“To find peace in the presence of the faultless is the desire of the one who seeks excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?” This is my favourite Thomas Mann qoute – from “Der Tod in Venedig” (Udg.…
Nothingness and perfection
Kategori: Gustav Mahler
The Ninth Symphony
The Ninth Symphony is the last work, that Mahler has finished. Like “Das Lied von der Erde”, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony endeavors to obtain a new independence of the several voices, which is reflected in the instrumentation and causes an broken,…
The Eighth Symphony
The Eight Symphony , also called “Die Symphonie der Tausend”, reckons with four-part double choir, boys’ choir eight solo voices and full orchestra. After having finished the composition, he wrote: “… It is the greatest thing that I have ever…
The Seventh Symphony
The Seventh brings the liberation from the mental agony of the Sixth Symphony. Here, no struggles were fought out, but contrasts were compares all of the sudden. Also for this symphony Mahler demands again some unusual instruments: tenor horn (a…
The Sixth Symphony
The programmatic content of this symphony can be described as the struggle for existence of the wanting, creative man against the inexorability of destiny, which ends catastrophically with the undoing of the hero. Among all of Mahler’s symphonies, the Sixth…
The Fifth Symphony
The first movement TTrauermarsch” – funeral march – (With measured steps. Severe. Like a conduct) is thematically and formally an integral part of the second. The powerful scherzo, which Mahler considered to be the most important movement of the symphony,…
The Fourth Symphony
Initially, the first movement was called “Die Welt als ewige Jetztzeit” and is so a pendant to the finale. The initial title of the second movement, “Freund Hein spielt auf”, is missing in the partition. It is replaced by the…
The Third Symphony
In 1895/96, Mahler composed the symphony in D Minor with alto solo, women’s and boys’ choir after words by Friedrich Nietzsche and verses from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”. At that time, Mahler was a very busy conductor at the municipal theatre…
The Second Symphony
For the first movement, he revised a previous work, a symphonic piece similar to a funeral march, entitled „”otenfeier”. Obviously, Mahler adopted this title from a poem of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, that he received translated by his friend…
The First Symphony
Mahler converted the expressed wealth of ideas into programmatic titles of the movements, but was in the dark about the name of the whole work at first: Once he talks of a “symphonic poem”, once of a “symphonic poem in…