Luogo e data di registrazione		Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland (USA) - aprile 1998
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producers		Dr. Marion Thiem / Roger Wright
	Recording Producer		Christian Gansch
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Ulrich Vette
	Recording Engineer		Reinhard Lagemann
	Editing		Johannes Müller
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 463 257-2 - (1 CD) - durata 53' 32" - (p) 2000 - DDD
	Note		Cover: August Macke, Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn.

In February 1892, after 18 totally unproductive months, Mahler abandoned his already wellestablisbed habit of composing only during the summer months and, even though the Hamburg opera season was still in full swing, began writing music again. To his sister, who had just sent him Arnim`s and Brentano’s three-volume anthology of poetry he wrote in a vein of newfound self-eonfidence: "I now have the Wunderhorn in my hands. With that self-knowledge which is natural to creators, I can add that once again the result will be worthwhile!" Within barely a month Mahler had completed four "Humoresques" for voice and orchestra that were later to form part of his much larger collection of orchestral Wunderhorn songs. The fifth "Humoresque", Das Himmlische Leben, was initially intended to form part of the monumental Third Symphony (1895-96). But Mahler became conscious of the exceptional wealth of material that the song contained and decided to use it as the final movement of another symphony, which likewise was initially described as a "humoresque". In this way, Das himmlische Leben became the culmination ofthe new work for which Mahler first drew up a sort of synopsis of the different movements: 1. Die Welt als ewige Jetztzeit (The World as Eternal Present). in G major 2. Das irdische Leben (Earthly Life), in E flat minor 3. Caritas (Adagio), in B major 4. Morgenglocken (Morning Bells), in F major 5. Die Welt ohne Schwere (The World without Gravity), in D major (Scherzo) 6. Das himmlische Leben (Heavenly Life), in G major This plan was to develop considerably: Morgenglocken was taken over into the Third Symphony, Das irdische Leben was taken up into the collection of orchestral Wunderorn settings, while the Scherzo in D major is undoubtedly identical to the movement that Mahler later inserted into his Fifth Symphony. The Adagio of the present symphony might well have originally been subtitled “Caritas”, but it is in G major, not B major. Not only was it rare for Mahler to change the tonality of a movement once it had been planned, but the same title was to reappear several years later in the initial outline of the Eighth Symphony. It was in July 1899 that Mahler began work on the actual symphony, at Aussee, a small spa in the Salzkarnmergut. The final weeks of his vacation there were spent in a state of feverish activity - his powers of musical invention became increasingly fertile as the fateful hour of his return to Vienna approached. On his many long walks he carried a sketchbook with him. but after his return to Vienna he put the sketches from his mind until the next summer. The following year, 1900, Mahler arrived in a state of exhaustion and depression at his new summer house in Maiernigg, a tiny village on the Wörthersee in Carinthia; but as soon as he reimmersed himself in the previous year’s sketches, he realized to his amazement that throughout his long period of creative inactivity a "second self" had been working unconsciously. As a result, the work was far more advanced than it had been when he broke off the previous year, so that the Fourth Symphony could now be completed in record time - only a little over three weeks. Mahler put the finishing touches to the manuscript on 6 August 1900. Beside himself with happiness, he could not stop talking about his work and commenting on it to his closest friends, underlining the unprecedented complexity of the polyphonic writing and his elaborate handling of the development sections. Whereas, in the case of his earlier symphonies, Mahler had provided his listeners with explanatory introductions, or at least given titles to their individual movements, listeners to the Fourth Symphony were not provided with a text of any kind, except for the poem set to music in the final movement. What, then, was he trying to express in his new work? In 1901 he described the Adagio, with its "divinely gay and deeply sad" melody, in the following terms: "St. Ursula herself, the most serious of all the saints, presides with a smile. Somewhat later he compared the whole work to a primitive painting, with a gold background, and described the final movement in particular: “When man, now full of wonder, asks what all this means, the child answers him with the fourth movement: 'This is Heavenly life'.” 1. Bedächtig. Nicht eilen - Recht gemächlich (Deliberately. Unhurriedly - Very leisurely) A few bars of introduction, in which the flutes and sleighbells predominate, lead into the first movement proper. The initial ascending theme, typically Viennese in character, belongs to a larger family of similar melodies in Mahler's works; it is followed shortly by a second theme on the lower strings that is as calm as it is pastoral in nature. But such simplicity is soon belied by a development section in which the different motifs are combined, linked together, transformed and inextricably intertwined or, in the words of Erwin Stein, “shuffled like a pack of cards”. 2. In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast (At a leisurely pace. Unhurriedly) A shadow hangs over this Scherzo in ländler rhythm: the shrill sound of a retuned violin (each of its strings is tuned a whole tone higher) invests these pages with a suggestion of parody, although it is clear by the end of the movement that, as Mahler himself explained, “it wasn't meant so seriously after all”. Originally, Mahler had headed this movement: “Death strikes tip the dance for us; she scrapes her fiddle bizarrely and leads tis up to heaven.” 3. Ruhevoll (Calm). Poco Adagio With the third movement we penetrate to the essence of Mahler`s music and, one could almost say, of his soul. No other composer writing in the Beethovenian tradition could have created music so serene, so serious and so profound. Mahler was right to remark that this movement “laughs and cries at the same time”, since the opening theme, motionless and meditative with its passacaglia bass, is followed by a second theme that is openly anguished in character. What follows are two distinct groups of variations on the main theme separated by a return of the second, anguished, theme. The coda, which is in E major, announces the principal motif of the final movement, its sudden modulation unleashing the symphony's only genuinely loud tutti and throwing open the gates of perhaps the only paradise accessible to the living - the naive paradise of childhood and popular imagery. 4. Sehr behaglich (Very contentedly) In the Wunderhorn poem Das himmlische Leben, Heaven's bucolic pleasures - musical and, above all, gastronomic - are described and catalogued with a verve, enthusiasm and precision that delighted Mahler. He enjoined the soprano soloist to adopt "a joyful, childlike expression completely devoid of parody". His contemporaries found this naivety singularly false and affected. To today's listeners it seems inconceivable that this lovely song, so fresh and pure and so astonishingly rich in melodic invention, should have been so badly received by almost all its early audiences. The luminous, radiant, sublime coda in E major - “heavenly” music if ever there was - leaves us wholly convinced that "no music on earth can compare with that of the heavenly spheres". In writing the Fourth Symphony, Mahler hoped to offer his contemporaries a work that would be both shorter and more accessible than his previous symphonies. He dispensed with vast orchestral forces and, in particular, with trombones, forcing himself to invest the writing with the clarity, economy and transparency plainly demanded by the subject-matter of the symphony. The symphony received its first performance in Munich on 25 November 1901 under the composer’s own direction. The audience, expecting another titanic work from a composer noted for his love of monumentality, could not believe their ears. Such innocence and naivety could only be more posturing on his part, they felt, not to say an example of deliberate mystification. The performance was roundly booed. Shortly afterwards, Felix Weingartner conducted the work in Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Mahler himself conducted the first performances in Berlin and Vienna. On each occasion he was accused of "posing insoluble problems", "amusing himself by using thematic material alien to his nature", "taking pleasure in shattering the eardrums of his audiences with atrocious and unimaginable cacophonies" and of being incapable of writing anything other than stale and insipid music, lacking in style and melody, music which, artificial and hysterical, was a “medley” of "symphonic cabaret acts”. History teaches us that many great composers were similarly reviled by their contemporaries. Yet it must be admitted that a paradox lay at the heart of the Fourth Symphony: the contrast between the reassuring surface and the compositional tcchnique beneath it was bound to be disconcerting. Behind the deliberate simplicity and relatively modest orchestration lie a wealth of invention, a polyphonic density and a concentration of musical ideas: an almost dizzying complexity and a technical sophistication that are without precedent in Mahler`s oeuvre. For its time, the Fourth Symphony was an avant-garde work, a form of self-discovery for the composer himself, which brought an entirely unexpected evolution in his style towards greater rigour and concentration. In his "return to Haydn", Mahler certainly borrowed traditional formulas from the past, but he enriched and transformed them constantly, with inexhaustible imagination. Nor has his “irrational and unreasonable gaiety” anything counterfeit about it. The prevailing mood is that of an affectionate nostalgia for better times, for an "age of innocence", yet another reason why the Fourth Symphony remains the most authentically Viennese of all Mahler`s works. Henry-Louis de La Grange