Symphony No. 6 in A Minor “Tragic”  
Performed by The Toledo Symphony on November 7 & 8, 2025

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)  

Sir Donald Francis Tovey described Gustav Mahler as “a great man and no less than a martyr to his artistic sincerity.” This trait manifested itself in many ways throughout his life, but none more so than in his music, about which he refused to compromise. Mahler was equally against explaining his music in words; he believed that the music should stand on its own, and that it was the job of the conductor to translate and the audience to listen. 

Mahler acknowledged that his music was not always easily accessible to his audiences, but he still usually refused to offer any interpretation of it. In an 1896 letter, he responded to a request for program annotation, partially conceding: “In spite of everything, it is therefore good that at the beginning, when my style is still foreign to him, the listener be provided with a few signposts and milestones along his journey, or shall we say: a map of the stars to comprehend the night sky with its shining worlds. But such an exposition cannot offer more. A person must fasten upon something he knows, or he gets lost.” 

The only thing Mahler asks of his listeners (at first!) is that you listen openly. He wrote, “At a first performance … the principal thing is to give oneself with pleasure or displeasure to the work, to allow the human-poetic in general to affect one, and if one then feels drawn to it, to occupy oneself with it more thoroughly…. One must bring along one’s ears and heart and, not least, surrender willingly…. A bit of mystery always remains – even for the creator!” 

Mahler is certainly one of the most influential composers of his time.  He received his musical education in Vienna and quickly built a career as a conductor and composer. As a conductor, he held positions most notably with the Vienna Court Opera and the New York Philharmonic, and as a composer, he produced nine symphonies plus a tenth, unfinished, as well as many other works. Mahler’s symphonies are deeply personal to him, reflecting his struggles and philosophies. They are epic in scale and often explore themes of love, fate, and death.  

In 1902, Mahler married his wife Alma, with whom he had a complicated and tempestuous relationship. Due to the constraints on his schedule during the opera’s concert season, Mahler often took his young family on “composing holidays” in the mountains. It was on one of these holidays, in 1903-1904, that he did most of the work on his Sixth Symphony. During this time, his career was going very well. He was Director of the Vienna Court Opera, and his Fifth Symphony had been completed the year before. However, his personal life was never a smooth path, he was having health issues, and Europe was in sociopolitical flux and headed toward World War I. Despite these obstacles, it was a very productive year for Mahler.  

Like his other symphonies, Mahler’s Sixth is inspired by various philosophical and literary sources, especially Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence” and courage in the face of life’s challenges. Mahler also held the themes of destiny and human suffering, as expressed by Austrian poet Heinrich Leopold Wagner, close to his heart.  

Subtitled “Tragic,” Mahler’s Sixth Symphony includes a theme in honor of his wife that he called the “Alma theme.” It is first introduced in the opening movement, but changes and grows throughout the work, representing the complexities of their relationship. Alma wrote, “After [he] had drafted the first movement, he came ... to tell me he had tried to express me in a theme. ‘Whether I’ve succeeded I don’t know ...’ This is the great soaring second subject [in F Major] of the first movement.”  

Music critic and writer Herbert Glass notes, “[Mahler] was a morbidly sensitive soul who, with the wisdom of our hindsight, embraced every tragedy or potential tragedy as an inevitability. It is a feeling that thoroughly colors his music: Gustav Mahler, the victim of cruel fate. Doomed.” This darkness and angst pervade the Sixth Symphony. Mahler’s friend, conductor Bruno Walter, wrote, “The Sixth is bleakly pessimistic: it reeks of the bitter cup of human life. In contrast with the Fifth, it says ‘No,’ above all in the last movement, where something resembling the inexorable strife of ‘all against all’ is translated into music.” 

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is in four movements. The opening Allegro begins ominously and features extensive use of percussion. The second and third movements were originally meant to be performed Scherzo-Andante but were later switched by Mahler, and then switched back again by editors and conductors. The first publication of the score had them as Mahler originally intended, but then Mahler changed his mind and reversed them for every performance that he conducted. Since he continued to express doubts in rehearsals about the order, and it has become the conductor’s choice in modern performances.  

The Scherzo’s opening remembers the marching bass of the first movement, and contrasts with a Trio section marked Altväterisch, or “in an old-fashioned style.” Alma wrote, “In [the Trio section of the Scherzo] he represented the unrhythmical games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand. Ominously, the childish voices became more and more tragic, and at the end died out in a whimper.”  

According to Ledbetter, the tender and introspective Andante is “[the] most crushing lush, aching lyrical beauty.” It is in E-flat major, tonally distanced from the A minor of the overall work, representing a moment of comfort amid the conflict. Ledbetter notes, “The melodic material is akin to that of one of the Kindertotenlieder.” 

The finale brings back elements from not only the first movement but from throughout the symphony. It also calls for a percussion instrument that had to be specifically designed for this work and is now called the “Mahler Box and Hammer,” used here to depict “the hammer blows of fate.” The Box and Hammer is exactly what it sounds like: a wooden box built to certain specifications struck with a large hammer to produce a resonant sound. Though Mahler himself did not explain in words the exact meaning of the hammer blows in his Sixth Symphony, he spoke about it to Alma, who described, “In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, his hero’s. ‘It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled,’ were his words. Not one of his works came directly from his inmost heart as this. We both wept that day. The music and what it foretold touched us deeply.” Alma also suggested that these three blows of fate fell on Mahler, who in the year following completion of his Sixth Symphony, was forced to resign from his post at the Vienna Court Opera. Then his young daughter, Maria, died suddenly of scarlet fever, and he received a diagnosis of a heart condition. 

The Sixth Symphony met with a lukewarm reception, though it was appreciated by some. In a 1941 essay, American composer Aaron Copland wrote, “It is music that is full of human frailties ... so ‘Mahler-like’ in every detail. His symphonies are suffused with personality – he has his own way of doing and saying everything.... Two facets of his musicianship were years in advance of their time. One is the curiously contrapuntal fabric of the musical texture; the other more obvious, his strikingly original instrumentation. It was because Mahler worked primarily with a maze of separate strands independent of all chordal underpinning that his instrumentation possesses that sharply etched and clarified sonority that may be heard again and again in the music of later composers.... The use of the orchestra as a many-voiced body in this particular way was typical of the age of Bach and Handel. Thus, as far as orchestral practice is concerned, Mahler bridges the gap between the composers of the early 18th century and the Neoclassicists of our own time.” 

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is scored for four flutes and piccolo, four oboes and English horn, three clarinets and E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, four bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, six trumpets, three trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion including on-and-offstage cowbells, offstage pitched bells, Mahler box and hammer, two harps, celesta, and strings.