MAHLER'S SEVENTH SYMPHONY, like his Fifth and Sixth, is considered to be a symphony without a program. While denying that this work is programmatic, Alma Mahler gives us several important clues to the contrary; for instance, the fact that Mahler had Eichendorff's poetry and German Romanticism in mind while composing this symphony. Interestingly, Bruno Walter also mentions Romanticism in relation to it. In his monograph on Mahler he characterizes the symphony's three middle movements as a return to the kind of Romanticism that he had assumed Mahler had overcome. It is not clear whether he means Romanticism in German cultural history or in Mahler's creative development, but his statement does make the point that Mahler is interested in a particular view of Romanticism in his Seventh Symphony. In speaking about the piece, Mahler employed a very specific nocturnal idiom, not only, for instance, by using the term “Nachtmusik” for the second and fourth movements, but also by comparing the last movement to night-ending daybreak during rehearsals for the symphony's premiere in Prague in 1908.

The starting point for my deliberations on the Seventh Symphony, which argue that it does indeed have an (anti-programmatic) program, is these nocturnal references and the importance of the imagery of light and darkness. Night is a leitmotif in German cultural history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There exists an entire musical tradition that takes night as its theme. This tradition includes works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Wagner — to name only a few of the more prominent examples. Mahler explicitly referred to this tradition through his use of the title “Nachtmusik” for two of the symphony's slow movements. There is also a literary tradition represented, for instance, by the poetry cycle Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) by Novalis (the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg) or E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nachtstücke (Night Pieces, 1817). Both authors were important figures in the German Romantic movement, and Mahler was certainly familiar with them. Attempts have been made to match, in particular, the second movement with a specific text by the German Romantic author Eichendorff. In the following, I will not further pursue the assumed Eichendorff reference but will rather pick up on the second part of Alma's assertion, that Mahler's symphony has something to do with a rereading of German Romanticism.