Mahler: Symphony No. 9 | London Symphony Orchestra & Sir Simon Rattle | George Enescu Festival 2023

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9 | London Symphony Orchestra & Sir Simon Rattle | George Enescu Festival | 30.08.2023 | Bucharest Palace Hall

0:01 I. Andante comodo
28:46 II. Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb
45:29 III. Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig
58:38 IV. Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend


Recorded from public broadcast. Enjoy!

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Gustav Mahler was thinking about death when he composed the Ninth. His fouryear- old daughter had died in 1907, traumatizing the composer – he could not bear mention of the child’s name – and forcing the family to move to find a new summer retreat, one free of painful associations. They settled on Toblach (Dobbiaco) in the mountainous Tyrol region on the Austro-Italian border. Mahler would compose his final music during his summers there: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in 1908, the Ninth Symphony in 1909, and the unfinished Tenth in 1910.

In 1907, Mahler was also diagnosed with the heart condition that would kill him four years later. To a man who loved nature and found inspiration in out-door excursions, the doctor’s order that he refrain from strenuous physical activity meant a drastic lifestyle change. Instead of rambling around the woods and mountains in Toblach, he spent much of his time alone in his composing cabin. In a 1908 letter to the conductor Bruno Walter, Mahler wrote, “The solitude, in which my attention is turned more inward, makes me feel all the more distinctly that everything is not right with me physically. Perhaps indeed I am being too gloomy – but since I have been in the country I have been feeling worse than I did in town, where all the distractions helped to take my mind off things.”

So in the Ninth Symphony we definitely have a composer preoccupied with “the end,” with his own and others’ mortality. But Mahler didn’t see the Ninth as his final work – the Tenth, much of which he completed before he died, ended up being that. He was simply grappling with the same questions of life and death he faced in much of his music – according to his long-time friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, the first opus to flow from Mahler’s pen, at the age of six, no less, was “a polka, to which he added a funeral march as an introduction.” (John Mangum / laphil.com)