It was described as “the first nihilist work in the history of music” by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. We look at the story behind Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.
“My Sixth seems to be yet another hard nut, one that our critics' feeble little teeth cannot crack”. It will “propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.”. So wrote Mahler in letters to the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg and the Austrian writer and musicologist Richard Specht respectively.
*****
Sign in to use alerts, your personal diary/wishlist, to save your recent searches, to comment on articles and reviews or if you want to input events.
Please fill in your email address, then click on one of the two buttons.
