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In 2016, the  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) invited 150 of the world’s leading conductors to vote for what they considered the greatest symphonies ever written. Beethoven and Brahms — not surprisingly— had two each in the top ten. But three of those places were occupied by Gustav Mahler.

Chicago seems to be experiencing  the  year of Mahler.

In February Klaus Makela led the Chicago Symphony through a spellbinding Fifth Symphony.

This week Jakob Hrusa wowed the audience at Symphony Hall with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

More are coming to our city. In October Mahler’s First Symphony will be heard. In March of next year Mahler’s Fourth Symphony will continue the festival, followed by Mahler’s Second  (Resurrection) Symphony in May.

To fully appreciate the Mahler mania gripping our city, and indeed the world, one might check out some new books about the Czech Genius.

A fine one volume biography would be Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer.

But first begin with a general treatment of composers to see Mahler in historical perspective. The Language of the Spirit by Jan Swafford offers many insights to his work:

• “In his person Gustav Mahler was one of the most tormented of composers, feeling from beginning to end like a stranger in the world, and his music was made in his own image. But sorrow is only one of the notes in the rich fabric of his art, which ranges from the childlike to the despairing, the earnest to the sardonic.

• “From early on Gustav was obsessed with music, especially Czech folk music and the military marches he heard in the street. For him this music seemed to resonate with his feelings and his sorrows, and he never lost that sense of it.”
• “He was a convert to Christianity. Mahler was not raised religiously, and in the next years his music was full of Christian imagery.
• “Leonard Bernstein said, “Ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its spiritual prophet.” He saw it through the lens of his own joy and suffering, but he was singing of universal themes that will never lose their resonance. “
• A more recent book offers an exciting looks at Mahler himself:
• David Vernon’s Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies should hook you into the Bohemian maestro.
  • “Mahler would famously, and with some justification, claim to be thrice homeless: as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. He was, he said, always an intruder, an outsider, never welcomed or greeted warmly, facing lifelong suspicion and resentment from the powerful, the insecure and the unimaginative. His music, too, would intrude upon the sensibilities and consciences of the world, infringing on proprieties of style and scale, content and clarity.”
• “In 1901, at the height of his powers, he suffered an intestinal hemorrhage, brought on through overwork. One Sunday he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a Bruckner symphony in the afternoon and Mozart at the Opera in the evening. It was all too much, and his body rebelled. Recuperating, he resigned from the Philharmonic (though he would remain an important guest conductor), “
• “Mahler saw so much beauty and sadness in the world that it hurt. It was often more than he could bear, unhappiness remembering happiness, nature mending and dying, transience and eternity squabbling. Yet he was able to communicate those feelings to us, in breathtakingly subtle, complex and powerful ways, through music,”
• “He uses the symphony to explore the richness, the difficulty, the sorrow and the splendour of human existence. He investigates youthful idealism and tragic reality, the mysteries of life and the certainties of death, the exquisiteness of a sunrise and terror of infinite nothingness…His music is restless, ecstatic, menacing and wry, often bending time and possibility but constructed from a profound understanding of technique, procedure and history. “

The 9^th Symphony

Mahler wrote the Ninth at age 48. It was his last completed symphony.  Fellow Czech Jakob Hrusa took the baton to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa is one of the most animated conductors you will ever see, at times resembling Leonard Bernstein . And like Bernstein Hrusa seems to be channeling the lifetime of experiences Mahler has committed to music. A stunned audience sat in silence as the work ended, only to leap to its feet in wild appreciation.

• “The whole work is based on the conflict between these four elements — death, desolation, ecstasy and acceptance — and it is crucial we see it as a symphony which celebrates life as much as it dreads death. Mahler’s last completed symphony is a marvellously constructed network of agony and longing, mockery and veneration, resilience and resignation, “
• “It stares death in the face and refuses to blink, while searing suffering onto the inner ear. It yearns for lost time and lost love. It sometimes seems obsessed with the past, with memory, with a fervid desire to project all history, both personal and universal, musical and non-musical, into infinity.”
• Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies by David Vernon
  • “Mahler had always been a slightly troubled soul, since his adolescence aware of and intimidated by death, often to the point of obsession, and this had been intensified by the death of his daughter and diagnosis of his heart complaint.
  • “For Alban Berg, the Ninth’s first movement was the greatest single thing Mahler ever wrote, music saturated with the forewarning of death, which arises again and again, culminating in ‘the colossal passage where premonition becomes certainty — where, in the midst of the most profoundly anguished joy in life, death itself is announced “with the greatest violence”.’ Yet Berg knew, too, that the Ninth, like Das Lied von der Erde before it, expressed 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. The final adagio of the Ninth can be regarded as a harrowing requiem but also — and perhaps simultaneously — as a hymn of affirmation, though pained by resignation. With this view, it takes a long, loving but final look back across the entirety of existence, essentially calm and full of grace for the life”
  • “Mahler does not want to end in emptiness and dejection, and the last movement of the Ninth is commandeered by a hymn-like adagio, where the finale’s theme overcomes its parodic mistreatment and expresses itself fully and magnificently. The main string theme sings out its magnificent, yearning hymn to the wonders of life and the glories of existence. It is now too powerful and determined to be interrupted by squeaking clarinets or cut down by sniping oboes. It seems to gather together all the fragments of confidence, joy and optimism that have existed across the whole stormy course of the symphony, fusing them together to forge a new perspective of affirmation and resilience, surging ahead with an unwavering strength.”
  • “In 1901, at the height of his powers, he suffered an intestinal haemorrhage, brought on through overwork. One Sunday he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a Bruckner symphony in the afternoon and Mozart at the Opera in the evening. It was all too much, and his body rebelled. Recuperating, he resigned from the Philharmonic (though he would remain an important guest conductor), “
  • “Mahler saw so much beauty and sadness in the world that it hurt. It was often more than he could bear, unhappiness remembering happiness, nature mending and dying, transience and eternity squabbling. Yet he was able to communicate those feelings to us, in breathtakingly subtle, complex and powerful ways, through music,
  • “He uses the symphony to explore the richness, the difficulty, the sorrow and the splendour of human existence. He investigates youthful idealism and tragic reality, the mysteries of life and the certainties of death, the exquisiteness of a sunrise and terror of infinite nothingness…His music is restless, ecstatic, menacing and wry, often bending time and possibility but constructed from a profound understanding of technique, procedure and history. “
  • “The whole work is based on the conflict between these four elements — death, desolation, ecstasy and acceptance — and it is crucial we see it as a symphony which celebrates life as much as it dreads death. Mahler’s last completed symphony is a marvellously constructed network of agony and longing, mockery and veneration, resilience and resignation, “
  • “It stares death in the face and refuses to blink, while searing suffering onto the inner ear. It yearns for lost time and lost love. It sometimes seems obsessed with the past, with memory, with a fervid desire to project all history, both personal and universal, musical and non-musical, into infinity.”
  • “Mahler does not want to end in emptiness and dejection, and the last movement of the Ninth is commandeered by a hymn-like adagio, where the finale’s theme overcomes its parodic mistreatment and expresses itself fully and magnificently. The main string theme sings out its magnificent, yearning hymn to the wonders of life and the glories of existence. It is now too powerful and determined to be interrupted by squeaking clarinets or cut down by sniping oboes. It seems to gather together all the fragments of confidence, joy and optimism that have existed across the whole stormy course of the symphony, fusing them together to forge a new perspective of affirmation and resilience, surging ahead with an unwavering strength.”

Mahler was mocked and ridiculed for converting to Christianity. His compatriots saw the act as a careerist move to secure the leadership of Vienna’s philharmonic and opera, But those friends who knew of his almost pathological fear of death believed him to be sincere in wanting  a resurrection after death through Jesus Christ, who had defeated death through death itself.

The final movement of his 9^th Symphony is as close as mortals can come to experiencing vicariously the glorious, yet gentle, resurrection for which Maher yearned