Mahler's most characteristically "Mahlerian" symphony is also his least loved

Claudio Abbado conducts the first five minutes of the chamber-music-like fourth movement, the second "Night Music" (yes, with guitar, mandolin, and cowbells!), of Mahler's Seventh Symphony -- at the 2006 Lucerne Festival.

by Ken

We concluded Friday night's "Night Music" preview with a two-minute-plus "glimpse" of "what I think qualifies as the ultimate in Night Music." Here's the complete movement:

MAHLER: Symphony No. 7 in E minor:
ii. Nachtmusik I (Night Music I): Allegro moderato


Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971

If you wonder about that movement designation "Nachtmusik I," it means just what it says. It's the first of two "Night Music" movements. Here's the other, "Nachtmusik II," from the same recording.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 7 in E minor:
iv. Nachtmusik II (Night Music II): Andante amoroso


Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971


IT'S FITTING THAT WE START WITH THE 2ND
AND 4TH MOVEMENTS OF MAHLER 7'S FIVE

. . . because that's where Mahler started. As it happens, we've already heard his Sixth Symphony ("The Andante of the Sixth Symphony -- the most beautiful movement Mahler ever composed?" and "Is Mahler's Sixth Symphony any more 'tragic' than life itself?," July 2011), so we're starting more or less where he did. And the first ideas that came to him which seemed capable of being developed further were the two Nachtmusik movements. And then he was stuck. He doesn't seem to have lost confidence that his pair of "Night Music"s could be the core of something; he just couldn't figure out what.

In a useful liner note for Otto Klemperer's 1968 EMI recording of the Mahler Seventh, the Austrian-British musicologist-critic Mosco Carner (1904-1985) tells the story of how the composer overcame this creative block: