7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7in 1907, the last of which portended his own death: his
resignation was demanded at the Vienna Opera, his three-
year-old daughter, Maria, died, and a doctor diagnosed his
fatal heart disease.
Musical Works: Last Period
Thus began Mahler’s last period, in which, at the age of 47,
he became a wanderer again. He was obliged to make a
new reputation for himself, as a conductor in the United
States, directing performances at the Metropolitan Opera
and becoming conductor of the Philharmonic Society of
New York; yet he went back each summer to the Austrian
countryside to compose his last works. He returned finally
to Vienna, to die there, in 1911.
The three works constituting his last-period trilogy,
none of which he ever heard, are Das Lied von der Erde
(1908; The Song of the Earth), Symphony No. 9 (1910), and
Symphony No. 10 in F Sharp Major, left unfinished in the
form of a comprehensive full-length sketch (though a full-
length performing version has been made posthumously).
Beginning as a song cycle, it grew into “A Symphony for
Tenor, Baritone (or Contralto) and Orchestra.” Yet, he
would not call it “Symphony No. 9,” believing, on the
analogy of Beethoven and Bruckner, that a ninth symphony
must be its composer’s last. When he afterward began
the actual No. 9, he said, half jokingly, that the danger
was over, since it was “really the tenth”; but in fact, that
symphony became his last, and No. 10 remained in sketch
form when he died.
This last-period trilogy marked an even more decisive
break with the past than had the middle-period trilogy. It
represents a threefold attempt to come to terms with
modern man’s fundamental problem—the reality of death,