Although Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) is right up there in the pantheon of composers, his music gained its true currency only well after his death. Sure, he was famous in his lifetime as a conductor but his compositions were largely neglected and indeed banned in Europe during the Nazi era (Mahler was an Ashkenazi Jew), and it was only after 1945 that a new generation of listeners rediscovered his music and turned him into one of the most frequently performed and recorded composers which has sustained to the present day.
Mahler composed his Symphony No. 5 between 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at his holiday cottage at Maiernigg in Austria (his “composing hut” is now a little museum). At nearly seventy minutes long, it’s a musical canvas with some serious scope, but today we’ll look at the fourth movement or Adagietto, a tender piece of music that was said to have represented his love for Alma Schindler whom he married in March 1902.
The Adagietto is undoubtedly the single most well-known piece of Mahler’s music. Leonard Bernstein conducted it during the funeral Mass for Robert Kennedy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1968, but it was its use in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice that skyrocketed it to fame.
Death In Venice was German author Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella about a famous and ennobled writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who is sojourning in Venice for health reasons and becomes increasingly obsessed with a young handsome Polish boy, Tadzio, who is staying in the same hotel on the Venetian island of Lido.
In the movie, Visconti turns von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) from writer to composer, which allows the musical score (which also includes music by Beethoven and Mussorgsky) to represent Aschenbach’s work. The ending scene in which the dying composer watches Tadzio strolling and wading through the seawater to the enraptured tones of Mahler’s Adagietto (before von Aschenbach promptly keels over dead) is striking. You can go watch the movie (despite the spoiler!) but for now, listen to the music itself:
