Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 27

MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 9
JOSEPH MEYERHOFF SYMPHONY HALL
Friday, June 7, 2019, 8 pm
Sunday, June 9, 2019, 3 pm
MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE
Saturday, June 8, 2019, 8 pm
Marin Alsop, conductor
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 9 in D Major

Andante comodo

Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers

Rondo - Burleske
Adagio
The intermission will last 20 minutes. The concert will end at approximately
9:40 pm on Friday and Saturday and 4:40 pm on Sunday.
PRESENTING SPONSOR:
About the Artists
Marin Alsop
For Marin Alsop’s bio, please see pg. 7.
About the Concert
SYMPHONY NO. 9
Gustav Mahler
Born in Kaliště, Bohemia (now Czech
Republic), July 7, 1860; died in Vienna,
Austria, May 18, 1911
In the finale of his Sixth Symphony,
written in 1904, Gustav Mahler
interjected three tremendous percussion
blows: a musical expression of a vision
that he himself would be struck by
three calamities. And in 1907, this
eerie presentiment came true. First,
Mahler was pushed out of his position
as Director of the Vienna Court Opera,
where he had built a reputation as
Europe’s greatest opera conductor. That
summer, his beloved elder daughter,
Maria, died suddenly of diphtheria. And
in the immediate aftermath, a medical
examination revealed he had a serious
heart condition that would probably kill
him within the next few years.
The next summer, Mahler wrote to his
close friend, the conductor Bruno Walter,
about the restrictions this diagnosis,
along with increasingly severe physical
symptoms, had forced on him. “For many
years, I have been used to constant and
vigorous exercise —roaming about in the
mountains and woods, and then, like
a kind of jaunty bandit, bearing home
my drafts.…Even spiritual indisposition
used to disappear after a good trudge.…
Now I am told to avoid any exertion, keep
a constant eye on myself and not walk
much.” Though Mahler had moved to
an inspiring new composing retreat in
Toblach in the splendidly jagged Italian
Dolomites, his wife, Alma, remembered
1908 as “the saddest summer” they had
ever experienced. “We were afraid of
everything. He was always stopping on a

walk to feel his pulse, and he often asked
me to listen to his heart and see whether
the beat was clear or rapid or calm.”
Nevertheless, Mahler managed to
submerge his anxiety in a new project: a set
of six orchestral songs he called Das Lied
von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”). In
effect, it was his Ninth Symphony, though
set in an unorthodox form. For Mahler
was wrestling psychologically with yet
another burden: the Curse of the Ninth
Symphony. After the prolific Haydn and
Mozart with their dozens of symphonies,
composers like Beethoven, Schubert
and Bruckner had found their Ninth
Symphonies to be the last station before
death. So, Mahler tried to cheat the
curse by not numbering Das Lied and
then upon completing his titular Ninth
Symphony (begun that same summer)
telling friends it was actually his Tenth
because Das Lied was the Ninth. But the
curse could not be defeated that easily.
For partway into his Tenth Symphony
in 1911, death indeed claimed Mahler,
leaving that work incomplete.
Meanwhile, Mahler the conductor had
quickly filled the gap left by the loss of
Vienna by accepting the directorship
of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
His years were now divided between
conducting and administrative duties in
America and composing in Europe—
an arduous existence in the days before
the jet plane. In 1909, he added the
music directorship of the New York
Philharmonic. Both institutions paid him
handsomely, but their wealthy patrons
bedeviled his existence with their demands,
and he found the Big Apple’s high-pressure
style—even a century ago—hard to bear.
Certainly, it was not the right place for a
man with a weak heart.
Nevertheless, when Mahler returned
to Toblach in the summer of 1909 for his
most intensive work on the Ninth, his
spirits were higher than they had been a
year earlier. He was more philosophical
about the imminence of death and yet
his passion for life was more intense than
ever. He wrote Alma: “I feel marvelous
here! To be able to sit working by the open
window and breathing the air, the trees
and flowers all the time—this is a delight
M AY– J U N 201 9 / OV E R T U R E
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