The Fifth is the most Jewish of all Mahler’s symphonies. The first movement takes us to the unmistakable mood of Jewish lamentation, the finale to the childlike vision of messianic joy. As we know, Mahler converted to Catholicism. Views may differ as to whether his decision was opportunistic or a question of religious conviction. Christianity plays an important part in much of Mahler’s music, though not in this particular work.

Perhaps I may take the liberty of referring briefly to my own family. My ancestors (like Mahler’s) were merchants in a small shtetl in the Habsburg Empire. They were observant Jews. My grandfather, three years older than Gustav Mahler, decided to leave this religious lifestyle behind him when he went to study in Vienna. My father and his brothers were brought up without any religious education. They adored Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and Richard Wagner. One of the four brothers converted to Catholicism when he married a daughter of a converted family. Later, under Nazi occupation, when it seemed for a while that converting might help them avoid deportation, two of my uncles and an aunt became Catholics; the other members of the family did not. Whether or not these decisions were opportunistic was never discussed in my family. Nobody cared - these were considered unimportant, personal decisions, partly dictated by circumstances. Converts or no converts, nobody practised any religion and everybody adored culture. And they all hummed tunes like those in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

 Iván Fischer