Hi! I'm glad to tell you that An die Musik moved to another address, and became An die Musik: Phoenix Project. Please, visit our new place of sharing the greatest music ever! Just click the image below: From now, this blog will keep just the posts which brings some informative texts, and the download links will be gradually deleted. Also gradually all the discs will be posted in our new blog. I thank you all for the visits during this years, and I hope to see all of you around ADM: PP. Musical hugs! Erlen Changing reception history has unintentionally highlighted the historical character of Mahler's purely orchestral, middle-period symphonies. The rehabilitation of his reputation after Wold War II, particularly in German-speaking countries was marked by a tendency to consider the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies his most successful and musically rewarding: as more traditional kinds of symphonic discourse, demonstrating the relevant signifiers of mastery. It would be equally appropriate to regard these two works as experiments in the new style to which Mahler himself referred in the case of the Fifth. The cumulative, heterodox structures of the earlier symphonies are replaced, in the Fifth, by a somewhat more uniform model. Its orchestral polyphony is also denser, more frequently mixed in timbre, in the manner of Richard Strauss, and less marked by simultaneously juxtaposed individual sonorities (Mahler experienced difficulty with the Fifth's orchestration and laboured on it in revisions). There is also a reduced reliance on explicitly characterized musical manners of intentionally ironic or naive effect. Instead, Mahler opted for a rhetoric that brings to the foreground a constructed musical subjectivity whose task is to control and unify the protean character changes that define its discourse. Symbolically projected voices and quasi-naturalistic scenarios are still present, but where formerly they were external to the alienated subject, such manners now tend to be presented more frequently as subjective modes, embraced and exploited with Nietzschean elan.[...]The fragility of that self-confidence was starkly emphasized by the Sixth Symphony (19034). This was composed during the period of Mahler's closest contact with the younger Viennese modernists, to whose circle his uneasily progressing marriage to Alma Schindler gave him access. Conducted by Mahler with the subtitle Tragic on at least one occasion, the Sixth displays an inverse relationship between symbolic subjective security and structural conciseness (it has four movements, the first with repeated exposition in the Classical manner). Specific biographical reasons for its cumulatively depressive and even suicidal manner are often sought, although Mahler explored as a logical proposal the insight that subjective authenticity and a positively constructed teleology (permitting a happy ending) might have no causal link. The Sixth Symphony's first movement reverts to sharply characterized and opposed elements, like those of the first movement of the Second and Third Symphonies. A coercive A minor march is replaced by music of energetic lyricism which Mahler described as a representation of his young wife, although it, too, functions rhetorically as a subjective mode, urgently insistent upon its superior claim to authenticity. Other elements are added to the relentless succession of