Mahler, Shostakovich

Putting together music by Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich in a single concert programme is logical, because there is an artistic kindship between the two composers. Shostakovich drew a great deal from Mahler and even said that „Mahler's works transformed his compositional taste“. 

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911) wrote his song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) in the years 1901–1904 on texts by Friedrich Rückert, who in a collection of poems of 1833/34 mourned the death of two of his children from scarlet fever.  Alma Mahler's memory of trying to persuade Gustav not to go ahead with his arrangement of Rückert's poems because she feared it would being down disaster on the family is often quoted.  In this cycle Mahler brought the art of working with individual bands of melody to the highest perfection, with the vocal and instrumental elements blending inseparably into each other. The songs were first performed on the 29^th of January 1905 at a concert of the Association of Creative Music Artists (Vereinigung der schaffenden Tonkünstler) in Vienna, with the soloist of the Vienna Court Opera Freidrich Weidemann taking the vocal part and the composer conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. In Prague the Kindertotenlieder was first performed on the 16^th of October 1907 at a Philharmonic Concert of the Orchestra of the New German Theatre, but in a piano arrangement: the soloist was the Dutch baritone Johannes Meschaert, accompanied on the piano by Otto Klemperer.  The first performance by Czech artists seems to have been on the 9^th of March 1913, when the soloist was  František Jelínek with the piano accompaniment by Otakar Ostrčil, while the orchestral version was first presented in Prague by Alexander Zemlinsky on the 20^th of March 1914 with the New German Theatre Orchestra and Alfons Schützendorf. In the context of specifically Czech concert life, the songs were first performed with orchetra on the 28^th of  February 1918 at a concert in the Smetana Hall; the soloist was the English singer Theo Drill-Orridge accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Karel Boleslav Jirák.

Mahler's influence on the symphonist DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) is evident from the very first of the latter's symphonies; all contain parodic elements that conceal a tragic note.  Shostakovich started to write his last Symphony no. 15 in A major, op. 141 in 1971 while in hospital. In September of the same year he wrote to his friend the Polish composer Krzystof Meyeri: „In the summer I managed to finish a symphony, the fifteenth. Probably I oughtn't to be composing, but I can't live without it. The symphony has four movements and contains literal quotations from Rossini. Wagner and Beethoven and in many respects it is directly influenced by Mahler.“ It is clear that the use of the quotations (and from these composers in particular) and reference to Mahler's influence had an inner reason in the symphony, but the composer did not disclose it.  We might guess that the quotation „prophecy of death“ from Wagner's Valkyrie is a foreboding of death (some days after writing this letter to his friend Shostakovich suffered his second heart attack), and the combination of the opening notes of Rossini's overture to William Tell with a twelve tone passage and bugle signals is a condensation of the development of music over the past century. The symphony was first performed on the 8^th of January 1972 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory by the Moscow Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer's son, Maxim Shostakovich.