
Mahler — a rollercoaster of emotions
I started listening to Mahler’s 1st symphony around 1996 or 97 on a CD my dad had. It didn’t make any sense to me at first but after a while I grew to love it — the open, expansive ‘spring’ of the opening, and especially the storm of the last movement.
By co-incidence, one of my 2 A-level music teachers told us it would be our Set Work so we had to study the score, musical motifs (the perfect 4th of the 1st movement which then appears as a ‘cuckoo’, the 5 ascending notes), historical context, story of its composition including the removal of one of the 5 movements, in more detail.
As Jeff Quigley put it, the 2nd Symphony is “really chilling in parts and then lifts you up and tears you apart all over again. Stunning. It’s like a rollercoaster of emotions that leaves you breathless at the end”.
I went to see / hear a performance of it at the Royal Albert Hall in London around 18 months ago with Paula & Fabiana Chávez, mostly-blind twin sisters who live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whilst they were over here to perform some classical music on the piano together, and I was in tears at the end of it.
I gradually fell in love with his other symphonies as well — the 2nd (Resurrection, after the ‘funeral’ of the 1st), 6th (the one with a hammer), 7th.
The 8th ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ — so-called because that’s how big the orchestra & choir should be, is operatic in scope and use of text from Goethe’s Faust.
The 9th is epic in duration and orchestral scale.
‘Lied von der Erde’ (Song of the Earth), a kind of 10th symphony in all but name [he started composing a 10th Symphony but died before he completed it] is a kind of orchestral song cycle, with the last of the 6 movements/songs — ‘the farewell’ — being about half an hour long — as long as the previous 5 together.
I love the emotional journey music takes me on. Why do YOU love music?

