

He was a conductor first and a composer in the summers, and that explains the music better than any other biographical detail. He knew exactly what an orchestra could be made to do because he stood in front of one nearly every night of his working life, and he wrote at the limit of it.

What a Mahler symphony is trying to do that a Brahms symphony is not

A Brahms symphony is an argument: four movements, tightly related, developing a small number of ideas with maximum economy, and admitting nothing that does not belong to the argument.

A Mahler symphony is a world, and the vulgar is admitted on purpose. Three differences are audible immediately. First, the range of material: a Landler, a march heard as if from three streets away, a hymn and a shriek can follow one another inside a single movement, and the collisions are the content rather than a failure of taste. Second, the treatment of the orchestra: Mahler writes chamber music for 100 players, so that a solo oboe or a muted trumpet carries a passage while the rest of the band waits. Third, scale: he adds movements, adds voices, and lets a slow finale run longer than an entire classical symphony.

The consequence for a listener is that there is no penalty for losing the thread, because the thread is not the point in the way it is with Brahms. The point is what the orchestra does next.

The nine symphonies at a glance

Two things determine whether an orchestra can programme a given Mahler symphony: the extra players and the extra singers. The table sets out what each one adds beyond a standard establishment of 80 to 100.

The four that are played most, and why

Four of the nine account for most performances. Each is played for a different reason.

The First is the entry point, for orchestras and audiences alike. It is the shortest route into the style, and its third movement is the clearest single illustration of Mahler's method: the round known in English as Frere Jacques is turned into the minor and played as a funeral march by a solo double bass, then interrupted by what sounds like a village band. Nothing before him does that.

The Second, the Resurrection, is the one people mean when they say a Mahler symphony overwhelmed them. It opens with a funeral march, passes through a Landler, a scherzo built on a song about Saint Anthony preaching to the fishes and a short contralto solo, and ends with a choral finale in which the chorus enters almost inaudibly, seated, before the offstage brass and the organ arrive. What it is about is stated in that structure: a death at the start, a question through the middle, an answer sung at the end.

The Fifth is the most performed because of one movement. The Adagietto, for strings and harp alone, is short, slow, quiet and separable, and its use in Visconti's 1971 film of Death in Venice put it in front of an audience that had never heard a Mahler symphony. The rest is nothing like it: a solo trumpet fanfare and a funeral march at the start, a bright contrapuntal rondo at the close. Programming it means finding a principal trumpet who can carry the opening cold.

The Eighth is played least often of the famous ones and remembered most easily, because of its nickname. The Symphony of a Thousand was the impresario's label, not Mahler's, but the forces are genuinely enormous: eight soloists, two full choruses and a boys' choir, on top of an expanded orchestra and organ. It has two parts rather than movements, setting a Latin hymn and then the closing scene of Goethe's Faust.

What the forces actually cost a hall

The costs of a Mahler performance are concrete and they compound. Five items drive the budget upward. Extra orchestral players are engaged per concert and per rehearsal, and the Second and Eighth need dozens beyond the contracted establishment. Choral forces need their own rehearsal schedule, a chorus master and, for the Eighth, a boys' choir. Soloists are paid fees, and the Eighth needs eight of them. Instrument hire covers what no orchestra keeps: cowbells, a hammer and its box, a posthorn. Platform work is the hidden one, since a hall may need staging built, choir seating installed and a second body of brass positioned away from the stage.

Against that, rehearsal time does not expand. Three to four rehearsals of three hours is the normal allowance for a programme, and a Mahler symphony fills all of it while the chorus, prepared separately over weeks, joins for only the last one. This is why the Second and the Eighth are festival works rather than subscription works, and why the Ninth, needing no singers and no unusual instruments, is programmed more freely than either.

Which one is best

No single symphony is the best, and the question usually means one of two things. A listener asking where to start is best answered with the First, then the Fifth, then the Second. A listener asking which is greatest gets no consensus: the Ninth is the one most conductors name, the Sixth the one most composers name.

The unfinished Tenth is the honest end of the list. Mahler drafted all five movements and orchestrated only part of it. Performing versions have been made by several hands, and the Adagio alone is often played instead. Whether the completions should be played at all is an argument that has run for over sixty years and shows no sign of resolving.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• The orchestraHow a symphony orchestra is put together