About this Piece

In the summer of 1904, Mahler wrote two symphonic pieces that would become the “night music” movements of his Symphony No. 7. The following summer he wrote the first, third, and fifth movements of the work. That winter, as was his custom, he revised and orchestrated the score he had written across the two previous summers.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 remains one of the least known of his works. Unlike most of his other symphonies, the Seventh lacks a specific program that describes some autobiographical or philosophical journey unfolding from movement to movement. When Arnold Schoenberg first heard the work in 1909, he wrote a letter to the composer praising this new direction: “I had less than before the feeling of that sensational intensity which excites and lashes one on, which in a word moves the listener in such a way as to make him lose his balance without giving him anything in its place.” 

Schoenberg approved of Mahler discarding storyline elements and the hyperemotionalism of late Romanticism. He clarifies this a few lines later: “I have put you with the classical composers—but as one who to me is still a pioneer. I mean, there is surely a difference in being spared all extraneous excitement, in being at rest and in tranquility, in the state in which beauty is enjoyed.” 

While it’s difficult to ascribe meaning to the symphony beyond its melodies, rhythms, harmonies, and forms that make up its musical content, listeners who know Mahler’s other symphonies will doubtless recognize many passages that refer back to previous works. 

Symphony No. 7 consists of five movements. The two outer movements are more extended compositions, the first a free sonata form, the finale a free rondo. The three internal movements serve as symphonic character (or mood) pieces. The symphony also returns to the kind of progressive tonality of earlier compositions, in which the work begins in one key and ends in another. In this case, the mood overall progresses from dark to light, minor to major. 

Mahler’s treatment of the orchestra, always a central aspect of his compositional style, is especially noteworthy. In the first movement he features the tenor horn, an instrument not usually encountered in a traditional symphonic context. Here it provides a resonant, woodsy flavor and suggests a connection with the posthorn music in the Third Symphony. In the fourth movement Mahler features a mandolin and a guitar. 

The first movement opens with a lengthy slow introduction. The expansive, angular brass melody, supported by funeral-march chords, passes back and forth between the tenor horn and other wind and brass instruments. It advances in carefully measured fits and starts, giving the passage as a whole the character of a solemn procession. 

The introduction also exhibits, for Mahler, a high level of harmonic experimentation. The Symphony begins with an ambiguous chord that fails to provide the listener with an unequivocal point of orientation. Throughout the movement  tones collide, produced by superimposing dissonant intervals one on top of the other. 

Perhaps more than in any other Mahler symphony, we hear a harmonic environment balanced between two historical epochs. At times, the music arises from the chromatic-but-tonal palette used by late-19th-century composers such as Wagner and Richard Strauss; at others, it adopts the abstract, atonal vocabulary of early modern masters such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.  

At the end of the introduction Mahler brings his music to a loud boil. Amid a shimmering orchestral sound mass, bass instruments repeat a throbbing rhythm, and horns blurt out an aggressive melody that foreshadows the theme to come. The main part of the movement (Allegro risoluto) begins without pause. Its melody possesses an aggressive, sharply chiseled profile reminiscent of the opening theme of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. The accompanying chords move at a gallop. Mahler then introduces in the violins a lyrical tune that nevertheless maintains the steady energy of the surrounding music. 

Compared with other Mahler symphonies, the music in this first movement features few of the dramatic mood changes normally associated with the composer. There is, however, a magically calm interlude that presents glistening high string music and distant-sounding trumpet fanfares. 

The busy textures in this movement reveal a composer who has abandoned his earlier habit of composing from a piano, and who has transformed his style from one based on tunes supported by chords to one that weaves many independent melodies into an intricate contrapuntal fabric. Mahler derived his approach from a deep love of nature’s multiplicity. During a walk with friends, Mahler was suddenly bombarded with a jumble of sounds from a traveling carnival and remarked: 

“Do you hear that? That’s polyphony—and that’s where I got it from. When I was a small child, in the woods of Iglau, this used to excite me strangely and impressed itself on my mind. It does not really matter whether you hear it in this sort of row, or in the song of a thousand birds, in the howling gale, the splashing waves, or the crackling fire. But that is how—from a lot of different sources—the themes must come, and like this they must be entirely different from each other in rhythm and melody.... What the artist has to do is organize them into an intelligible whole.” 

The second movement, the first of two “night music” sections, conforms loosely to an A-B-A-B-A structure. The “A” music begins with an intimate chamber ensemble. After a short duet of hunting-call figures played by two horns, the music yields to hypnotic arpeggios in the oboes, clarinets, flutes, and bassoons. The passage soon develops from melody-based music to a many-layered sound mass. After the mass dissolves, Mahler continues with a more extended treatment of the hunting-call figure, presenting it in a freely imitative duet for horns and cellos. Underneath the duet, the violins intermittently play raspy chords using the wood of the bow. 

The “B” sections present two main ideas. The first involves a wonderfully lyrical string tune supported by feisty chords in an oom-pah-pah style. The second is a vigorous, rustic march that starts out in the winds. The music arises from the rollicking wind-band march from the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. When these sections return, the music is altered with fresh orchestrations, new counterpoints, and thematic fragmentation. 

The fourth movement, the second “night music” piece, is one of the most enchanting in all of Mahler’s symphonic output. It assumes the pose of a Mediterranean serenade, suggested by its Andante amoroso tempo designation and by its inclusion of mandolin and guitar, two instruments associated with serenades. After a short opening phrase for solo violin, the music continues with fluid burbling figures in the clarinet, reminding us that Mahler often found inspiration while rowing on Austria’s Alpine lakes. Underneath the clarinets the harp plays a broken-chord bass, recalling the Adagietto from his Symphony No. 5. 

Throughout the movement Mahler paints a seductive, intimate sound world by restricting himself almost exclusively to chamber-orchestra dimensions. The composition of the chamber orchestra, however, changes continually, so that the listener steadily encounters fresh new colors. The music progresses from one striking instrumental mosaic to another, in arrangements that hardly ever repeat. 

The symphony concludes with a triumphant, brassy rondo in C major. The music embraces nature’s fresh air with tremendous, even raucous, vitality. —Steven Johnson