Closing Concert

“I do not think that I have ever worked under such a feeling of compulsion; it was like a lightning vision – I saw the whole piece immediately before my eyes and only needed to write it down, as though it were being dictated to me,’ Gustav Mahler told music historian Richard Specht. He created the colossal score for the Eighth over a period of ten weeks, working, according to his wife Alma, “as if in a fever”. The evening-length symphony is monumental not only for its cast list and instrumental lineup, but also for the depth of its meaning; at the same time it is also revolutionary from a formal perspective. Despite its length it only has two extensive parts. In the first part Mahler wrote a musical setting for the Latin hymn Veni creator spiritus [Come, Holy Ghost, Creator, come]; in the second part he set to music one of the most important texts of world literature – the philosophical final scene from Faust by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In musical terms, both movements are thematically linked; ideologically they are unified by the idea of redemption through the power of love. In fact, towards the very end, Mahler constructed an uplifting, wonderfully ornate melody to the words “eternal love”.

The “Symphony of a Thousand” was the last of the composer’s works premiered during his lifetime. “In my opinion, that evening in September 1910 was the culmination of Mahler’s life, moreover, none of those present, performers and audience alike, would ever forget it,” stated conductor Bruno Walter, Mahler’s pupil and close colleague, remembering the world premiere of the Eighth Symphony. In the auditorium of Munich’s Neue Musik-Festhalle sat such eminent figures as composers Richard Strauss, Camille Saint-Saëns and Anton Webern, conductor Leopold Stokowski, who six years later conducted the American premiere of the work, and writer Thomas Mann. The latter, greatly moved by the piece, wrote Mahler a letter, in which he described him as “a man who, as I believe, expresses the art of our time in its profoundest and most sacred form”. Performances of Mahler’s Eighth always make for truly exceptional occasions to this day.

The ensemble of soloists at this Prague Spring concert comprises exceptional vocal artists, among them two superb Mahler singers: Sarah Wegener, who has sung the Eighth under conductors Kirill Petrenko, Kent Nagano and James Conlon, and Gramophone Award-winner Jennifer Johnston, who performed Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Klaus Mäkelä, and with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic under Franz Welser-Möst. The tenor part will be sung by British vocal star David Butt Philip, who has given debuts at Covent Garden, the Vienna and Bavarian State Operas and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The cast also includes two stellar Czech singers, Kateřina Kněžíková and Adam Plachetka.