Mahler 6

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is a deeply tragic work in the truest sense of the word. Strangely, at the time when he was writing it, his personal life was very happy. When he finished the symphony, he played it for Alma at the piano, and at a certain moment, in the slow movement, I think, Alma burst into tears and said: “How can you write something like that when we are so happy?” Soon afterwards, their daughter died, and Mahler was diagnosed with an incurable heart disease. But at the time when he wrote the symphony, there was no hint of this in his private or family life.

Alma recalled the composing of the Sixth Symphony as follows: “When Gustav finished the draft of the first movement, he came to tell me that he had tried to capture me in it. ‘I don’t know how well I have done, but you will have to put up with it.’ He had in mind the soaring theme of the first movement in F major. Then in the scherzo he captured the arrhythmic playing of two little children tottering in zigzags over the sand. Like a premonition of evil, the children’s voices gradually become tragic, and finally they are extinguished with a cry. In the last movement he described himself and his downfall, or as he said later, the fall of a hero. ‘It is a hero who is struck by three blows of fate, the last of which fells him like a tree,’ he said. None of his other works came so directly from his heart as this one. We both wept that day. The music itself and what it foretold moved us deeply...”

Semyon Bychkov