Gustav Mahler (photo art by Keith Adams)
Tonight, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra offers a picture-window view of the tourtured soul translated into music with the first of two performances of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of 1,000,” aka his Symphony No. 8.
Mahler (1860-1911) was famous in his day as an opera conductor and secured the respect of Germanic Europe in his mid-20s by conducting a Wagner Ring Cycle and completing an unfinished opera of Carl Maria von Weber, Die drei Pintos.
But Mahler never actually wrote an opera of his own. That’s probably because the man who stood on the podium of the Metropolitan Opera as well as many of the big houses in Europe knew that that inner turmoil is hard to convey on a big stage.
So he used pure music — instrumental and song — to express the inner battles between the devil sitting on the left shoulder, whispering seductive notions of all sorts in one ear, and the angel sitting on the right, exhorting us to remain on the straight-and-narrow of an upright, virtuous life. Continue reading
Musical Toronto 