Since his death in 1911, Gustav Mahler has come to occupy a central place in the history of music and in the orchestral repertory. With advances in recording technology, his symphonies – many of them clocking in around 80 minutes, perfect for a single CD – have found a huge audience, one much larger than in the decades after his death, when a handful of dedicated acolytes championed his music in the concert halls of Europe and America. Mahler has also, just about a century later, emerged as a crucial bridge between the musical Romanticism of the 19th century and the modernism of the 20th, a composer who simultaneously summed up the achievements of his predecessors and pointed the way forward.

The Fifth Symphony occupies a pivotal place in Mahler’s endlessly fascinating output. It was his first purely instrumental symphony since the First, which he had worked on during the 1880s and subjected to heavy revision in 1893. He composed the Fifth during the summers of 1901 and 1902, during his annual holiday from his job as director of the Vienna Court Opera. It was in Vienna the winter prior to beginning the Fifth Symphony that Mahler met Alma Schindler, the beautiful daughter of a famous landscape painter. Mahler proposed to her in the fall of 1901, and the symphony, with its trajectory from mourning to triumph, reflects this development in its composer’s personal life.

The symphony is in five movements, which are grouped into three parts. The work opens with a funeral march that starts with a trumpet fanfare whose rhythm dominates the movement. The march contrasts with two trio sections, the first bursting out of the near-silence like some sort of terrifying, demonic carnival music, the second a more somber, restrained passage for the strings.

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