Mahler’s A-minor Sixth Symphony is a mythical piece. Mahler may or may not have subtitled it “Tragic” at some stage of its composition, and it could, possibly, contain music that consecrates and depicts his wife Alma. It may be “the first nihilist work in the history of music”, as conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler described it. Conductor and friend of Mahler’s Bruno Walter found the piece too expressively dark for him to conduct, since it “ends in hopelessness and the dark night of the soul”. Most significantly, it’s a work you are always told is dangerously, prophetically autobiographical, above all in its final fourth movement, that half-hour-long hallucinogenic, emotional nightmare-scape. When he revised the piece in 1906, Mahler deleted the third of the movement’s hammer-blows – a literal thumping of a gigantic box with a wooden sledge-hammer, as you can see in the Vienna Philharmonic's performance! – supposedly because he was trying to avoid a three-fold jinx of fate. His revisions were futile – the next year in 1907, Mahler had to cope with the death of his daughter, the end of his relationship with the Vienna State Opera, and the diagnosis of the fatal heart condition that would kill him four years later.

Most notoriously of all, this work – we are always told – is the symphony that its composer couldn’t make up his mind in which order to place the movements, whether the scherzo or slow movement should come second. The piece was initially published in one order, but first performed, with Mahler himself conducting, in another. The result has been confusion and consternation for conductors and for listeners about the meaning, structure, and function of the Sixth.

So let’s deal with these crazy facts first. There ought to be no confusion about the order of the movements (read Jeffrey Gantz’s excellent digest of these issues here), since Mahler never conducted the piece in any order apart from Andante-Scherzo; he felt so strongly about it that, despite having originally conceived the inner movements the other way round, he asked his publisher to insert an erratum into every copy of the first edition, making sure that the symphony would always be played with the slow movement second. Mahler must have felt incredibly strongly since in changing a published score, he was incurring extra costs and risking a critical backlash. The confusion comes only posthumously: Alma Mahler sent conductor Wilhelm Mengelberg a telegram in 1919 suggesting the piece should be played Scherzo-Andante. And then there’s Erwin Ratz’s seemingly unfounded decision to reverse Mahler’s final order in his critical edition of 1963, ever since which conductors and record companies have taken this version as gospel, even though it directly goes against the only Sixth Symphony that Mahler ever knew, conducted, or heard in his lifetime. And the hammer-blows? Again, the idea that these hammer-blows actually represent real or imagined “blows of fate” – as well as being ludicrously superstitious – contradicts the coherent and convincing musical reasons Mahler had for deleting the third thump. (Again, Gantz is a good guide – and again conductors have gone against Mahler’s revisions, reinstating the third blow, thanks in part to another posthumous editorial cock-up).

But whatever the “facts”, these issues won’t go away, since they’re all part of how the piece has been played, interpreted, and heard over the decades – and I’m not going to suggest that any performance of the Sixth that changes Mahler’s order is inherently “wrong”, just that conductors and scholars need to have good reasons for their decisions (like the music-analytic ones put forward, for example, by David Matthews and Norman del Mar).

Ironically, with all of this freight of interpretative controversy, there’s no other symphony in Mahler’s canon like the Sixth that is so much about a direct negotiation with, rather than an obliteration or sublimation of, the conventions of symphonic form. Yes, it’s conceived on a gigantic scale, but this piece is the first four-movement, purely instrumental symphony that Mahler had composed since his First (and even that piece started life as a five-movement quasi-tone-poem). Take the first movement, for example: an Allegro energico that opens with the grim tread of an A-minor march, which is contrasted with a magnificently lyrical second main idea (the supposed “Alma-theme”); the first section is even marked to be repeated, just like in classical symphonies, and the trajectory of this movement ends in the symphony’s most joyous single moment of major-key victory. (That’s the problem with Walter’s and Furtwängler’s descriptions of the Sixth Symphony, and even the “Tragic” epithet: if you hear the piece thinking only of the implacable darkness with which it ends, you miss the true drama, which is that a completely different emotional outcome is possible until the final few minutes. Everything is at stake right until the end of this music, and it’s the fact that this symphony consistently strives for a victory that it doesn’t ultimately win that makes it so emotionally devastating; in that sense, this symphony is the exact opposite of “nihilistic”.)

Yet this piece – like all of the symphonies in this series – is, at every point, challenging conventions even while it fulfils them. And in this piece, it’s how Mahler maintains an abstract musical momentum over the whole structure, even while, moment by moment, his music lurches from the emotional abyss to the mountaintop, and in some passages, can even contain music that sounds like it’s happening outside the frame of the rest of the piece. That’s literally true in the cowbells at the still centre of the first movement; a vision of a world of unsullied nature brought into the concert hall, a prelapsarian pastoralism Mahler then wrenches back into the symphonic present tense of the desperate struggle of the rest of the movement. The cowbells return in the slow movement as part of its relatively tranquil respite; and in the finale, too, where they represent an elusive hope of emotional stability the music will try and fail to achieve. In the scherzo, there’s a grotesque play of music that’s both child-like and “Altväterisch” (“old-fashioned”), but it’s in the finale in which the alchemy of the musical micro- and macro-structures is most vivid, and in which all of the major moments of this huge movement’s architecture are experienced as a twist of the symphonic knife in your very being. Or they should be, if conductor and orchestra are doing their job (as they are in the five performances below!). Those hammer-blows aren’t mere sound and fury; both strokes mark the music’s failed attempts to create a stable, victorious climax, instead of which the music curdles into angst on both occasions just after the percussionist has brought down their hammer. These are the sounds and the physical realisations – as you watch the player lift the hammer above their head and bring it down on the conductor’s cue - of the nail in the coffin of the fate of the symphony’s hero, whoever that is.

That’s another problem with conventional ways of thinking about this piece. If you conceive of it as autobiographical, then its journey to the final extinguishing of all hope in its final bars, and the last, shocking appearance of the fatalistic rhythm that has dominated both the first movement and the finale, is limited in its power: it depicts a figure who is someone apart from us – Mahler himself, or some other symphonic super-ego. Instead, I think the piece should feel as if it’s us in the audience who are the heroes and heroines who are not just depicted but implicated in the symphony’s drama. And paradoxically, this symphony has a cathartic and even life-affirming power, precisely because it confronts us with the limits of musical and symphonic existence, and creates sonic extremities that are still, more than a century on, unique to this score. They are evident above all in the dream-like soundscapes of the opening of the finale, music that returns throughout the fourth movement; each time intensified, as each rotation of the symphonic wheel only brings the music closer to its ultimate oblivion. And that’s perhaps the greatest irony of all, that this most outwardly coherent of Mahler’s symphonies, with its four instrumental movements, should prove the most surreal, sonically imaginative and emotionally disturbing of them all.

Five key recordings

Ivan Fischer/Budapest Festival Orchestra: a performance of clarity, coherence, and musical focus, whose emotional impact comes from its objective revelation of Mahler’s symphonic structure.

Claudio Abbado/Lucerne Festival Orchestra: one of the central achievements of the partnership between Abbado and his Lucerne players, making Mahler’s piece an unforgettable existential journey.

Klaus Tennstedt/London Philharmonic Orchestra: playing and conducting pitched at the very edge of Mahler’s symphonic abyss.



Leonard Bernstein/Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: an alchemy of orchestral virtuosity, expressive intensity, and interpretative imagination.

Jascha Horenstein/Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra: Horenstein’s live performance is one of the grittiest and grandest of this symphony ever recorded.

• Valery Gergiev conducts Mahler’s Sixth Symphony with the World Orchestra for Peace at the Proms on Sunday 20 July. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms

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