Shostakovich 5 & Mahler

Mahler composed his first cycle of sung poems, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, between 1883 and 1885. Still a young man, the composer and conductor was madly in love with the soprano Johanna Richter, who did not share his passion. This cycle of sung poems expresses Mahler's disappointments, frustrations and suffering, in the pure tradition of Schubert's Winterreise, for example. The title of the cycle - Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wandering Journeyman") - refers to the "Wanderjahre", the years during which journeymen went from town to town to learn their trade from masters. This was also often the period of first (thwarted) love affairs. In the 1880s, Mahler also served his "apprenticeship", gaining first experience as a conductor in Laibach, Olomouc, Cassel, Prague and Leipzig.

It was during the tumultuous years of the Great Stalinist Purges - a campaign of mass persecution carried out in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 - that Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony. Through a review in the official press, entitled "Chaos instead of music", the authorities had just condemned his opera Lady Macbeth from the Mtsensk district. Blacklisted, the composer saw the premiere of his Fourth Symphony cancelled at the very last moment. Shostakovich conceived his Fifth Symphony as "the creative response of a Soviet artist to justified criticism". The result was a relatively standard orchestral line-up and a more accessible, tonal style. The authorities saw in this symphony, with its ecstatic, grandiose finale, the story of a Soviet hero whose personality has been shaped by several crises and who, in the finale, triumphs and looks to the future with optimism. Others, on the other hand, have seen in this four-movement symphony a hidden critique of the regime. Be that as it may, the Fifth Symphony was a public triumph, and Shostakovich was fully rehabilitated. Even today, this symphony, characterized by a fine balance between reflection, humor and grandeur, is one of the composer's most beloved works.

Created with the support of the Belgian Tax Shelter through Casa Kafka Pictures.