IN his eighth Symphony Mahler reverts, on a higher plane of his spiral
development, to the programmatic and philosophically motivated
symphonic type of his youth. As a reflection of his unceasing struggle
with religious problem this Symphony takes up the thread from
Symphony II, and with it shares the hymnic choral finale. Accord-
ing to the late Alfred Mathis, an expert on Mahler's music, ¹
the work
was originally planned in four movements:

(1) Hymn, 'Veni Creator'; (2) Scherzo; (3) Adagio Caritas; (4)
Hymn, The Birth of Eros. The two instrumental middle movements
(one of them a remnant left over from the original draft of Symphony
IV) were eliminated and the Eros movement was eventually replaced
by the most potent poetical realization of neo-Platonism: the closing
scene of Goethe Faust, Part II. Mathis quotes a letter of Mahler's
to Alma (dated Munich, June 1910), written during the rehearsals
for the first performance of the Symphony, in which he expatiates on
the spiritual link between Plato and Goethe: ²

. . . In the discourses of Socrates, Plato gives his own philosophy, which,
as the misunderstood 'Platonic love,' has influenced thought right down
the centuries to the present day. The essence of it is really Goethe's idea that

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