7 Gustav Mahler 7Nos. 5, 6 , and 7. No. 5 (1902; popularly called Giant) and No. 7
(1905; popularly called Song of the Night) move from dark-
ness to light, though the light seems not the illumination
of any afterlife but the sheer exhilaration of life on Earth.
Between them stands the work Mahler regarded as his
Tragic Symphony—the four-movement No. 6 in A Minor
(1904), which moves out of darkness only with difficulty, and
then back into total night. From these three symphonies
onward, he ceased to adapt his songs as whole sections or
movements, but in each he introduced subtle allusions,
either to his Wunderhorn songs or to his settings of poems
by Friedrich Rückert, including the cycle Kindertotenlieder
(1901–04; Songs on the Deaths of Children).
At the end of this period he composed his monumen-
tal Symphony No. 8 in E-flat Major (1907) for eight soloists,
double choir, and orchestra—a work known as the Sym-
phony of a Thousand, owing to the large forces it requires,
though Mahler gave it no such title; it constitutes the first
continuously choral and orchestral symphony ever com-
posed. The first of its two parts, equivalent to a symphonic
first movement, is a setting of the medieval Catholic
Pentecost hymn Veni Creator Spiritus; part two, amalgam-
ating the three movement-types of the traditional
symphony, has for its text the mystical closing scene of
J.W. von Goethe’s Faust drama (the scene of Faust’s
redemption). The work marked the climax of Mahler’s
confident maturity, since what followed was disaster—of
which, he believed, he had had a premonition in composing
his Tragic Symphony, No. 6. The finale originally contained
three climactic blows with a large hammer, representing
“the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one
felling him as a tree is felled” (he subsequently removed
the final blow from the score). Afterward he identified
these as presaging the three blows that fell on himself