Vienna, 1900

In April 1902, twenty-one artists filled the Secession with a tribute to Beethoven. Max Klinger’s statue occupied the main hall, and Klimt’s frieze ran around three walls, ending in an embrace. At the preview on 14 April, the day before the exhibition opened to the public, Mahler conducted a wind arrangement from the finale of the Ninth Symphony. In Mahler’s Adagietto, the middle section becomes more flowing. The harp largely stops, and the first violins play on the G string. Their line rises.

At the end of an early orchestral manuscript of Urlicht, Mahler wrote the place and date: Steinbach, 19 July 1893. The song became the fourth movement of his Second Symphony. Its poem came from the second volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, published in 1808, and Mahler set it for alto. Her first short phrase is answered by brass chords in the manner of a hymn. The score asks for solemnity and simplicity. Later the voice leaves a phrase unfinished, and the oboe completes it with a turn.

In the finale of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, the strings begin alone. The four lines rise and move around one another. Schoenberg described this introduction as a departure from earth, in which the traveller passes through clouds, escaping gravity and the troubles left below. He wrote the quartet in 1907–⁠08. Its earlier movements still have named keys, but in this movement the pull towards a home chord weakens. The two violins, viola and cello play a succession of new combinations of notes before the soprano enters with George’s poem.

“Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” — “I feel air from another planet.” The soprano begins with the opening line of Stefan George’s Entrückung, from his 1907 collection Der siebente Ring. In the poem, familiar faces fade in the darkness, and the trees and paths the speaker loved grow so pale that he hardly knows them. Schoenberg gave the words to a fifth musician, the soprano, who joins the two violins, viola and cello. The strings go on playing their own lines while she sings. In his performance instructions he asked for the passage to be as light as breath, with the voice set apart from the strings by its colour.

On 26 August 1910, Mahler met Freud in Leiden. His marriage to Alma was in crisis, and three earlier appointments had been cancelled. Freud was on holiday in the Netherlands, about to leave for Italy. Ernest Jones’s biography describes the two men walking through the city for four hours while they talked. In the quartet, the soprano is still singing George’s poem, with its chasms and clear, distant heights. The strings begin quietly again, grow louder and fall back. A further rise leads towards the end of her part.

The soprano stops and the four string players continue alone. This was the passage that finally quietened the audience at the premiere. Recalling it in Los Angeles in 1936–⁠37, Schoenberg wrote: “Perhaps even my enemies and adversaries might have felt something here.” Three years after the quartet’s first performance, he dedicated his Harmonielehre, a book on harmony, to Mahler’s memory. The quartet had already moved far from the F♯ minor of its opening. At the end of this long coda the strings reach F♯ major and hold the chord.