Gustav Mahler
Adagietto (from Symphony no. 5)
Like Smetana, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was born in Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), and like Schubert he achieved his greatest successes in Vienna. For Mahler, though, it was more for his conducting rather than composing that he gained international fame, and during the last years of his life he accepted principal conducting appointments at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and to the New York Philharmonic. When Mahler died at age 50 from a blood infection he still had not received full acceptance from the Viennese musical establishment as a composer, but now he is regarded as the last great Viennese symphonist, joining the ranks of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Brahms.
In his maturity as a composer Mahler produced only symphonies and orchestral songs, and his only existing chamber work is the early Piano Quartet in A minor, the manuscript of which was rediscovered in the eary 1960s by Mahler's widow, Alma (1879-1964). Its single movement was first performed in 1876 while Mahler was a student at the Vienna Conservatory, and the young composer toyed with the idea of expanding it into a multi-movement work, but abandoned the idea after sketching only two dozen measures of a scherzo movement.
The elegiac Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (1901-1902) is probably the best-known of his symphonic compositions, owing largely to its inclusion in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film, Death in Venice. But even before the film it was popular as a stand-alone concert piece, and it was played at the memorial service for Robert Kennedy in 1968.