Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is a metaphysical journey from the depths of human suffering to the heights of celestial ecstasy – with everything in between.

 

    As soon as Mahler finished his First Symphony, he started work on a huge orchestral funeral march. He called it Totenfeier (Funeral Rites), yet this new music wasn’t a stand-alone tone poem. Right from the start Mahler intended this funeral march to be the first movement of a new symphony; the question was, how to finish it?

    Mahler wrote the original version of this first movement in 1888 and sketched a few bars of a second movement, then stopped. It seemed as if he had reached a crisis as to how to proceed. His creative drive came to a standstill for five years – the only such break in his composing life. Mahler was still only 28, yet in his music he was grappling with mighty and eternal questions of life and death, in music which was...