The British conductor Karel Mark Chichon, artistic director of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, was for six years the chief conductor of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern – the descendant of the Saarländischer Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester, the same one with which Stanisław Skrowaczewski recorded the complete symphonies of Anton Bruckner. During his first visit to Wrocław this season, Chichon will lead a performance of a work by a symphonic genius of the final phase of musical Romanticism – Gustav Mahler’s famous Symphony No. 2.
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.