Mahler - Symphony No. 5

Mahler - Symphony No. 5

Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Orchestre de Paris in a performance of Mahler's Symnphony No. 5. Recorded at the Salle Pleyel, Paris in 2009. ,,Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance - 50 years after I'm gone.’’ Gustav Mahler wrote his Symphony No. 5 in the summers of 1901 and 1902, a period of change in the composer's life. As director of the Wiener Staatsoper and conductor of the Wiener Philharmoniker, he had one of the most-wanted positions in the music business, while he also met his wife Alma Mahler, who was pregnant with their first child, in 1902. Mahler's health gave less cause for celebration: a hemorrhage would have killed him in 1901, had his doctor not prevented that. Keeping this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Mahler's approach to composition changed. His work premiered in 1904, but the audience was not ready for a composition this impressive. Different from his Symphonies No. 2 and 3, Mahler's Symphony No. 5 is a completely instrumental work (with the famous fourth movement, the Adagietto, as the highlight), and, moreover, it lacks the philosophical or religious themes of his earlier Symphonies. Mahler would keep wrestling with the instrumentation of the piece until his death in 1911.