In February 1901 Mahler had suffered a sudden major hemorrhage and his doctor later told him that he had come within an hour of bleeding to death.

The middle symphonies, by contrast, are pure orchestral works and are, by Mahler's standards, taut and lean.

Final revisions made by Mahler in 1911 (by which time he had completed his 9th Symphony) did not appear until 1964 (ed.

Some peculiarities are the funeral march that opens the piece and the Adagietto for harp and strings that contrasts with the complex orchestration of the other movements.

A triumphant chorale breaks forth but dissolves into a return of the tragic material of the opening of the movement.

The mood abruptly shifts from the pessimism and storminess of the first two movements to a lighter, affirmative disposition, aided by the dance rhythms.

This sudden change in the musical temperament exposes the "schizophrenic character" of the symphony, since the tragic nature of the first two movements is not reconciled with the more joyful mood of the scherzo.

The themes are: The fourth movement may be Mahler's most famous composition and is the most frequently performed of his works.

This German text can easily be sung to the first theme of the Adagietto, beginning with the anacrusis to bar 3, reinforcing the suggestion that it is indeed intended as Mahler's love note to Alma and returning to the more vocal quality of the earlier symphonies.

recordings by Eliahu Inbal, Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Abbado), while Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic performed it in 9+1⁄2 minutes.

A recording of a live performance with Hermann Scherchen conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1964 lasts 15′15″.

Leonard Bernstein conducted it during the funeral Mass for Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, on 8 June 1968,[9] and he also briefly discusses this section along with the opening bars of the second movement in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from 1973.

Although the Adagietto had regularly been performed on its own, it came to popular (i.e. non-classical) prominence in the 1971 Luchino Visconti film Death in Venice.

In that film, the lead character was modified from the novel's original conception of writer to that of composer, with elements in common with Mahler.

[10] Music professor Jeremy Barham writes that the Adagietto has become the most "commercially prominent" of Mahler's symphonic movements, and that it has "accrued elegiac meaning" in the popular consciousness over the years, becoming particularly used in commemorative events following the September 11 attacks in the United States.