May 12, 2022
Mahler once said this to Bruno Walter, his protege and great
advocate of Mahler’s works: "What one makes music from is still the
whole—that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human
being”
You could almost
just stop there with the last movement of Mahler 9. This is
music so full of feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, but also
of also acceptance and consolation, that words fail to describe its
emotional impact. But as always with Mahler, this isn’t merely an
emotional outpouring, a dumping of his innermost feelings onto the
audience. It is a superbly paced, beautifully written movement, and
despite its 25 minute length, and very stable and slow tempo, the
movement does the seemingly impossible and feels both endless and
compact at the same time.
So today, while
of course we’ll talk about the emotional content of the music, I
want to focus a bit more on how Mahler writes this music to make it
so effective, and how he finds a way to reach the peaks of
expression and the epitome of using silence as music. And finally,
we'll explore how and to whom Mahler says goodbye to at the end of
this symphony, as everything fades away. Join us!