Exploring Mahler’s Fifth Symphony With The Thinking Of "The History Of The Structure"

Gustav Mahler(1860-1911)was an outstanding Austrian conductor and composer from the19 th century to the turn of the 20 th century.Although his creative focus only focused on the two genres of symphonies and art songs,he poured a lot of his efforts.Especially for symphonies,Mahler created ten symphonies in his life,almost every one of which became the embodiment of his spiritual journey.The development of "history of structure" benefits from the enlightenment brought by the theory of structuralism,and its methodology is derived from the "structural" thinking advocated by structuralism,which emphasizes the interrelation and wholeness between things.For some seemingly unrelated phenomena,through the structural way of thinking,we can dig out their internal connections and hidden structural patterns,and then comb them into a system.Taking the Fifth Symphony composed by Mahler during 1901-1902 as the research object,this paper explores the structural relationship between the main body of Mahler’s symphony and the explicit and recessive structure behind his music from the aspects of the work itself,the aesthetic norms and the structural embodiment of society.Based on this,the study of the Fifth Symphony in this paper is mainly divided into two parts.The first part analyzes the essence of the symphony,and analyzes the internal and inter-movement relations from the perspective of structure,so as to explore the explicit relationship reflected by the work’s essence.The second part explores the implicit structural relationship behind Mahler’s Fifth Symphony from the perspective of aesthetic norms,the social structural connection reflected behind the works,and the creative connection between Mahler and his contemporaries and non-contemporaries.Finally,the author elaborates the research significance and use value and thinking of choosing the Angle of "structural history".