The current season of the ROSS is based on three Mahler symphonies: this second one, but also the fifth and sixth, which will be performed in January and May, following the cycle of the seasons. It is inevitable to return to Mahler's famous statement: "A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.‘ The interpretation of this sanctuary of sound, with its transition from the shadow and pain of death to the most heavenly luminosity of an infinite choir, is the triumphal arch with which we begin a new stage for the orchestra that wants to ’contain everything."

Although Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) lived for little more than a decade of the 20th century, before rising beyond Pythagorean harmonies, he is the great composer of the turbulent last century and still of the unsettling present. ‘My time will come,’ he had announced after the cold reception of his symphonies when he was only recognised as the all-powerful conductor of the Vienna Opera. Norman Lebrecht explains the reason for his enduring relevance in his biography of the composer, Why Mahler? How one man and ten symphonies changed the world:

‘Mahler is a composer for today, a creator of music that interacts with what musicians and listeners feel in a changing and threatening world. He never preaches or prescribes, he speaks to us as a sensible, smiling and patient human being, always trying to decipher the meaning of life. Mahler lives. Here and now.’

Can a symphony change our world?

Musical literature abounds with testimonies from people whose lives have been changed by listening to this work, which has served as a mystical and symphonic baptism. In 1997, our orchestra performed it under the baton of the eccentric and quixotic millionaire Gilbert Kaplan (1941-2016), who made it his raison d'être after hearing it at the age of twenty-three: ‘I entered the hall as one person and left it as another.’ Kaplan not only studied musical direction to end up conducting more than fifty orchestras and signing the best-selling Mahler recording in history, but also acquired and edited the manuscript which, after his death, was auctioned in London for more than five million euros, doubling the amount paid for the originals of Mozart's nine symphonies.

The presence tonight of Hungarian soprano Emöke Baráth and Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo – who will announce the emergence of the human voice in the fourth movement, a prelude to the final chorus – is yet another incentive to enjoy a work that is eternal in its conception.

Oedipus complexes

Mahler began work on this score in 1888. The first movement, Totenfeier (“Funeral Rites”), was initially constructed as a symphonic poem and presented to the legendary conductor Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) – the father of modern conducting – who, covering his ears, exclaimed: 'If that is still music, then I no longer understand anything about music. Compared to this piece, Wagner's Tristan seems like a Haydn symphony." This comment, in which Mahler's unique complexity should not be overlooked, plunged our composer into a creative crisis that caused him to shelve the project. Years later, in 1894, during Bülow's funeral, Mahler would have the revelation that would lead him to complete his Second Symphony when he heard a chorale with lyrics by the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) Aufersteh'n (‘Resurrection’), which would give rise to the fifth movement, that immense hymn, a song of glory and celebration:

"To blossom again, you have been sown!

Oh believe it, my heart, believe it:

Nothing of you is lost!"

Thus, the symphony, conceived as a requiem for the hero – or ‘Titan’ – of his first instalment, was transformed into an altarpiece of jubilant souls, into a reverse requiem where, in Mahler's words: ‘A glorious sense of love penetrates us with the knowledge that we are saved’.

There has been no shortage of psychoanalytical assessments of the Oedipal nature of this symphony, revisited on the deathbed of a musical father. It was the spirit of his century. On 26 August 1910, a defeated Mahler underwent a long psychoanalytic session with Sigmund Freud, to whom he confessed his terrible fear of death (he had seen seven of his thirteen siblings die). ‘I had many opportunities to admire the psychological abilities of that brilliant man,’ wrote Herr Sigmund.

‘Where, O death, is your victory?’

This is how the Apostle of the Gentiles paraphrases the words of the prophet Hosea when proclaiming the Christian resurrection. However, Mahler, who had been baptised a Catholic in 1897 (perhaps because it was a necessary condition for accessing the podium of the Vienna Opera), avoided giving his music a doctrinal dimension, valid, in his desire for transcendence, for everyone:

"O pain! Thou who fillest all things!

I have escaped from you!

Oh death! You who subdue everything!

Now you have been subdued!"

Motivated by the critics' lack of enthusiasm and misunderstanding, Mahler clarified the meaning of each movement in a sort of programmatic script. Thus, after the funeral rites with which the symphony begins, where the composer asks himself the most serious questions, ‘What is this life and this death? Do we have an existence beyond?’, in the andante the composer recalls the sweetness of existence, which would be confronted in its most grotesque aspects in the scherzo. The music of this third movement comes from a lied from ‘The Magic Horn of Youth’, a compilation of popular texts to which Mahler returned time and again. In ‘Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish’, the anti-dogmatic character of the symphony is ironically manifested: after listening attentively to the saint's catechesis, the fish leave to do something else... Another lied from the abundant ‘magic horn’, Urlicht (‘primordial light’) illuminates the fourth movement, which exposes ‘the questions and struggles of the human soul for God’. This brings us to the fifth and final movement, about which the composer said: ‘The great crescendo that begins at this point is so tremendous and unimaginable that I myself do not know how I achieved it’.

What more can be added other than the heavenly choir that we are about to hear?

‘You will rise again, yes, you will rise again.’

José María Jurado García-Posada