Luoghi e date di registrazione		Philharmonie, Berlin (Germania) - settembre 1999
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Executive Producer		Christopher Alder
	Engineered by		Klaus-Peter Grosz
	Mastered by		Emil Berliner Studios
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 471 624-2 - (1 CD) - durata 81' 03" - (p) 2002 - DDD
	Note		Cover Photos: Groth, Caselli, Groth, Caselli (from left to right)

It would be the last score that Gustav Mahler completed, in 1909 at his summer house near Toblach, in the Tyrol (now Dobbiaco, Italy). Following that draft, "quite indecipherable to other eyes", Mahler did finish onother fair copy in New York in 1910, but he did not live to hear a performance of his Ninth Symphony. Just over a year after his death, his friend Bruno Walter conducted the work's first performance in Vienna on 26 June 1912. The Symphony is thus lacking an important compositional stage: the alteration and refinement of the orchestration that Mahler always undertook before a première. Under the circumstances of his early death, the Ninth was received as his "farewell symphony", as a kind of premonition of death, whose composition supposedly represented his own farewell to life. Thoughts of farewell and death, then, are the Symphony's central themes, but even Mahler's close confidant Bruno Walter avoided making a direct comparison between the life and the work. It takes a look at the Ninth's compositionol construction to elucidate why, beyond that aspect, it was also elevated to the status of "first work of the new music" (Theodor W. Adorno). Thinking polyphonically: the first movement Polyphony, the art of combining independent, logically seft-contained musical lines meaningfully and convincingly, permeates Mahler's Ninth from first movement to last. In the opening movement, following a brief introduction, the second violins present the first thematic idea. It is built out of tiny motives, out of speech-like patterns, out of the musical transformation of that "Leb wol!" ("Farewell") that Mahler jotted down in his scene. Seven times this D major theme appears in the course of the first movement, its aspect always changing, with the continual addition of new counter-melodies having their own character. These compete with the principal idea, and are most clearly in accord with it when the music runs into moments of peril: at the pauses that hold up its progress. Towards the end of the movement there emerges a chamber-musical passage that clearly stands apart from everything that has come before it. Some of it is reminiscent of bird calls, and every part display an individual profile. Alban Berg referred to this transparent piece of extreme polyphony as a "vision of the hereafter". Polyphony means thinking on different levels simultaneously. Mahler does not limit its use to the combined effect of melodic lines - he also extends it to include musical form. In the first movement there are elements of a song-like structure, a rondo-like recurrence of the principal idea, but especially the principle of an evolution proceeding from opposites, as in the underpinning of classical sonata writing. None of these schemes, however, can be reconciled entirely with the opening movement of the Ninth. Measured against historical models, its form is ambiguous - as are the details of the process it comprises. For in this work are not only broadly spun-out musical themes, but also signs, signals, symbols. They determine the scant introduction. The first six notes on cello and horn, with far-reaching developmental possibilities, give out a rhythm which returns at nodal points in the first movement and adumbrate its cataclysmic power at the end of an extended period of intensification. It is followed by a funeral march - "like a solemn procession", the music to which people customarily are borne to the grave. Berg used this same motive as the "death rhythm" in his opera Lulu. The three-note motive, played at the beginning by the harp, underlies this movement's sombre events. The horn-call idea immediately following reveals itself in time as the common origin of the various themes, as their "primary source". Its counterpart is found in the roar of the march music. It drives one passage, which Mahler headed "Mit Wut" ("Wrathfully"), to the edge of violence, and it sounds the three-note motive at marching pace in the "funeral procession". The Three little musical gestures with which the Symphony begins act as the implements of significance and set the system of ideas in motion. From polyphony to montage: the second movement Mahler's polyphony assumes different features in the second movement. The great Mahler expert Constantin Floros has called it "the summa of the Mahlerian dance modes. Dances of every character developed by Mahler [...] are represented here: the leisurely ländler, the two types of waltz, and the slow ländler; and it should be mentioned that they are clearly distinguished from one another by different tempi". Floros here stresses the music's reminiscing character - which has something of a balancing function - and emphasizes the essence of the Ninth as a symphony of farewell. There is something else at play in this movement: anyone who knows certain German folk songs will constantly be confronted with familiar turns of phrase: "Bald gras ich am Neckar" ("Now I mow by the Neckar") at the very beginning (Mahler actually set this text as Rheinlegendchen), a ditty about the Bohemian wind ("Hab mir mein Weizen am Bergl g'sät, hat ihn der böhmische wind verweht" - "I sowed my wheat on the hill, the Bohemian wind blew it away") and a Bohemian shepherd's song that is sung at Christmas time (the quotation from it is identical to a phrase in Mahler's Wunderhorn song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt). But it is not so much the quotations themselves that matter here as the melodic inflection. This was derived from the south-German-Austrian-Bohemian cultural region, whose popular music is markedly different from that of other German-speaking areas. Mahler grew up in this environment. A piece of it marches past us here - fragmented, distorted, tossed and jumbled into a simultameity of the diverse, as though viewed in a dream. "The tone of such montages [...] is not one of parody but rather [...] that of a dance of death" (Adorno). The dark, disintegrating, dying close supports this diagnosis. Head over heels into the grotesque: the third movement In the third movement, the Rondo-Burleske, Mahler's polyphony turns a somersault and intensifies to reach a state of "grim jollity". This virtuoso movement becomes short-breathed before finally gathering its momentum. Rondos do not normally contain this much imitation, fugal writing or counterpoint. The high art form is mutated into something grotesque. Even the play with triviality knows no bounds. The allusion to a melody from Lehár's Merry Widow is outdone by a vulgar popular tune on the horn. Yet even the coarsest material is brought into an artistic form, within a constant shifting between musical levels. What had been accompanimental is elevated to became thematic and given its oen accompanimental motive, which then proceeds to take the lead. This spiralling motion does not come to a standstill until reaching the slow episode whose songfulness promises the consolation that the last movement, the Adagio, could offer. Reminiscences and quotes: the slow final movement Mahlerìs Ninth is a work of farewell, not in the biographical sense but in terms of its content. A part of farewell is memory, which assumes musical shape as quotation or reminiscence. The Ninth is full of retrocpection. Two different sorts can be distinguished: reminiscences within in the Symphony itself and reminiscences that point towards other works or to the history of music. The two can be mixed. The main theme of the last movement has its precursors in the Burleske and the last piece of Das Lied von der Erde, whose title is Der Abschied - farewell. Mahler discloses both relationships ever more clearly in the course of the finale. He reveals a common thought, a common vanishing point, towards which several of his works are aimed. At the very end, he becomes even clearer, when the entire proceedings have finally withdrawn into regions of calm. He then quotes in the first violin from the fourth of his Kindertotenlieder. The text of this passage reads: "...im Sonnenschein. Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh'n" ("...in the sunshine. The day is fine on yonder heights"), which no person ever reaches during his or her lifetime. If the Eight, according to Mahler's own words, is his mass, then the Ninth contains his requiem. The close of the last movement must then, however, correspond to "Et lux perpetua luceat eis" ("And may perpetual light shine on them"), in the trascendentally remote key of D major into which Mahler's Ninth passes the D major of its opening. Between those two points lies a painful process, one that has led through widely ranging fields of memory and through the bonfire of the grotesque, through that "Purgatorio" which would become the third movement of his Tenth. That work Mahler was no longer able to complete. Habakuk Traber (Translation: Richard Evidon)