Adagietto (Mahler)

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The Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony is a piece of music for harp and the strings of an orchestra.

It is arguably Mahler's most famous single piece of music, and is the most frequently performed extract from Mahler's works. It is best known for its use in the 1971 Luchino Visconti film Death in Venice. However it was frequently performed on its own before then, chiefly because in the early 20th century music programmers did not believe whole Mahler symphonies would be acceptable to audiences. Indeed, the British premiere of the entire Fifth Symphony came thirty-six years after the Adagietto itself had been introduced, by Henry Wood at a Proms concert in 1909.

It lasts for approximately ten minutes, and Mahler adds the instruction sehr langsam (very slowly). This has led to some conductors taking the movement well over its normal duration, in some cases over eleven minutes (11'13" as performed in a recording by Leonard Bernstein). However in recent years the trend moved away from extreme tempi, notably 9'33" in the inaugural recording from Simon Rattle as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Adagietto was also performed at the mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York on 8 June 1968, the day of the burial of Robert Kennedy.