Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 – Düsseldorfer Symphoniker & Ádám Fischer

The 2nd Symphony is a piece on which Mahler worked for a very long time. The first drafts of the first movement, which at that time was still called “Todtenfeier”, were written before the composition of the 1st Symphony, the last one he wrote only seven years later. Bringing the individual movements into a unity is a completely different task than with the First. It helps me to think of the symphony as a process that one has to go through. From the funeral service with its mood of mourning to hope and redemption. Basically, the Second is like an emotional opera that can’t be described with a concrete story, but with the thoughts of a person at and after a funeral. In this sense, it occurred to me that the movements of the symphony belong together much more than one first thinks, and perhaps more than Mahler himself thought. There is a clear caesura here: from the fourth movement, the “Urlicht”, the music moves to a completely different, new level. I feel this moment very similarly to the introductory “O Freunde” in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth … (Adam Fischer)