Berliner Philharmoniker 2

Gustav Mahler remained silent about the idea behind his Ninth Symphony, but even his close circle of friends was certain that this work had special significance. Conductor Willem Mengelberg believed it to be a heartfelt farewell and assigned to the four movements the following images: “pain of separation and melancholy,” “dance of death,”  “gallows humor,” and “memento mori.” His colleague Bruno Walter, Mahler’s former assistant, compared the enraptured finale with the  “dissolution of a cloud into the blue of the heavens.” And the composer Alban Berg considered the Ninth to be “the most magnificent thing that Mahler ever wrote” — precisely because of its sense of impending doom. Musically, too, much of it seems to come from another world: the musical language is far ahead of its time. Mahler himself did not live to experience the world premiere, which Bruno Walter conducted in Vienna in June 1912, a year after the composer’s death. Since Mahler was unable to test the score in practice, we don’t know whether he would have made any changes — a particular challenge in the interpretation of this musical testament, according to Kirill Petrenko.