Symphony No. 9 in D Major

No Mahler symphony offers a more intense spiritual and emotional journey than the Ninth. Mahler had always been preoccupied with death (how many of his symphonies don’t feature a funeral march?), but the traumatic loss of his daughter in 1907 and the subsequent diagnosis of a heart defect gave a new urgency to his confrontations with mortality. The Ninth Symphony swings between chilling encounters with death and a heightened sense of the heartbreaking beauty and fragility of life. Running through it all are echoes of the falling two-note “ewig” (“eternally”) figure from the recent song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde and the falling three-note motif from Beethoven’s piano sonata Les Adieux (The Farewell), which Mahler played as a student. The long first movement leads us through an astonishing range of emotions and textures, after which the initially robust, open-air, country-dance second comes as a shock, though it eventually turns manic and sinister. A tumultuous, harsh “Rondo” follows with, at its heart, a poignant section in which a trumpet aspires heavenward but fails. Then comes the astonishing “Adagio” finale, whose anguish and eventually hushed sadness is like watching the final agony and release of someone desperately loved. But is Mahler anticipating his own end or coming to terms with loss? A last-minute echo of the searing Kindertotenlieder seems to confirm the latter, but it could easily be both.