Symbol, Structure, and Semantics in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6

Much of Mahler’s appeal to the modern concert-going audience derives from the unrelenting signification of meaning throughout his works. Within the mammoth time spans and instrumentations of his symphonies, Mahler always appears to be telling the audience something. The gestures and semantic webs of his works are a constant indication that he intends to create literal emotional and intellectual associations within the music’s narrative. He consistently blurs the boundaries between programmatic and non-programmatic music, using systems of meaning from both types of instrumental music to communicate at the most sophisticated level.

As a result, a cottage industry of interpreting the implicit meanings of Mahler’s symphonies has grown in parallel to their reception and popularity. There is a widely held belief that Mahler’s works can be fully understood only when their symbolic narratives are made manifest in prose.

For many of his symphonies, the extra-musical and associated symbolic implications are fairly clear. This is particularly the case in his explicitly programmatic symphonies such as his first four “Wunderhorn” symphonies and his later texted works, Symphony No. 8 and Das Lied von der Erde. However, in Mahler’s more outwardly “abstract” symphonies, Nos. 5, 6, and 7, the quest for meaning becomes difficult as they contain fewer externally-based reference points for contriving meaning from within the music’s content. In Symphonies No. 5 and 7, Mahler makes extensive use of stylistic imitation and gestural types that analysts can hang their interpretations on.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, alone among his mature works, presents ontological problems for the interpreter of Mahler’s intentions. This work contains few references to other pieces of music or explicit extra-musical ideas. The majority of the references to other pieces of music in Symphony No. 6 refer to Mahler’s previous symphonies (and, anachronistically, his later ones).

Instead of musical objects creating the semantics of the symphony, it is the form of the piece itself that defines its musical narrative. It relies on the construction of its form in order to convey meaning rather than through stylistic reference or affective gesture. The structure of the placements, interactions, and functions of the musical material of the symphony are the narrative content piece. However, basing meaning on form restricts the music from expressing emotional ideas in a readily apparent manner. So many of Mahler’s earlier pieces rely on the expression of subjective experience and representational stereotypes. The juxtaposition of affects and tropes is much less critical to the meaning of this symphony than to Mahler’s other symphonies. Because this symphony is not “anthropomorphic”—overtly expressing a specific subjective human experience—it makes the possibility of a “reading” of it much more difficult than one of nearly any other Mahler symphony [1].

However, it has not stopped many analysts from trying. Many analyses base their interpretation of the symphony’s last movement on Alma Mahler, who claimed that Mahler was portraying himself as a tragic hero who cannot escape the “blows of fate” represented by the disturbing hammer blows that distinguish the movement, among other elements [2]. Others have pushed back against this reading, such as Seth Monahan, who, after establishing a more abstract interpretation of the musical structure of this movement, proposes that the finale represents Mahler stifling his wife Alma’s spirit in their marriage [3]. More recently, Kevin Quill, in his dissertation, “Death Symbolism in Gustav Mahler's Music,” proposes that the finale of the symphony is a reflection of Mahler’s anxiety about his Jewishness and that the music is a depiction of a recurring dream Mahler had in which he was haunted by the figure of Ahasuerus, the Christian stereotype of “The Eternal Wandering Jew.”[4]

All of these are valid interpretations of the music. However, there is no way of verifying any of these proposed representational narratives. Because Mahler does not engage musical ideas that have literal extra-musical meanings, any attempt to associate extra-musical meaning with the music of this movement is, by definition, speculative.

This design is intentional. In abandoning his typical semantic thinking in this symphony, Mahler uses the signification of meaning expected from his compositional style, but without any of the discrete semiotic meaning of musical objects. In this symphony, the listener hears musical events but is given no guidance as to what they refer to in any conceptually associative sense. Without specific associative elements, the meaning of the story of the symphony becomes confused for the listener. We hear the symbolism of the relationships and processes of the music but do not know to what they refer. In my opinion, this is at the heart of Mahler’s intention for this piece.

In his Symphony No. 6, Mahler explores a new approach, radical even for him, of blending programmatic and “absolute” music. Whereas in his earlier symphonies, Mahler used the principles and forms of “absolute” music to express programmatic ideas, in this symphony Mahler uses the semiotics of programmatic music to realize a new conception of “absolute” music. The purpose of this symphony is not to use symphonic form to express an extra-musical story, but rather to use the communicative principles and sensibilities of externally-referential music to create a new kind of symphonic abstraction. Rather than expressing a particular narrative, the work’s expressive intent is the musical experience itself.

In a letter to the musicologist Richard Specht, Mahler wrote, “My sixth will pose riddles that only a generation that has absorbed and digested my first five symphonies may hope to solve.” The act of riddling is the primary creative force in the work. The piece is a kaleidoscope of uncertainty and contradiction. Musical meaning, throughout, is rendered wholly vague and indeterminable. To ask what Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is about is beyond the point. Rather, it is the sheer concept of meaning in music that is the meaning of this symphony.

[1] The concept of anthropomorphism in Mahler’s symphonies is taken from Seth Monahan’s analysis of the finale of Symphony No. 6, who in turn borrows it from Theodor W. Adorno. Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 54, 220–221, 251.
[2] Alma Mahler’s interpretation is published in Donald Mitchell, “The Only Sixth,” in Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2007), 383.
[3] Seth Monahan, “'Tragedy Refuses a Nominalist Form’: ‘Inescapable’ Coherence and the Failure of the Novel-Symphony in the Finale of the Sixth,” chapter 7 in Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas.
[4] Kevin Quill, “Death Symbolism in Gustav Mahler's Music” (DMA diss., The Juilliard School, 2021), 213–224.
[5] Quoted in Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, 221n10.

Bibliography

Mitchell, Donald. Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2007.

Monahan, Seth. Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Quill, Kevin. “Death Symbolism in Gustav Mahler's Music.” DMA diss., The Juilliard School, 2021.

Other Sources Consulted

Del Mar, Norman. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study. London: Eulenburg Books, 1980.

Matthews, David. “The Sixth Symphony.” In The Mahler Companion, edited by Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Samuels, Robert. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.