You won’t want to miss the Opening Night concert of the 2010-2011 Season …it’s a blockbuster! Besides the usual excitement of Opening Night, here’s what’s in store for you: the largest orchestra the Orlando Philharmonic has ever assembled; the largest chorus ever assembled; and last but not least, the monumental and magnificent orchestral and choral work of Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection.”

The Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. Apart from the Eighth Symphony, this symphony was Mahler’s most popular and successful work during his lifetime. It is his first major work that would eventually mark his lifelong view of the beauty of afterlife and resurrection. In this large work, the composer further developed the creativity of “sound of the distance” and creating a “world of its own,” aspects already seen in his First Symphony. The work lasts around eighty to ninety minutes.

Mahler completed what would become the first movement of the symphony in 1888 as a single-movement symphonic poem called Totenfeier (Death Celebration). Some sketches for the second movement also date from that year. Mahler wavered five years on whether to make Totenfeier the opening movement of a symphony. In 1893, he composed the second and third movements. The finale was the problem. Mahler knew he wanted a vocal final movement. Finding the right text for this movement proved long and perplexing.

When Mahler took up his appointment at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, he found the other important conductor there to be Hans von Bülow, who was in charge of the city’s symphony concerts. Bülow, not known for his generosity, was impressed by Mahler. Bülow’s death in 1894 greatly affected Mahler. At the funeral, Mahler heard a setting of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection). “It struck me like lightning, this thing,” he wrote to conductor Anton Seidl,” and everything was revealed to me clear and plain.” Mahler used the first two verses of Klopstock’s hymn, then added verses of his own that dealt more explicitly with redemption and resurrection.* He finished the finale and revised the orchestration of the first movement in 1894, then inserted the song Urlicht (Primal Light) as the penultimate movement. This song was probably written in 1892 or 1893.

Mahler devised a narrative programme for the work, which he told to a number of friends. In this programme, the first movement represents a funeral and asks questions such as “Is there life after death?”; the second movement is a remembrance of happy times in the life of the deceased; the third movement represents a view of life as meaningless activity; the fourth movement is a wish for release from life without meaning; and the fifth movement – after a return of the doubts of the third movement and the questions of the first – ends with a fervent hope for everlasting, transcendent renewal, a theme that Mahler would ultimately transfigure into the music of his sublime Das Lied von der Erde.

The symphony is written for an orchestra, a mixed choir, two soloists (soprano and contralto), organ, and an offstage ensemble of brass and percussion. The use of two tam-tams, one pitched high and one pitched low, is particularly unusual; the end of the last movement features them struck in alternation repeatedly.

The work was first published in 1897 by Friedrich Hoffmeister.

Mahler 2 – Resurrection Symphony
“An Immense Project”
Christopher Wilkins, Music Director

*Fifth Movement

Note: The first eight lines were taken from the poem Die Auferstehung by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Mahler omitted the final four lines of this poem and wrote the rest himself (beginning at “O glaube”).

Notes from Wikipedia

Watch and listen as English conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, conducts the final movement of Symphony No. 2 with England’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.   CLICK HERE

Mahler’s Description of each movement in Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”

Learning to Love Gustav Mahler – article on LATimes .com (March 14, 2010) by Richard S. Ginell