By Music Hound: Mahler's 5th

The Fifth Symphony, Leonard Bernstein/Wiener Philharmoniker

Mahler in 1902

Bernstein was buried with a copy of the Fifth placed across his heart, but his emotionally extroverted approach to the work has its drawbacks

"In the Fifth [symphony] Mahler presents two stark alternatives. He lays out the bad news first, then abruptly turns around in the scherzo as thought to say, "Mind you, there is another way of looking at this." .. No one was more subject than he to brusque switches of of mood for no apparent reason. No composer leaped more abruptly from the major to the minor mode, even within the same phrase, or more often undercut a noble chord with banality. Indeed, this is a particular hallmark of his music." (Jonathan Carr, Mahler, A Life)

Carr goes on to rehearse an argument (contra Adorno) that claims justification for the final optimism of the Fifth via the correct performance of the scherzo. Taken slowly and sentimentally, the scherzo is a very shaky bridge to the second part of the symphony. Taken more quickly and with a minimum of schmaltz, it functions as the perfect link. Life may be a joke, Mahler seems to say, but it need not be a sick one. Unfortunately, the scherzo of the Fifth is the one bit of Mahler the average person is likely to know: it shows up on all the "get down with the classics" anthology box sets. Hence, a movement that is perhaps most important to the whole to which it belongs, is the very one that shows up most on its own, with its own set of performance expectations. This is why many Mahlerites, at least in this instance, end up embracing the more modernist approach of a conductor like Pierre Boulez, who wishes to stand Mahler up against Alban Berg rather than Johanesse Brahms.  

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Mahler's last composing hut, Toblach