Luogo e data di registrazione		Watford Town Hall, London (Gran Bretagna) - settembre 1985
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Günther Breest
	Coordination		Claudia Hamann
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Editing		Reinhild Schmidt & Jurgen Bulgrin, Ulrich Vette (Gesellenlieder)
	Prima Edizione LP		Deutsche Grammophon | 415 959-1 | LC 0173 | 2 LPs - 62' 54" & 40' 08" | (p) 1986 | Digital
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 415 959-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 65' 18" & 54' 56" | (p) 1986 | DDD
	Note		The Compact Disc edition also contains "Sechs frühen lieder".

Symphonie Nr. 2 In the first half of the nineteenth century conductors were usually expected to be composers as well, and some, like Weber and Wagner, were composers of genius. But the century was an era of increasing specialization, and as it progressed the public and critics became suspicious of such versatility. “Kapellmeistermusik”` became a term of disapprobation, implying a worthy but uninspired competence. As a young conductor Mahler gave little evidence of the double life he was leading. Apart from some incidental works performed while he was engaged at the theatre in Kassel (1883-85) and his completion of Weber’s comic opera Die drei Pintos (1888), only a handful of his songs had been heard in public when in November 1889 Mahler announced his serious ambitions as a composer, conducting the première of his five-movement “Symphonic Poem” (later to become the First Symphony) in Budapest. The work, technically accomplished and flamboyantly origiiml, met with incomprehension from the public and critics alike. Despite the demands imposed by his conducting career, Mahler had maintained his creative activity throughout the 1880s. Up to at least 1883 he worked on Rübezahl, an opera which was never completed and was presumably destroyed. He had already written the words for several of his earlz works (including Rübezahl) when in December 1884 he drafted a group of six poems, four of which served as the text of an orchestral song cycle, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Soon afterwards the “Symphonic Poem" was begun, but work on it was interrupted by Die drei Pintos, and it was not completed until March 1888. In the beginning of that year, before the "Symphonic Poem" was finished, Mahler was already sketching ideas for a pair of orchestral movements, and, after resigning from conducting posts at Leipzig and Prague in quick succession, he had enough time during the summer to complete one of them - a massive first movement for a C minor Symphonz, which he entitled “Totenfeier” (Funeral Rite). This, with a few changes, became the opening funeral march of the Second Symphony, though it was no more like a conventional opening to a symphony than the first movement of the “Symphonic Poem”. Its scale is established by the initial theme for the cellos and basses, which uncurls itself gradually, developing and transforming its constituent motifs. This process, which is typical of the first movement and of the Symphony as a whole, was described by Mahler as one of self-generation. The music renews itself continuously, moving inexorably towards and away from climactic points. By any standards the “Totenfeier” was an astonishing achievement for a 28-year-old composer, but after its completion in September 1888 work on the Symphony came to a halt for nearly five years. Mahler’s new responsibilities as director of the Royal Opera House in Budapest absorbed most of his time during the opera season, and the summers proved relatively unfruitful. In 1889 he underwent a serious operation and spent the summer convalescing and dealing with family tragedies: his mother and a younger sister were dying. Until 1893 his own ill-health and professional commitments continued to limit his time for composition, and he turned to smaller projects, the setting of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Late in September 1891 Mahler played through the opening movement of the C minor Symphony on the piano for Hans von Bülow, who earlier in his career as a conductor had championed Wagner’s “music of the future"; to Mahler’s dismay Bülow found the piece distressingly modern. Work on the Symphony was not resumed until July and August 1893. Mahler began by recomposing a recently written Wunderhorn song (Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt), transforming it into an orchestral scherzo; he then returned to the unused sketches of 1888 and composed the Andante moderato. At about the same time the orchestration of another Wunderhorn song, Urlicht, which was eventually to become the Symphony’s fourth movement, was finished. Having now essentially composed the three inner movements. Mahler remained uncertain about their order. It is unclear at what stage. whether still in 1893, or not until the following year, he came upon the idea of incorporating Urlicht into the Symphony. And there is evidence that at one stage the scherzo was placed second and the Andante fourth. This uncertainty went hand in hand with his inability to make much headway with the finale. Later, in 1897, Mahler recalled that he had for some time contemplated the introduction of a chorus, but hesitated because he feared comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In February 1894 Bülow died in Cairo, and at the memorial service for him on 29 March 1894 Mahler heard a chorale setting of Klopstock’s verses "Auferstehn, ja Auferstehn". This provided the much-needed solution: a text which, with extensive additions by the composer, would crown the finale, which in turn would bind the five movements together in a coherent sequence. On 25 July 1894 Mahler was able to announce the completion of the Symphony. The finale retrospectively clarified and concluded a programmatic idea underlying the whole Symphony which Mahler later spelled out in detail. (The quotations below are from that text.) The opening funeral march invites the listener to contemplate death: “We stand by the coffin of a beloved person. His life, struggles, passions and aspirations pass one last time before our mind’s eye... What now? What is this life - and this death? Is there an existence for us beyond it? Is this all only a confused dream, or do this life and this death have a meaning? And we must answer this question if we are to live on." The next two movements (in A flat major and C minor), highly contrasting transformations of a dance type, the Ländler, embody differing responses to life: in the Andante “A happy moment from the life of this beloved departed one and a sad recollection of his youth and lost innocence”; in the scherzo alienation and loss of faith - "...The world and life become for him a disordered apparition; disgust for all being and becoming grip him with an iron fist..." - culminating in a "cry of despair". The latter movement is an extraordinary and sardonic conception, with the original Wunderhorn song decorated and transformed, then interrupted and finally combined with new material. (It won praise from Brahms and later inspired Luciano Berio to subject Mahler`s scherzo to similar musical processes in his Sinfonia of 1968.) The fourth movement is the programmatic and musical turning point of the work. Just as the text ("...I am from God and will return to God! The dear God will give me a lamp, will light my way to eternal blissful life!" points towards the finale’s answer in religious terms to the questions implied by the first movement, so the use of the voice and the key (D flat major) anticipate important musical events in the last movement. The Symphony culminates in a portrayal of the Last Judgment: "We are confronted again with all the dreadful questions... The end of all living things is come - the Last Judgment is announced... The earth trembles, graves burst open, the dead arise and stream forth in an endless procession... The wailing grows ever more dreadful... all consciousness ceases at the approach of the Eternal Spirit. The Great Summons is heard - the trumpets of the Apocalypse call; in the awful silence. we think we hear a distant nightingale, like a last quivering echo of earthly life!"; and a celebration of the belief in resurrection: "Softly a chorus of saints and heavenly beings breaks forth: ‘Rise again, yea, thou shalt rise again’. There appears the glory of God! A wondrous gentle light permeates us to the heart - all is quiet and blissful! And behold: There is no judgment - there is no sinner, no righteous, no great and no small. There is no punishment and no reward! An almighty feeling of love illuminates us with blessed knowing and being." The finale begins with an orchestral outburst, as recapitulation of the scherzoßs "cry of despair", and later on thematic material from the other movements recurs, including a chorale from the first movement based on the Dies Irae plainsong. As in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the finale explicitly absorbs the influence of opera, but in both works the outward dramatic freedom is underpinned by a sustained and coherent musical structure. In the “Resurrection” Symphony the episodic opening section presents the main musical material and leads into a fast developmental section which begins as a grotesque march (the procession of the dead), transforming themes and welding them into a more sustained musical argument. The entry of the chorus is delayed until the recapitulatory final section of the movement, where the voices initiate a thematic summing-up of the whole work, culminating in the long-awaited arrival of the tonal goal, E flat major. The instrumental movements of the Symphony were performed during 1895, but in order to hear the entire work, Mahler had to pay for the performance, which he conducted in Berlin on 13 December 1895. As usual the critics remained sceptical, but the majority of the audience was overwhelmed by the expressive power and integrity of the music. The Symphony was, and remained, a success with the public, and in the view of Bruno Walter its première marked the real beginning of Mahler’s career as a composer. Paul Banks (Translation: Lionel Salter) Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen Songs with orchestral accompaniment constituted a genre rarely cultivated in the 1880s. Berlioz had made some notable contributions, but few composers had followed his example. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) were drafted for voice and piano, but from the outset the composer conceived them as an orchestral song cycle. They were revised and orchestrated in the early 1890s and were first performed by the baritone Anton Sistermans (with Mahler conducting) in Berlin on 16 March 1896. In later years Mahler claimed to be the sole author of the texts, but in fact the first draws on folk poems contained in the Wunderhorn collection. The narrative of the cycle - “a wayfaring man who has been stricken by fate goes forth into the world, travelling wherever his road may lead him” - was a cliché of romantic poetry and Mahler`s versification is barely competent. But the modest poetry of the Gesellen songs is transcended by music of compelling intensity. In its combination of a folk-like melodic line with a sophisticated accompaniment the cycle looks forward to the complex interplay of popular music and high art in Mahler’s later Wunderhorn songs. Some of the material of the Gesellen songs also had a potential for symphonic expansion, which the composer explored in the first and third movements of his First Symphony. Mahler’s music characterizes the varying moods of the texts - the delight in nature which only postpones the return of sadness, inner torment, and the final spiritual and physical death - with an authenticity and vividness absent from the poetry. The emotional journey is charted by the highly original tonal organization of the cycle in which no song ends in the key in which it began, and the cycle as a whole travels from D minor to F minor. The Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are Mahler’s first large-scale masterpiece and, like many of his later works, project a spiritual journey in music which continually develops and evolves. Although the protagonist may sing of achieving peace in death, the musical setting is as much concerned with mirroring the eternal regeneration of Nature. Paul Banks (Translation: Lionel Salter)