Mahler’s sixth symphony is one of great contrast. Although written at an incredibly happy period of his life, the work itself is mostly dark. Mahler firmly believed in an artist’s ability to predict or even influence future events, and the Sixth, his most personal work, is also a prophetic one. The three blows of the epic hammer are said to represent the three great blows that came to Mahler after the premiere: the death of his child, the diagnosis of his heart condition, and his forced resignation from the Vienna Opera. “No other work flowed so directly from his heart as this one,” wrote his wife Alma. “We both cried at the time; we felt so deeply what this music meant, what it forebodingly told us.”
The Sixth is a tour-de-force, an intense eighty minutes of music performed by a large scale orchestra where every detail, from the smallest, gentlest moment to the largest crash of the hammer is intensely thought through.
