His second daughter was born that June, and during his customary summer break away from Vienna in his lakeside retreat at Maiernigg in the Carinthian mountains, he finished his Symphony No.

The Seventh had its premiere on 19 September 1908, in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic, at the festival marking the Diamond Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph.

The three years which elapsed between the completion of the score and the symphony's premiere witnessed dramatic changes in Mahler's life and career.

In March 1907 he had resigned his conductorship of the Vienna State Opera, as the musical community in Vienna turned against him (which was why he chose Prague for the work's debut);[7] on 12 July his first daughter died of scarlet fever; and, even as she lay on her deathbed, Mahler learned that he was suffering from an incurable heart condition.

surmise that this is why the optimism and cheerfulness of the symphony was subsequently tempered by the small but significant revisions Mahler made in the years leading up to its premiere.

[12] The principal theme, presented by horns in unison in E minor, is accompanied similarly, though much faster and in a higher register.

This leads straight into the development, which continues for some time before suddenly being interrupted by pianissimo trumpet fanfares and a slow chorale based on the march theme from the introduction.

Scampering woodwinds imitating somewhat grotesque bird calls pass off into the distance, as the trumpets sound the major/minor seal from Symphony No.

The horns introduce a rich, somewhat bucolic (A) theme, surrounded by dancing strings and a march rhythm from his song "Revelge".

Nonetheless, as the Spanish musicologist José L. Pérez de Arteaga points out,[16] this movement is really "a most morbid and sarcastic mockery of the Viennese waltz".

The movement begins with a strange gesture: a pianissimo dialogue between timpani and pizzicato basses and cellos with sardonic interjections from the winds.

[12] The scherzo is contrasted by a warmer trio in the major mode, introduced by and containing a "shrieking" motif beginning in the oboes and descending through the orchestra.

Multiple viola solos rise above the texture, and there is a persistent timpani and pizzicato motif that pervades the dance.

At one memorable point in the score, the cellos and double basses are instructed to play pizzicato with the volume fffff, with the footnote, "pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood".

[17] Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht accounted for the unusual musical episodes of this movement by offering a program in which Mahler walks through Vienna one evening,[18]at night, and takes in all the music he can hear: happy violins, quivering mandolins, guitar and the clarinet, the voices of all the other instruments.

[19][a] Boisterous timpani joined by blazing brass set the scene for the riotous final movement in C major.

"A vigorous life-asserting pageant of Mahlerian blatancy", is how Michael Kennedy describes it, and Mahler himself explained it with the aperçu "The world is mine!

"[22] The principal theme of the first movement crops up amidst the outrageously exuberant finale, but is soon quelled and reappears in the major mode.

[23] The piece evolves from uncertain and hesitant beginnings to an unequivocal C major finale, with its echoes of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: indeed, at the premiere the overture to this opera was performed after the symphony.

This journey from night to day proceeds via the third movement scherzo, marked schattenhaft (shadowy), which may have been what prompted Arnold Schoenberg to become a particular champion of the work.

6, notably the juxtaposition of major with minor chords, the march figure of the first movement, and the use of cowbells within certain pastoral episodes.

[25] Martin Scherzinger has analysed the fifth movement of the symphony from a deconstructionist perspective informed by the methodology of Jacques Derrida.