Daniel Barenboim conducts Mahler

In his 60 years of working with the Philharmoniker, Daniel Barenboim has not yet performed the music of Gustav Mahler. That is now to change: he will be conducting two late works, beginning with the expressive Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony. Anguished melancholy prevails here, as in Das Lied von der Erde. Somewhere between a song cycle and a symphony, Mahler called it at the time “probably the most personal thing I have done so far”.

Gustav Mahler began his Tenth Symphony at a time when he found out about his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius – largely because Gropius “accidentally” addressed one of his numerous love letters directly to him. What followed was a major crisis, which left its mark on Mahler’s Tenth. The Adagio, the only completed movement, consistently leads towards a catastrophe – with a glaringly dissonant nine-note chord, from which the trumpet screams out an A, as in Alma.

After this piece describing a catastrophe, in which loneliness and farewell to the world are inscribed alongside sadness and pain, the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, turn their attention to another of Mahler’s late works: Das Lied von der Erde, which was composed two years before the incomplete Tenth. Mahler’s life was already unravelling at that time: his elder daughter had died of diphtheria, and he himself had been diagnosed with a serious heart valve defect. In his Lied von der Erde after Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, the composer wrote a poignant symphony with alto and tenor voices that focuses on the finite nature of human existence. In the fading last movement Der Abschied, all that remains is “earthly eternity”, the continuation of nature that Mahler loved so much, reaching beyond the death of the individual.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Daniel Barenboim

Dorottya Láng

Benjamin Bruns