When the Swiss conductor Thierry Fischer was asked in 2023 to choose the repertoire for his farewell concert as music director of the Utah Symphony Orchestra, he picked Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. Now serving as director of the Brazilian Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo and the Spanish Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, he was ending his collaboration with the Utah, which had had a special relationship with Mahler. The musicians from Salt Lake City were the first in the United States to record a complete cycle of Mahler’s symphonies, and next, under Fischer’s direction, they carried out a special two-year programme of presenting the complete Mahler symphonies. In Wrocław, under Fischer’s baton, the famous Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” will be performed.

Mahler completed the laborious six-year process of composing his Symphony No. 2 one-hundred and thirty years ago – in 1894. The first ideas for this piece arose when he was finishing The First Symphony “Titan”. At that time we was already drafting the symphonic poem Totenfeier. He thought of it either as an independent work or as one of the movements of another symphony. However, the composition was maliciously criticised by the famous conductor Hans von Bülow, a student of Liszt, and in consequence Mahler postponed work on Totenfeier for two years. When he returned to it and decided that he would use the score in his next symphony, the one who contributed to the completion of the work was (although from beyond the grave) von Bülow. When Mahler was looking for a text that he could use in the finale of his Second, he heard the hymn Die Auferstehung by the Romantic poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock at the von Bülow’s funeral. It was a breakthrough. “I was like struck by lightning. Everything has now become clear and pure for my soul,” he wrote.

Mahler added his own text to Klopstock’s stanzas, devoting the monumental ending to meditation on death, God’s love and the idea of the afterlife. To introduce words into his symphony, following in the footsteps of Beethoven’s Ninth, he added vocal parts in its finale – two soloists and a choir. The finale also gained a short introduction in the landler rhythm – before the era of the waltz, the most popular Austrian folk dance. The composer, using a text from the collection of German folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn, expressed his simple trust in the Supreme. Thanks to Mahler’s letters to his friends and the programme of one of the early performances, we know that the first three, purely instrumental movements of the work were also intended to illustrate the struggle with existential issues – moments filled with dilemmas, doubt and regret for lost youth. The premiere of the work in Berlin on December 13, 1895, was the first major success of Mahler the composer, previously appreciated primarily for his conducting.