Mahler 9 with Markus Stenz  

Gustav Mahler  
Symphony No. 9 (81’) 

There will be no interval

Markus Stenz conductor

The concert is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast in 'Radio 3 in Concert'. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes. Visit bbc.co.uk/now for more information on future performances.

1 Andante comodo – Allegro
2 Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb
3 Rondo-Burleske. Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig
4 Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend

Late works have a habit of attaining something of a mythical status, a tantalising glimpse into the mind of the dying composer and his or her final creative utterances. And it is true that, when Mahler composed his Ninth Symphony, he was clouded by death. In 1907 he had lost his four-year-old daughter to scarlet fever, and just a few months later his doctor diagnosed him with an incurable heart condition. In addition, there was the superstition about composing a Ninth at all, as his wife Alma explained in her letters: ‘In his dread, he wished to dodge a Ninth Symphony, as neither Beethoven nor Bruckner had reached a Tenth.’ As it turns out, history would indeed repeat itself and Mahler’s Ninth would become his last completed symphony. He died in 1911, a year before it received its premiere.  

Little wonder, then, that the work has achieved that same iconic ‘deathbed’ status – the last notes of the finale are even marked ersterbend (‘dying away’). Such a detail might seem trivial were the whole symphony not littered with allusions to death and closure, from the opening theme of the first movement to the closing strains of the last. Just as the symphony seems to fade away into nothingness, so it creeps almost imperceptibly into being, the harp then strings outlining the sighing ‘Leb’ wohl’ (farewell) motif – words that Mahler himself writes into the score. But from this tiny, understated germ of an idea he conjures a huge movement of extraordinary breadth, its mood disturbed only by the sudden intrusion of brass and percussion, played at Mahler’s direction ‘with the greatest violence’.

For the composer Alban Berg, this was the movement that revealed Mahler’s true intentions in composing his Ninth. This is where he shows that, yes, it is a symphony about death, but it is also just as much about the joy and fulfilment of existence. ‘The first movement is the greatest Mahler ever composed,’ wrote Berg. ‘It is the expression of a tremendous love for this earth, the longing to live on it peacefully and to enjoy nature to its deepest depths – before death comes. For death is inevitable.’ 

Mahler’s letters tell a similar story. In the summer of 1909, he wrote to the conductor Bruno Walter, who would later conduct the work’s world premiere: ‘I have more thirst for life than ever, and find the “habits of existence” sweeter than ever.’ Mahler pours this thirst for life into the central two movements of the Ninth: the first an earthy folk dance that threatens to spill over into a giddy waltz, the second a blistering Rondo-Burleske in which he brings his contrapuntal creativity to the fore. When the finale comes, then, it emerges not from the shadows of death but from the vibrancy and vitality of life. And, as that life seeps away, reluctantly, over the course of this epic final movement, it becomes clear that Mahler is not signalling his solemn departure from this world but instead clinging onto the last vestiges of life with all his being. 

<sup>Programme note © Jo Kirkbride

Further Listening: Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne/Markus Stenz (Oehms OC654)

Further Reading: Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music Deryck Cooke (Faber)</sup>

Biographies

Markus Stenz conductor

Markus Stenz studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne under Volker Wangenheim and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. 

He made his opera debut in 1988 at La Fenice in Venice. He returned there last season for Mozart, Schumann and Wagner and this season and beyond he conducts Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Berg’s Wozzeck.

Other operatic highlights include Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich; the world premiere of György Kurtág’s Fin de partie at La Scala, Milan, with subsequent performances at the Dutch National Opera and Opéra National de Paris; and Britten’s A Midsummer NIght’s Dream and Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

This season he makes debuts with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and returns to the Japan, Netherlands Radio and Seoul Philharmonic orchestras, Oregon and Indianapolis Symphony orchestras and the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne. 

Further ahead he will work with the Orchestre National de Lyon, Dutch National Opera and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

The most recent addition to his award-winning discography is Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Other highlights include a Mahler symphony cycle, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, all with the Gürzenich Orchestra.