In 1907, two years before he began composing his Ninth Symphony, Gustav Mahler's world changed from heaven to earth. On March 17 he resigned as assistant conductor of the Vienna Opera, a position he had held for ten years (although he would soon sign a contract with the New York Met), capitulating to friction with the administration and the growing anti-Semitism of the Viennese press. In the interregnum of that summer, he took Alma and her two daughters to his villa in Maiernigg, where he could compose in the peace of his famous "composition hut." But on July 5, victim of scarlet fever, his eldest daughter, barely four years old, died. A few days later, Mahler was diagnosed with the heart disease that would take the composer to his grave in less than four years.
Mahler refused to return to Maiernigg the following summer, so Alma found a house in Toblach, in the Dolomites (in the mountain range of the Eastern Alps), a huge farmhouse with eleven rooms, two terraces and two bathrooms, "undoubtedly somewhat primitive, but in splendid surroundings," as Alma put it, referring to the expansive mountain view. There, over the course of the next three summers, Mahler will complete his last works: The Song of the Earth, the Ninth Symphony, and begin the Tenth, which was left unfinished when his heart finally failed.
The three works were written while Mahler was obsessed with the idea of death, and clearly reveal how disturbed he was by its immediacy. But the composer did not give up without a fight, even though his doctors tried to restrict his diet and warned him to discontinue the swimming, cycling and hiking he enjoyed so much. His last four years, filled with commitments as a conductor, great efforts to compose and varied personal affairs (a meeting with Sibelius in 1907, sessions posing for Auguste Rodin in 1909, and a single visit, that dreaded and often postponed session with Freud in 1910) hardly reflect the routine of an incapacitated person.
The superstition
Yet Mahler had tried to avoid composing exactly nine symphonies, knowing that neither Beethoven nor Bruckner had gone further than that. He therefore called The Song of the Earth (which followed the Eighth Symphony) "a symphony for alto, tenor and orchestra," without adding a number. Only a few days after completing the next symphony, which he openly, and perhaps even defiantly, called the Ninth Symphony, Mahler set about composing a tenth, as if to make sure he had defeated superstition, which, of course, won the day.
The work was premiered posthumously in June 1912 by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the German conductor Bruno Walter, Mahler's personal friend.
It is structured in four movements, slow first and last, thus breaking with tradition, although Mahler had already experimented with a slow finale in his Third Symphony.
The complete work lasts about an hour and a half.
Presented here is the fourth movement, the Adagio, marked, in German, Sehr langsam und noch zuruckhaltend, something like "very slow and 'held back,'" or literally, "reservedly." It is initiated by the strings.
The finale is almost pure silence, stillness and waiting. The first violins sing a phrase from the Kindertotenlieder, the songs of grief over the death of children that Mahler, to his own horror, wrote shortly before the death of his daughter Maria. In the last twenty-four bars, very slow and pianissimo - one of the most moving pages ever written, notwithstanding the sparse notes - the music gradually recedes, serene and resolute.
The performance is by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
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