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The trouble with Mahler analysis is that there isn't a consensus about his compositional thinking.   So, like it or not, comments are going to be subjective, and may well look like ""original research"".    But it ought to be possible to explain why he thought of this work as a symphony (he deliberately withheld a number from it, because he had a superstition about Ninth Symphonies being terminal: the work we know as his Ninth was in fact his Tenth, and, like Das Lied von der Erde, posthumously premiered).   This article doesn't address that.   It has been suggested that the six movements can actually be seen as covering the traditional four - movements 3 -5 jointly fulfilling the scherzo function and helping to balance the finale.  (One also quotes the Eighth Symphony's second movement).  It might be possible to find in the finale a texture resembling a hybrid of scena and aria (two of each, separated by a funeral march, based on elements of the Trinklied which begins the work, in the role of a development section) and sonata.  The last section of the finale with its repeated ""Ewig"", could also be seen  both as  a cabaletta and the coda to the whole symphonic conception.   So the intellectual and formal weight distribution of the classical symphony is completely reversed.  But we still have something which can be called a symphony, even though nothing more different from its immediate predecessor, the Eighth, could be imagined.   I'm not proposing this as an addition to the article, simply suggesting that it wouldn't be too hard to find similar thinking in the literature.94.192.68.44    Croy379"