5. Symphony Concert

Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 6 a-minor

Although Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony was written at a time of his great successes as Viennese opera director, it is the most sombre of his symphonies. His wife Alma recalled the day Mahler played the Sixth for her on the piano for the first time: "No work has flowed so directly from his heart as this one. We were both crying at the time. We felt so deeply about that music because of what it foreshadowed. The Sixth is his most personal work and a prophetic one at that". The legendary blows of the hammer in the finale symbolized for Mahler those fatalistic strokes of fate that cut down the imaginary hero of his symphony. They seem like a ghostly premonition of his own fate: In 1907, only a year after the premiere, the death of his elder daughter Maria Anna plunged him into a serious crisis. He was subsequently diagnosed with heart disease, from which he was to die four years later. In his Sixth Symphony Mahler vividly describes the inevitability of fate and the brutality of life’s reality, to which he felt a victim all throughout his life. The monumental work will be performed in this symphony concert under the baton of Nicola Luisotti, who has been closely associated with the Staatsoper Stuttgart since his debut in 2001. Luisotti also shaped the San Francisco Opera for several years as music director.