Abschied (Farewell): with this single word, Principal Conductor Daniele Gatti encapsulates the third part of the Staatskapelle Dresden’s first Mahler cycle. Three closely related works will be performed in the 2026/27 season: the Sixth Symphony, the Tenth symphony (in the performing version by Deryck Cooke) and »Das Lied von der Erde«. Together with the Ninth Symphony, which will be heard in Dresden in the autumn of 2027, they form Mahler’s late oeuvre, which is both a laboratory to explore a new musical language and the result of profound reflection on the transience of life. The composer did not intend to create a kind of Requiem (Mahler detested definitive labels) with these works but rather wished to examine the process of leave-taking. The fact that these three symphonic works are not performed chronologically this season reflects their internal logic: for Mahler, saying goodbye is not a linear process.
Initially, however, the composer attempted to circumvent in his creative process the symphonic numbering system: after his Eighth, he feared the »curse of the Ninth«. For this reason, he did not call his next work a »symphony« but rather a »song«. Nevertheless, what emerged was in fact a »Symphony for Tenor, Alto and Orchestra« – not a hybrid of two different genres but a brilliant fusion. For the composer, every bar of the new work contained elements of the symphony and the song cycle; and for that reason, the result was »much more than either of them could ever be.«
Bruno Walter, Mahler’s friend and an important early interpreter of his work, went even further: for him, »Das Lied von der Erde« was a creation sub specie mortis – a »self-work« of unprecedented immediacy, in which every word set to music was an intimate expression of Mahler. The music reveals itself from an existential perspective: not »I am dying« but: »the world is becoming strange to me.«
In Mahler’s world, this strangeness is never silent: it is sound and friction. The human voice becomes an instrumental timbre within the web of orchestral parts; the text becomes musical material, opening up vast fields of association. Yet Mahler remains a symphonist, working with great formal tension and a motivic core that runs through every movement like a golden thread. This is clearly revealed in the finale, »Der Abschied« (The Farewell). There is a kind of musical disintegration as the score thins out and turns chamber-like in its nakedness, until only an open question remains.
Finally, the Tenth poses the question that lies behind everything: what follows the pain of this world? Unlike the Ninth, this work is shot through with raw biographical rage. In 1910, Mahler’s marital crisis reached its climax: Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius came to light, leading to the composer’s breakdown. This period saw his famous consultation with Sigmund Freud and a final phase of manic productivity. Through the sketches, we see the score as both a diary and a cry for help: »Have pity!«, »You alone know what it means«, »To live for you! / To die for you!«.
Musically, everything culminates in a nine-note dissonant chord that jumps out of the work like a piercing shriek. From a sustained A in the violins (»Alma«), the sound swells into this nine-tone sonic fusion (beside which Mahler noted: »Thy will be done«). Here, the farewell is not merely a leave-taking from the world, but first and foremost the attempt to release oneself from all sense of ownership or being owned. But why the performing version of the Tenth by Deryck Cooke? Because this edition approaches Mahler’s intentions with an avowed restraint – as a tentative search rather than a definitive completion. Even a long-sceptical Alma eventually recognised the quality of Cooke’s work, which does not »close« the Tenth rather opens it up.
When it comes to final arguments, the last movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is in many respects the most dramatic and enigmatic of them all. Although the work was composed many years before »Das Lied von der Erde« and the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies, it anticipates the tragic context in which these »farewell works« were written. In contrast to those later pieces, the Sixth Symphony is strictly classical in its structure, yet contains a profoundly personal, existential narrative. Following its martial opening, the relentless intensity is interrupted by occasional moments of bucolic calm, as well as poignant love motifs and traces of folk melodies. These worlds collide in the closing movement, which represents a struggle for the soul of the artist. The ending is bleak, yet precious life is not surrendered without resistance. In many ways, the Sixth Symphony marks the beginning of the end – the long farewell that traces Mahler’s journey from earthly sorrow to eternal transcendence.
The ordering of these three masterpieces within the concert season reveals a multi-layered dramaturgy: farewell is not a point in time but a path. It travels from the relinquishing of symphonic form in the Ninth, through the biographical dislocation of the Tenth, to the final broadening of perspective in »Das Lied von der Erde«. Here, the world and the self are cast adrift. There is no final movement that explains everything – only Mahler’s constant striving to pare back the monumental, to thin it out, and to render it vulnerable. Leave-taking thus becomes a way of life. To follow this path with Daniele Gatti is to hear more than just three late works; it is to hear a single, kaleidoscopic valediction: to the world, to art, and to an era.
Hagen Kunze
