Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Symphony No. 6 in A minor ‘Tragic’
Essen Philharmonic Orchestra
Tomáš Netopil, conductor
Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was written between 1903
and 1904, mostly in Vienna, during a period of professional
success and private happiness. But musically the ‘Tragic’,
as the symphony is sometimes called, seems like a bizarre
reversal of Mahler’s life events and an anticipation of future
tragedies: the death of a daughter, the diagnosis of Mahler’s
heart disease, and his profound occupational crisis at the
Vienna Court Opera. They would soon bring to an abrupt
end Mahler’s short spell of good fortune.
In retrospect, these three strokes of fate were identified
with the famous hammer blows of the final movement. Alma
Mahler wrote in her memoirs to the symphony: “No work
has flowed from his heart so directly. The Sixth is his most
personal work and a prophetic one on top of that.”
In mid-May 2019, Essen’s general music director Tomáš
Netopil conducted the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra
in two acclaimed performances of the Sixth Symphony.
The work was performed almost exactly 113 years earlier,
on 27 May 1906, by the same orchestra under the
composer’s direction.