The last concert of the season will begin with Arnold Schönberg’s shocking choral miniature Friede auf Erden [Peace on Earth], composed in 1907. It is a setting of a Christmas poem by the Swiss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and its content, so current today, represents a moving plea for the biblical greeting to finally come true.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which will inaugurate the 2023/2024 season, and Gustav Mahler’s Ninth, which will bring it to a close, are the two composers’ last works in the genre: the former in the key of D minor, the latter in D major. In his final symphony, Beethoven introduces vocal and instrumental forces, while Mahler returns to a purely orchestral form. Neither of the composers was fated to hear their work. Beethoven due to his complete deafness, Mahler due to his death. In Mahler’s Symphony, especially in the elaborate, moving Adagio that brings the four-movement cycle to a close, critics have sought a musical epitaph of the Austrian composer. Although the loss of his daughter and his diagnosis of incurable heart disease must have left their mark on this melancholy score, filled with the symbolism of death, its composer, as we learn from his correspondence, did not yet wish to bid farewell to the world.

Bartłomiej Gembicki