Crystal Hernandez
March CotW
8th grade Orchestra
04/01/2018
Mahler
“Born on July 7, 1860, Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler served as director for the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907. He later led the New York Metropolitan Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra. He wrote 10 symphonies during his career, which became popular for their 20th-century techniques and emotional character. He died in Vienna on May 18, 1911.”- https://www.biography.com/people/gustav-mahler-9395470
“Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. This symphony was one of Mahler's most popular and successful works during his lifetime. It was his first major work that established 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 has a duration of eighty to ninety minutes and is conventionally labelled as being in the key of C minor; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
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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, although his manuscript does label it as a symphony. In 1893, he composed the second and third movements.[3] The finale was the problem. While thoroughly aware he was inviting comparison with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9—both symphonies use a chorus as the centerpiece of a final movement which begins with references to and is much longer than those preceding it—Mahler knew he wanted a vocal final movement. Finding the right text for this movement proved long and perplexing.[4]”