Mahler began his Ninth Symphony in the spring of 1909. This would be his last completed work and is often considered his most deeply personal score. Bruno Walter, who conducted the first performance with the Vienna Philharmonic on June 26, 1912, said that he recognized the composer’s own stride in the limping rhythm of the first movement. “In it something is said that I have had on the tip of my tongue for some time,” Mahler wrote to Walter in 1909. Leonard Bernstein suggested that the hesitant opening with a faltering rhythm in the cellos was Mahler’s own erratic heartbeat. On July 5, 1907 his young daughter Maria had died of scarlet fever. A few days later, a physician diagnosed the composer with heart disease, from which he died at the age of fifty shortly after finishing the Ninth.
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is neither his ninth nor his final symphony. He had gone out of his way to duck the superstition, knowing that neither Beethoven nor Bruckner wrote more. Thus he named Das Lied von der Erde, “a symphony for contralto, tenor, and orchestra,” following his Eighth and only a days after completing his Ninth, Mahler plunged into a tenth. The piece is one of four compositions in “conventional” four-movement form and is the first important symphony since Haydn to begin with a slow movement. “The whole movement,” Berg wrote, “is based on a premonition of death which constantly recurs. . . . That is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano.” The main theme resembles the motto of Beethoven’s Farewell piano sonata and Mahler jeers at a waltz by Johann Strauss, Jr. called Enjoy Life. The slow finale is a grave adagio that balances the opening Andante, with a hymn played by a full string choir. The end is about silence, stillness, and waiting as the music gradually, peacefully, and resolutely fades to nothing.