Mahler was delighted with his new-found status as the owner of a grand villa. "The spirit of Bach is summoned with even greater force as Mahler deploys a dazzling array of counterpoint without ever becoming "dry." Yet according to the conductor Willem Mengelberg, a champion of Mahler's music and a close friend of the composer, the composer's inspiration here was none other than his fiancée Alma Schindler. Not coincidentally, he was at the time exploring a deeper admiration for J.S. The composer spent quite a while recuperating. (Indeed, this is the music that that eminent Mahlerian Leonard Bernstein chose to conduct at St. Patrick's in New York during the funeral services held for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968). He even gives the first movement a title ("Funeral March")-an explicit programmatic reference whose counterpart is the implicit "love song" to Alma represented by the Adagietto. Mahler wrote his fifth symphony during the summers of 1901 and 1902. But as soon as the stage has been set for a dignified triumphal conclusion, Mahler plays the trickster and adds an irreverently anarchic passage at the very end-crowning the Fifth with a fresh dose of humor and joie de vivre. non-classical) prominence in the 1971 Music professor Jeremy Barham writes that the Adagietto has become the most "commercially prominent" of Mahler's symphonic movements, and that it has "accrued elegiac meaning" in the popular consciousness over the years, becoming particularly used in commemorative events following the Performed by the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra (Reinhold Behringer) with digital samples. Among its most distinctive features are the trumpet solo that opens the work with the same rhythmic motive as used in the opening of Beethoven's 5th symphony and the frequently performed Adagietto.