Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor

The symphony falls into three parts made of five movements. Part one begins with a trumpet solo sounding a funeral fanfare, launching a somber march (I) that keeps breaking into violent outbursts before subsiding. The second movement continues the turbulence, stormy and urgent, until near its close the brass suddenly break into a chorale, a hymn-like blaze of sound that seems to arrive too soon and recedes just as fast. Part two is the massive third movement, a scherzo built around a swaggering waltz led by a solo horn that steps out in front of the orchestra like a soloist, constantly shifting between light dance and thicker, churning textures. Part three opens with the Adagietto, written for strings and harp alone, a hushed, slow-moving melody that has become the symphony's best known music, often heard on its own. It leads without pause into the finale, a good-humored, contrapuntal romp that gathers speed and voices, and finally brings back that same chorale from the second movement, now fully achieved and triumphant, to close the work.

Mahler composed his Fifth Symphony mostly during the summers of 1901 and 1902 at his lakeside retreat in Maiernigg, Austria, while serving as director of the Vienna Court Opera. It was his first purely instrumental symphony in years, abandoning the voices and literary programs of his earlier works. He conducted the premiere in Cologne in 1904, and was reportedly dissatisfied with his own orchestration, revising the scoring repeatedly in the years afterward. The Adagietto, the symphony's fourth movement, is said to have been a wordless love letter to Alma Mahler, whom he married in 1902, though Mahler left no written statement confirming this. The movement later gained wide fame on its own, notably as the music used in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice, which introduced it to audiences far beyond the concert hall.