The ‘greatest’ and the ‘most personal’

Whenever Mahler had completed preliminary work on a new composition he lost no time in letting friends and relatives know about it. Attributes he would thereby bestow on his works are revealing – and in such cases Mahler was certainly not sparing with superlatives. ‘It is the most significant thing I have done yet’ was for example his assessment of the Finale of the Second Symphony. He called the Third Symphony ‘my most individual and my richest work’. Whatever the degree of understandable enthusiasm resonating from such comments, it was rare for Mahler's judgements to be final. He appeared to sense each new composition as having reached a yet higher stage of development, successive completed symphonies always seeming his best to date.

There are only two notable exceptions to this. In order to express the aspirations and significance of the Eighth Symphony in words, during its composition in 1906 he wrote, ‘Just imagine the universe beginning to ring and resound. There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns circling above.’ He upheld the judgement that it was his ‘greatest’ work even when writing his important and substantial later works. At the beginning of October 1909, two months after the draft score of the Ninth Symphony had been completed, he called the Eighth ‘my most important work’, and in the summer of 1910 he spoke once more of his ‘greatest achievement’. Mahler bestowed a similarly positive, if subtly diering, attribute on the work which immediately followed: Das Lied von der Erde.