{"id":275,"date":"2019-09-25T01:32:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T01:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/adagietto-0\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T19:57:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T19:57:11","slug":"adagietto-0","status":"publish","type":"program_note","link":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/adagietto-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Adagietto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gustav Mahler\u2019s excruciatingly beautiful music is laden with the melancholy and presentiment of hopelessness that often infused late nineteenth-century Romanticism.\u00a0 His large-scale symphonic works often require large numbers of performers (in great variety), and can challenge the endurance of the audience, as well as that of the players.\u00a0 More recognized in his time as conductor than as composer, he assiduously composed in summers, while pursuing a strenuous conducting career that was brought to an early end by heart disease.\u00a0 He was married in 1902 to the famous&#8211;some would say infamous&#8211;and beautiful Alma Schindler, a woman almost twenty years his junior. They had two winsome daughters, one of whom, Maria (\u201cPutzi\u201d) died tragically at the age of four in 1907.\u00a0 It is said that Alma bitterly blamed him for tempting fate by writing his\u00a0<em>Songs on the Deaths of Children<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Constant bickering with singers and the virulently anti-Semitic press in Vienna led Mahler to New York City in the same year, where he became a star conductor with the Metropolitan Opera.\u00a0 His success there led him to an appointment with the New York Philharmonic in 1909 as principal conductor&#8211;a rival of Toscanini.\u00a0 Life was fulfilling, for he enjoyed working with the professionalism of the players there; but that year was marked not only by great success with the premi\u00e8re of his Eighth Symphony, but by grief at the discovery of Alma\u2019s affair with the famous young architect, Walter Gropius of Bauhaus renown.\u00a0 Mahler was heartbroken, and even consulted Sigmund Freud.\u00a0 After one more season in New York Mahler\u2019s ill health forced his return to Europe, where he died of bacterial endocarditis in May of 1911.<\/p>\n<p>Against this backdrop of personal stress and grief, Mahler seems today to be the perfect creator of intense, existentialist reflections on the dual nature of human existence, banal, yet transcendent.\u00a0 His personal&#8211;and to my mind it is uniquely so&#8211;rumination on life\u2019s meaning can be somewhat prolix and repetitive at the symphonic level, or penetratingly aphoristic in his songs.<\/p>\n<p>What is perhaps Mahler\u2019s most well known music is the famous \u201cAdagietto.\u201d\u00a0 It is an added (standing in fourth place) movement in his expansive, fifth symphony, and gained worldwide fame for its ubiquitous use in the film,\u00a0<em>Death in Venice<\/em>\u00a0(1971), and in innumerable other places.\u00a0 Simply put, it\u2019s an intense love offering to Alma, written in the summer of 1902, right after their marriage. \u00a0He worshiped her, and it shows eloquently here, almost painfully so&#8211;especially considering the checkered relationship that plagued them almost from beginning to end.\u00a0 He met her while she was having an affair with her music composition teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky, and he died while she was in the notorious, semi-public affair with Gropius.\u00a0 Mahler\u2019s letters to her, his anguished notations in his musical scores\u2014they\u2019re almost embarrassing\u2014are a testimony to his long-suffering devotion to her.\u00a0\u00a0 But, in the moment there was happiness, even if he exaggerated it in his mind.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only newlywed bliss, but also incredible beauty\u2014all in the music.\u00a0 After his death she blithely went on to collect serially other geniuses as her lovers.\u00a0\u00a0 If the purity of the love he expressed was only in his mind, well, irony was Mahler\u2019s middle name.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 2015 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[54],"class_list":["post-275","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-gustavmahler"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}