Four Centuries of Great Music April 19, 2026 - Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and Kindertotenlieder

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music I a featuring the music of Gustav Mahler.  In a recent conversation with the concertmaster of the Savannah Philharmonic, JoAnna Farrer, she  shared with me her love of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.  This was right after I saw the five star review of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic’s recording of the Mahler symphony cycle on Pentatone records in The Guardian newspaper.  The reviewer Clive Paget wrote that this recording is “meticulous, imaginative and deserves to be placed alongside the very best sets” of the Mahler Symphonies.  He also wrote  that “The Seventh is notoriously problematic, but Bychkov’s meticulous reading is remarkably convincing. Tempi and transitions in the long opening movement feel natural, the nocturnal movements flicker with imaginative minutiae and the finale, which packs an unashamed punch, for once feels entirely earned.”  

So here is a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the first movement which is marked Langsam Etwas weniger langsam Nicht schleppen Allegro con fuoco by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9. Pentatone Records

You have been listening to the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, performed by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9.

We will be closing this first hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring the music of Gustav Mahler with the second, third and fourth movements of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.

The second movement is marked Nachtmusik Allegro moderato
The third movement is marked Scherzo Schattenhaft
The fourth movement is marked  Nachtmusik Andante amoroso

These movements are again performed by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9.

You have been listening to the second, third and fourth movements of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony as performed by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9.

Let’s open this second hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring the music of Gustav Mahler with the fifth and final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony which is marked Rondo Finale Allegro ordinario and is again performed by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9.

You have been listening to the fifth and final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony again as performed by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic from their album set Gustav Mahler  Symphonies 1-9.




Gustav Mahler - Kindertotenlieder

Mahler - Kindertotenlieder was written around the same time as Mahler’s middle symphonies #5, 6, and 7 and it is said that you cannot fully appreciate these symphonies without listening to the Kindertotenlieder.  So we will close this second hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music with Mahler - Kindertotenlieder

Gustav Mahler began his Kindertotenlieder in the summer of 1901, after a health crisis got him thinking about his own mortality. Laid low with the flu in January of 1901, Mahler had returned to his duties as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic and as director of the Vienna Court Opera looking like death warmed over.

Alma Schindler, his future wife, observed him leading a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute on February 24, and remarked on his "Lucifer-like face, pale cheeks, eyes like burning coals," telling her companions, "This man can't go on like that."

That night, after the performance, Mahler telephoned his sister, who arrived at his apartment to find him lying in a pool of his own blood. This sister summoned a doctor and a surgeon, and Mahler underwent an emergency operation for an intestinal hemorrhage that night. 

Mahler returned to health, and the summer of 1901 was one of his most prolific periods for composition, yielding a host of songs, including the first, third, and fourth of the Kindertotenlieder and two movements of his Fifth Symphony. He also began his courtship of Alma, whom he married in March 1902. Their first daughter, Maria, was born in November of that year. The first moments of her life, during which she seemed not to be breathing, were terrifying, and Mahler constantly worried about her frail health. 

Alma Mahler severely took her husband Gustav to task for composing a series of orchestral songs on texts dealing with the death of children. Merely two weeks after the birth of their second child, Alma found it incomprehensible and feared that Mahler had tempted Fate. “I could understand,” she writes, “setting such frightful words to music if one had no children, or had lost those one had… Rückert did not write these harrowing elegies solely out of his imagination; they were dictated by the cruelest loss of his whole life. What I could not understand was bewailing the deaths of children who were in the best of health and spirits … hardly one hour after having kissed and fondled them. I exclaimed at the time: “For Heaven’s sake, don’t tempt Providence!” 

Alma’s fears seemingly proved an act of clairvoyance, as four years after the work had been completed, their daughter Maria—also known as Putzi—died of scarlet fever and diphtheria at the age of four in 1907. At that time, Mahler wrote to Guido Adler: “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more.”


Poet Friedrich Rückert began writing his Kinder-totenlieder following the deaths of two of his children from scarlet fever during the winter of 1833-34. He eventually produced hundreds of these poems, which were published posthumously. The texts chosen by Mahler touch on several themes, but the constant that binds them together seems to be their prevalent nature imagery, which places the localized tragedy of a child's death within an uninterrupted broader context. The texts also tell us something about Mahler's spirituality, with his firm belief in an afterlife affirmed by the recurring image of "light" and by the serene D-major conclusion of the final song.

Mahler's instruction in the score was "These five songs form a complete and indivisible whole, and for this reason their continuity must be preserved by preventing interruptions, such as for example applause at the end of each song.”). In this way the song cycle is constantly striving toward the D-major conclusion. Orchestrally, Mahler also builds up to the last song, which is the only one to use the full instrumental complement. Elsewhere, he creates compelling sonorities, such as the alternation between winds and strings in the first song, or the combination of English horn with violas and basses in the third. Taken as a whole, the cycle is as rigorously structured as any of Mahler’s symphonies, and its atmosphere – Mahler described them as “terribly sad” – informs his three “middle period” symphonies (Nos. 5, 6, and 7), a full appreciation of which is impossible without the Kindertotenlieder.

Here is a perforane of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder featuring Dame Janet Baker, Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli from the album Mahler: Kindertotenlieder - 5 Rückertlieder - Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen  Warner Classics