1. A version of this paper was first presented in December 1998 at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was subsequently read at a graduate colloquium at Yale University (February 2001), a symposium on musical scholarship at the University of Minnesota (March 2001), and a lecture series at the University of Cincinnati (May 2001).
2. 1 For example, Dika Newlin writes: "But there can be no doubt that even at the time he composed {the Sixth Symphony} Mahler felt that its tragedy held some special personal significance for him." See Dika Newlin, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York, 1947; rev. edn. 1978), p. 181. This notion appears to have originated with Alma Mahler, who wrote in her memoirs: "Not one of his works
3. came so directly from his inmost heart as this one. We both wept that day {when Mahler played through the symphony at the piano}. The music and what it foretold touched us so deeply. The Sixth is the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one also." As concerns the "domestic" aspect of the work, she wrote: "After he had drafted the first movement he came down from the wood to tell me he had tried to express me in a theme. This is the great soaring {secondary} theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. In the third movement he represented the arhythmic games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand." As for the composer depicting his own downfall: "In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, that of his hero: 'It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.' Those were his words. In the Kindertotenlieder, as also in the Sixth, he anticipated his own life in music. On him too fell three blows of fate, and the last felled him" (Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, rev. and ed. Donald Mitchell, trans. Basil Creighton {London, 1969}; orig. publ. as Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe {Amsterdam, 1940}, p. 70).
4. 2 The finale of the First Symphony begins with an off-tonic sonata in the "Inferno" key of F minor, which is eventually overthrown or transcended by a D-major breakthrough (Durchbruch), allowing the movement to conclude in the "Paradise" key of D, the tonic of the symphony as a whole. The Second Symphony begins with the C-minor "Todtenfeier" movement; its finale launches an expansive F-minor sonata whose recapitulation articulates an enormous III-V-I auxiliary cadence in the "resurrection" key of E major. The Fifth Symphony begins in C minor; apart from the central scherzo, which adumbrates the concluding key of the symphony, the work progresses by descending thirds (C minor-A minor-F major-D major) to conclude in the key of D.
5. 3 This is almost always the case with Mozart, whose minor-mode sonata-based movements invariably recapitulate off-tonic material from the exposition in the tonic minor rather than the tonic major.