Thank you so so much!!

oops sorry everybody please thank iplayosu for playing cello for me

That's the beauty behind this movement. Mahler was undoubtedly known for his full orchestration and masterful use of orchestral timbres. With that, he knew when certain instruments weren't needed, with this movement of his Symphony No. 5 being perhaps the best example of that. The movements surrounding this one do "live up" to what most people would expect Mahler to sound like; however, this movement doesn't need the loud support of percussion and brass. This so-called love letter to his wife Alma is one of, if not the most intimate moments in classical music and Mahler knew he needed only one family of instruments to achieve that intimacy. Could he have done it with woodwinds or even brass? Sure. Did he need to though? No.

Mahler's music is a great example of what often gets called "chamber orchestration." Basically scoring sections (or whole movements in this case) for a subset of the total orchestra, effectively turning an orchestral composition into a series of tiny chamber ensembles passages. You'll see tuttis in Mahler's music when he needed things to be loud, of course, but they're surprisingly rarer than one might expect from a composer with such a reputation for writing such massive works. In this case, the whole movement is scored for just the string section and solo harp. And indeed, even in this whole movement of reduced scoring, you still see the chamber mentality going with the harp dropping out for the whole B section, thereby identifying its sound solely with the A sections.

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