Luogo e data di registrazione		Orchestra Hall, Chicago (USA) - dicembre 1996
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Roger Wright
	Recording Producer		Karl-August Naegler
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Ulrich Vette
	Recording Engineer		Jobst Eberhardt
	Editing		Dagmar Birwe
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 457 649-2 - (1 CD) - durata 58' 45" - (p) 1999 - DDD
	Note		Cover Illustration: Pham van Mz, c/o Margarethe Hubauer

It is characteristic of Mahler that well before completing the jubilant D major conclusion of his First Symphony he had already launched its polar opposite' “Totenfeier” ("Funeral Rite,” or literally "Death Celebration”), the grim C minor movement that would eventually serve as the opening of his Second Symphony, the “Resurrection.” As so often in his career, the impulse to compose was intertwined with personal experience. "My music is lived," he once said, and so it was with “Totenfeier.” In January of 1888 Mahler, then assistant conductor at the Leipzig opera, had realized his first public success as a composer (or, more precisely, co-composer) by transforming the sketches for Carl Maria von Weber’s unfinished Die drei Pintos into a three-act opera that would remain in the repertoire for many years. Immediately after the Pintos premiere he began work on the opening funeral march of "Totenfeier" and was seized by one of the uncanny visions that periodically gripped him: as his confidante and chronicler Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports, “he saw himself lying dead upon a bier under wreaths and flowers (which were in his room from the performance of the Pintos) until Frau von Weber quickly removed all the flowers from him." Marion von Weber was the wife of Carl Maria von Weber's grandson; during the Pintos project she and Mahler fell in love. From vaious sources we know that this Werther-like affair brought enormous strain to all three parties, yet it also inspired Mahler to compose at white-hot speed. He probably adopted the title “Totenfeier” from a fragmentary dramatic epic by the 19th-century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, which appeared in 1887 in a German translation by Mahler’s longtime friend and mentor Siegfried Lipiner (who also provided a lengthy introduction). In one section of the poem the protagonist, Gustav [!], has committed suicide after the marriage of his beloved, Marie, to another suitor, Thereafter Gustav's spirit is condemned to wander in the vicinity of his inamorata and becomes, in Lipiner’s view, “a Werther sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity]." Indeed, in Lipiner’s reading, Gustav's suicide represents nothing less than “the Fall of man and his punishment.” Thus it seems hardly coincidental that in the second half of the "Totenfeier"’s development section Mahler quotes the "Dies irae" ("Day of wrath") chant, which was obligatory in settings of the Requiem Mass prior to Vatican II. It is heard shortly before the movements shattering dissonant climax, an unforgettable denouement based on musical rhetoric from the third of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), his earlier cycle on the theme of unrequited love. The song is entitled “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer” (“I have a burning knife”), and the text with its explicitly suicidal subject is by the composer himself. Since their student days, both Mahler and Lipiner had embraced a viewof tragic art and redemption derived from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche, according to which Promethean defiance leads toward self-transcendence and redemption. So much is apparent from the lines of poetry - again the composer's own - with which Mahler at long last concluded his romantic and idiosyncratic fresco of Doomsday and Resurrection in the Second Symphony's finale, more than six years after beginning work on the "Totenfeier" movement. Although Mahler apparently never fully abandoned his original plan to place "Totenfeier" at the head of a multi-movement symphony, during those six years he campaigned for its separate performance and publication (in both cases unsuccessfully). The score performed on this recording is that of his autograph manuscript dated 10 September 1888 (and partly revised not long thereafter), as published in the Critical Edition of Mahler’s complete works. On the whole it presents the music we know as the first movement of the Second Symphony, but there are some notable differences. The 1888 version contains two passages in the first half of the development section - of nine bars and twenty bars duration, respectively - which Mahler ultimately cut. (The second of these contains a curious allusion, almost surely ironic, to the subject of Bach’s "Little" G minor organ fugue, BWV 578.) In the process of pruning this material he tightened the movement's midpoint, which involves a false reprise of the opening fusillade for strings. Nevertheless, in different ways, both versions manifest a structural and expressive conflict between two key centers a semitone apart - E and E flat - that Mahler had in mind from the time of his earliest sketches for the piece. Indeed, such halfstep juxtaposition is a recurring motive throughout "Totenfeier." The earlier version also contains two rather redundant bars shortly before the movements high point that vvere later deleted to good effect. As regards instrumentation, the 1888 score calls for triple winds, four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, tuba, one harp, one timpanist, and percussion instruments (triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum), plus the usual strings. In the final version Mahler expanded the forces to include an extra flutist (who, like the third flutist, doubles piccolo), two E flat clarinets, a contrabassoon, two more horns, plus an additional trumpet, trombone, harp, timpanist (with more drums), and a higher-pitched gong. Yet size is not the only issue: although Mahler was already a skilled orchestrator in 1888, later he became a much more incisive one. His final version of the movement reveals an almost obsessive capacity to wrest from the orchestra precisely the sound colors he sought. ····· It was Mahler's "friendly rival" Richard Strauss who arranged for the first public hearing of this music The occasion was a partial performance (three movements) of Mahler’s Second Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic in March 1895. Just before the conclusion of the "Totenfeier" movement, the last of its E-to-E flat semitone gestures produces a striking major-to-minor modal shift in the high range of the trumpet choir. Whether intentionally or subconsciously, Strauss chose just this motto for the now-famous “2001” opening of his own next orchestral tone poem, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), completed the follovving year (1896). The title comes from the most famous (for some, infamous) book by Nietzsche, whose alter ego Zarathustra declares that God is dead and preaches the necessity of man's self-overcoming in order to become an Übermensch (best translated as “Overman”) - the self-determining super-individualist who climbs above and beyond the comon herd. Zarathustra also proclaims Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence: “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things,” which the philosopher also characterized as "the eternal hourglass of existence... turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" First issued publicly in 1893 (after Nietzsche's mental collapse in 1889), Also sprach Zarathustra had only just been taken up by European artists and intellectuals (Mahler, too, was intrigued by the book, and set the poetry of Zarathustra's midnight song in his Third Symphony, also composed in 1896). The powerful opening of Strauss's 30-minute tone poem is generally understood to represent the brilliant sunrise marking the dawn of Zarathustra's mission to humanity. But in contrast to some of his more explicitly narrative tone poems. Strauss here is not attempting to set the book to music: “Freely after Nietzsche” was his own subtitle to the score. Although he labels eight sections of the music with chapter headings from Nietzsche (which correlate with the numbered tracks of this recording), their sequence bears no relation to the books design. Nevertheless, the composer's stated intention “to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche's idea of the Overman" is partially congruent with the writer’s agenda, as is Strauss's description of the piece as “symphonic optimism in fin-de-siècle form, dedicated to the 20th century.” And he surely evokes something of the Eternal Recurrence in the half-step tonal conflict (cf. "Totenfeier") between the key centers of B and C that returns throughout the work, even at its ending: the last B cadence is quietly disrupted by uncanny low Cs in the basses, yielding an open-endedness that denies the traditional tonal frame. Stephen E. Hefling