Symphony no. 4 in G major

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony has earned a reputation as one of his most enigmatic works. Its scale is more intimate than that of several neighbouring symphonies, yet its final movement introduces the human voice: a soprano enters the symphonic argument and gives the closing vision its distinctive, disarming character. He completed the symphony in 1900, having set out, in his own words, to write “a symphonic humoresque” — “and what came out was a symphony of normal dimensions”. The finale sets “Das himmlische Leben”, a song on a text from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn of Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim; Mahler had written it years earlier and first intended it as the seventh and last movement of the Third Symphony, under the title “What the child tells me”.