Luogo e data di registrazione		Grosser Saal, Musikverein, Vienna (Austria) - maggio 1994
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Roger Wright
	Associate Producer		Ewald Markl
	Recording Producer		Werner Mayer
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Rainer Maillard
	Recording Engineers		Reinhild Schmidt / Stephan Flock
	Editing		Mark Buecker
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 445 835-2 - (1 CD) - durata 79' 22" - (p) 1995 - 4D DDD
	Note		Cover: Alberto Magnelli, Lyric Explosion no. 7, 1918 (Detail), Firenze, Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti.

In Mahler`s Fifth Symphony, the journey taken by thc imaginary hero had seemed relatively straightforward. leading, as it does, from the opening Funeral March to the joyful Rondo-Finale: a case, quite clearly, of per aspera ad astra. In the Sixth Symphony, by contrast, the grim determination and aggression of the opening movement are merely emphasized in the final Allegro moderato which, nevertheless, ends on a note of defeat, the bitterness of which is altogether unalloyed. Such deleatism and bitterness are all the more surprising in that there was nothing in Mahler’s life at this time that appears to justify such black-hued pessimism. Unfortunately, very little information is available on the actual composition of the Sixth Symphony since, unlike his close friend and confidante, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Alma Mahler was never a particularly scrupulous observer of her husband`s creative life. By dint of cross-checking, however, it can be established that Mahler - newly married and the father of a little daughter - arrived at Maiernigg on 10 June 1903 and set to work without delay. Alma recalls that he returned from his Häuschen (composing hut) one day and told her that he had tried to express her in a theme. “Whether I’ve succeeded, I don’t know; but you'll have to put tip with it." The theme in question is one of the few “positive” gestures in the work: it is the second subject of the opening movement, an ascending and descending line in the major, energetic and wilful, over which Mahler has written the word "Schwungvoll" (with vigour) in the full score. At the end of August, when he returned to Vienna, he had already completed the two middle movements in short score and had undoubtedly sketched the first. At the beginning of the following summer (1904), Alma's arrival in Maiernigg was delayed by more than two weeks since she had still not recovered from the birth of her second daughter, Anna (known as "Gucki"). Throughout the whole of June, heaven and earth seemed to conspire to prevent Mahler from resuming work on the score. The weather on the Wörthersee was appalling during these long days of solitude and forced inactivity: the sky was overcast, with frequent storms and torrential rain. The anxious feeling that so often assailed him, namely, that the wellspring of his art had run dry, continued to obsess him, while he attempted to "pick up the pieces of his inner sell". By early July, the weather improved, but suddenly the heat became unbearable. Incapable of supporting it a moment longer, Mahler rewarded himself for the completion of his song cycle Kindertotenlieder and treated himself to a lightning tour of the Dolomites until such time as Alma arrived. And it was among the ragged peaks of the Sextener Dolomites that he finally found the inner drive and inspiration that allowed him to finish his new symphony. By the end of August, when he was preparing to return to Vienna, Mahler was able to announce the completion of the Sixth Symphony to his friends Guido Adler and Bruno Walter. However brief the phrases, they were heavy with evident pride. To all appearances, the summer of 1904 was the most peaceful of all the summers that he spent in Carinthia. How, then, can we explain the fact that it was at precisely this time that he wrote the most tragic of all his works? According to Alma he later recognized in the three hammer blows of the final movement a premonition of the three blows of fate that were to fall on him in 1907: the death of his elder daughter, the diagnosis of a potentially dangerous heart condition and his departure from Vienna. In comparison to that of its predecessors, the four-movement form of the Sixth Symphony might appear to represent a return to Classical norms. The Fifda, after all, had been in five movements, the Third in six. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the new work surpasses all that Mahler had previously written in terms of its boldness and the dimensions of its final movement. In May 1906, during the rehearsals preceding the world première at Essen, Mahler had doubts concerning the order of the two middle movements. Initially, the order was Allegro, Scherzo, Andante and Finale. It was, however, at Essen that Mahler probably allowed himself to be influenced by a number of his friends, who pointed out the striking similarity between the opening of the Scherzo and that of the initial Allegro. A few months later, in January 1907, he decided to revert to the original order. These hesitations and changes of mind on numerous points of detail and even on a matter as important as the order of the movements are confirmed by Mahler`s contemporaries. As was so often the case, Mahler felt, while writing the Sixth Symphony, that he was the instrument of a power greater than himself. On this occasion, however, that power was mysterious, tragic and implacable, plunging him into a state of insurmountable anguish. What is this power with which Mahler’s symphonic heroes are forced to contend and to which they often succumb, as is the case at the end ofthe Sixth Symphony? It is a struggle that Mahler himself had to face, as he made clear in a striking remark when, following the final rehearsal, one of his friends asked him: “But how can someone who is so good express so much cruelty and harshness in his work?” To which he replied: “They are the cruelties I’ve suffered and the pains I’ve felt!” Every work of art worthy of the name must satisfy two contradictory demands: unity and diversity. In his Sixth Symphony, Mahler meets both these requirements by adopting solutions as magisterial as they are novel. Never before had he taken such pains to create a network of cyclical relationships between the different movements and to draw on what was in fact a very limited reservoir of thematic cells in order to produce an infinite number of themes and motifs. From the outset Mahler defines the work’s negative, pessimistic character with a harmonic leitmotif which reverses the traditional order of modes, prefacing the minor with a major mode. This order is repeated on numerous occasions, almost always accompanied by another, rhythmic, leitmotif. A model of Classical balance, the opening Allegro energico is cast in first-movement sonata form, with an exposition involving the traditional repeat. Here Mahler takes his definitive leave of the past, of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which is replaced by a world that is cruel and almost wilfully unappealing: angular, sometimes even unattractive themes characterized by wide intervals, ostinato rhythms and a tense, strained and anguished atmosphere. The hero of the symphony departs for war to an energetic march rhythm articulated on a percussion instrument borrowed from the world of military music - the side drum. A double exposition of the principal subject is followed by a transitional episode on the woodwind, a bridge passage in long note-values in the form of a chorale divested of its normal contents and imbued, instead, with a sort of hollow formalism and bizarre harmonies. Unlike the songs of triumph and faith that play an essential role in Bruckner`s symphonies, this is a “negative” chorale and, as such, one of the symphony`s most striking innovations. As Theodor Adorno has shown, it leads nowhere and prepares for nothing - certainly not for the "Alma" theme, which enters in a moment as a veritable intrusion. This second thematic element is one of a large family of ascending (and, hence, optimistic) motifs that had earlier produced many of Mahler`s themes. But it seems to embody not so much the reality as the idea that Mahler had (or wanted to have) of Alma: it is neither the charm nor the beauty of his young wife that he evokes here but a wilful, not to say forced, optimism. A section of the development deserves particular attention, the moment of idyllic calm in which the woodwind and horn exchange fragments and variants of Alma’s theme against a background of violin tremolandi. Here for the first time we hear the sound of cowbells, a symbol of contented isolation far removed from the turmoil of human existence. The movement ends in A major, but it is a tonality that sounds bombastic rather than genuinely triumphant, as if the "hero" wanted to convince himself that he had triumphed, without really believing in his own victory. For the Scherzo, marked “Wuchtig” (weighty), Alma provided a “key” that could scarcely be less convincing: it represented, she claimed, "the arrliythmic games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand” in the garden at Maiernigg. But in 1903, the date when these two middle movements were written, Anna had not yet been born and Putzi was no more than eight or nine months old. One is tempted, rather, to hear in this Scherzo a neo-medieval Dance of Death of the kind inaugurated by the “Funeral March in Callot”s Manner” of the First Symphony. I say “dance”, but it must be admitted that this eerie Scherzo never really dances, or, rather, it dances with a limp, since the triple rhythm is incessantly contradicted by accents placed on the weak beat in each bar. The general atmosphere is gloomy and grimacing, a mood to which the orchestration contributes with its use of instruments, such as the piccolo, E flat clarinet and xylophone, notable for their shrill sonorities. With its changes of time signature, rhythmic instability and formal and old-fashioned counterpoint, the Trio is no less disquieting. Grotesque marionettes dressed in fusty clothes seem to perform an ungainly dance with an almost pathetic clumsiness. It is left to the Andante moderato to introduce a note of contrast into the symphony`s cruel and hostile world. Indeed, its expansive lyricism makes it Mahler`s only authentic symphonic Andante, with the exception of that of the Fourth. Its opening theme, often accused of “banality” by Mahler`s contemporaries, was analysed in detail by Arnold Schoenberg, who underlined its asymmetries and ellipses and, above all, the fact that it is never restated in its original form. Melodically speaking, it still belongs to the world of the Kindertotenlieder, but without the atmosphere of mourning. Two contrastive episodes follow, the first on the strings, the second in the minor on the winds, but they are soon combined and even confused. Triplets that turn back on themselves, trilling birdsong and cowbells evoke the blissful calm of nature from which Mahler drew the greater part of his creative energies. With the exception of Part II of the Eighth Symphony, where the form is prescribed by the text (the final scene from Goethe`s Faust). the Sixth’s epic Finale is the longest of Mahlers movements. An immense musical "novel" whose elements, as always, are in a state of perpetual evolution by virtue of a principle defined by Adorno as "the irreversibility of time", it is structured around a fourfold repetition of its slow introduction. With its opening bars the blackest of nights envelops us, a chaos suggestive of the end of the world. Fragments of themes shoot up through the darkness, only to fall away again. After a great initial "cry" that rises to the violins` highest register before plunging down to the cellos’ lowest notes, we hear. in succession, the symphony’s double leitmotif, harmonic and rhythmic; an ascending octave-motif, on the tuba, recalling the opening movemcnt’s initial theme, followed by an arpeggiated motif borrowed from the Scherzo and, finally, an anticipation of the second theme, which is the only optimistic element in this final movement. But the most striking element in this introduction is undoubtedly the episode marked "schwer" (heavy) on the winds. another chorale-like passage but even more paradoxical and negative than that of the opening movement. The principal theme of the Allegro moderato is made up of all the elements that have been previously introduced. In the first reprise of the introduction, the initial "cry" is inverted and differently harmonized, in which form it introduces the development section, a section that defies all attempts at succinct analysis. Two hammer blows separate the main sections of this epic struggle. In the recapitulation, which is considerably foreshortcned, the order of the two principal thematic elements is reversed, the major preceding the minor as in the symphony`s principal leitmotif. A final variant of the opening "cry", accompanied in its final bars by both the major-minor and the obsessive, rhythmic leitmotifs, heralds the final catastrophe. No other piece of music approaches this coda for its sense of devastation and desolation. A slowed-down version of the ascending-octave motif is passed to and fro among the orchestra’s lowest instruments in a sort of sombre threnody or stricken dirge. The movement ends with a final reprise of the octave motif, this time on the lowest strings. It is brutally interrupted by a fortissimo minor chord (not preceded on this occasion by the major) that is underpinned by the rhythmic leitmotif as it gradually dies away. All that remains is despair, the dark night of the soul and the sense of defeat summed up by this haunting rhythm. Is there any need to speculate further on the meaning of an ending described by Adorno as "all's ill that ends ill"? For my own part, I think that all human beings pass through such moments of absolute despair and that Mahler is just as much himself here as he is in the triumphant tones of the Eighth Symphony. As a creative artist he was bound to explore the dark and desolate landscapes of the Sixth before discovering, in his subsequent works, other pathways leading to other horizons. The blackness of the Sixth Symphony was an indispensable stage in his evolution that would lead him to the radiant optimism of the Eighth and, later and entirely naturally, to the "azure horizons" and luminous vistas which, at the end of Das Lied von der Erde, open on to eternity. Henry-Louis de La Grange