Mahler: Adagietto from Symphony No. 5
Adagietto, the fourth movement of Mahler's Symphony Number 5 may well be Mahler's most famous composition and the most frequently performed of his works.
He composed his Fifth Symphony during the summers of 1901 and 1902. It has become one of Mahler's most popular symphonies. But at its premiere in Cologne in 1904, the symphony was a failure with an audience unprepared for its stupendous power and dizzying dramatic scope.
However, not all of this symphony received the audience's scorn. The fourth movement, Adagietto (Little Adagio), scored only for strings and solo harp, and with its gentle sound and restrained atmosphere, has always been instantly attractive to audiences. Beginning very quietly, this music is soon full of longing: its arcing, graceful melodies unfold with a bittersweet intensity, rise gradually to a soaring climax, and finally fall back to the peaceful close. It was often performed by itself during the decades before Mahler's music became popular.
Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911) was a Bohemian-born Jewish-Austrian composer and conductor. During his lifetime he was best known as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day. But his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered and championed by a new generation of listeners, and Mahler has become one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers. He is generally acknowledged to be among the most important late-Romantic composers.
With the exceptions of an early piano quartet, the early cantata Das Klagende Lied, and the tone-poem Totenfeier, Mahler's entire output consists of two genres: symphony and song. Besides his nine completed symphonies, his principal works are the song cycles Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Traveling Journeyman) and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), and his monumental synthesis of symphony and song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).
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