Symphony No. 4 (Mahler)

About

Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a work for a relatively small orchestra that is perhaps one of Mahler's shortest and most accessible symphony of the nine he completed in his lifetime. The symphony is referred to as one of his "Wunderhorn" symphonies along with the three that came before it, because it is primarily based upon songs based on a series of German folk poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (or The Youth's Magic Horn) that were written when the composer was younger. The Fourth Symphony is based upon one song in particular, "Das himmlische Leben" (or "The Heavenly Life"), which attempts to recreate a child's vision of heaven, and is sung in its entirety by a soprano (as the child) during the symphony's final movement (Leonard Bernstein would use a child to sing the part in his famed performance of the Mahler Cycle in the early 1980s with the Vienna Philharmonic, which met with significant controversy surrounding Mahler's original intentions for the piece). Because of the work's strong, lyrical content, reasonable orchestral demands and relative ease to perform, Mahler's Fourth Symphony remains his most frequently performed work compared to the rather lengthy, emotionally and physically demanding symphonies that came before and after, securing it as one of Mahler's most universally beloved works as a result.