Kirill Petrenko with Mahler’s Ninth

Alban Berg considered the first movement of the Ninth to be “the most glorious thing” Mahler wrote: “It is the expression of an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature. The longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one’s being, before death comes, as irresistibly it does.” Bruno Walter, Mahler’s long-time friend, former colleague at the Viennese Hofoper and conductor of the work’s posthumous premiere, described its opening movement as “a tragically moving and noble paraphrase of the feeling of farewell. A unique soaring between the sadness of farewell and a vision of Heavenly Light.”

However, Mahler follows the first movement with two movements in which everything that has gone before is radically called into question: in the second movement, which has demonic and grotesque traits, the minuet, waltz and Ländler are distorted as if in a concave mirror. Finally, the seemingly aimlessly circling music culminates in a danse macabre in which the violins (similar to the solo violin in the Dance of Death scherzo of the Fourth) are required to play “like fiddles”. With the Rondo-Burleske, the third movement, a fast march follows, whose quirky character turns increasingly aggressive. The final movement with its countless funereal ciphers, culminating in a disintegrating ritardando, seems almost testamentary. Based on the title of a movement in Mahler’s Third, the music writer Paul Bekker had a fitting heading for this finale: “What death tells me”.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Kirill Petrenko