Saisoneröffnung: Wiener Philharmoniker / Harding

Season Opening

In his imposing oeuvre, Gustav Mahler attempted to capture the world and all its joy and suffering in music. Nearly all of his symphonies will be performed in the Wiener Konzerthaus in the new season, interpreted by different orchestras under the baton of some very strong personalities. In a dazzling start to both the Mahler cycle and the new season, the Vienna Philharmonic will be conducted by Daniel Harding, who began to explore Mahler’s cosmos at an early age under the tutelage of Mahler expert, Claudio Abbado. Both the Vienna Philharmonic and Daniel Harding already collaborated in a performance of Mahler’s fragmentary Tenth Symphony a few years ago. This time, they will explore the composer’s impressive Sixth Symphony.

Mahler’s Sixth is regarded as a musical manifesto of hopelessness. Starting and ending in the dark key of A Minor, it exudes an aura of inexorable fate. The two notorious hammer blows in the final movement are interpreted as symbolising the body blows of fate. But when Mahler was working on the composition of the symphony in 1903/04, he was at the zenith of his career as director of the Vienna Court Opera. And Alma Schindler, 20 years his junior and one of the most sought-after beauties in Vienna, had just agreed to become his wife. Maybe Mahler had a premonition that happiness is always deceptive. Nevertheless, Alma’s rather enigmatic assertion that, in his Sixth Symphony, Mahler had predicted the heavy blows of fate that were to strike him only served to feed a murky mystification of the work. Viewing the symphony through lenses coloured by such biographical details, the lucidity and precision of the work’s structure can easily evade the listener. The recurring shades of light that infiltrate this great symphony are no lightweight episodes. The listener may dismiss them as being out of touch with reality, as an illusory foil against which the mercilessness of reality is all the more clearly outlined. But they take up a lot of space that gives the listener the room to breathe a wistful sigh of relief. The Sixth Symphony draws its energy from the conflict between hope and hopelessness. The repeated and sudden switches from minor to major is a leitmotif that runs all through this symphony. The magnitude and force of its dizzying plunges is all the more powerful because, as the music soars to ever giddier heights, it seems to do so on the illusory promise of permanence. It is an unparalleled exploration of extremes, which must have left an incomparable impression on the audience when it was first performed.