QTIX

Music that hits hard!

Simon Hewett leads the Queensland Youth Symphony (QYS) in a powerful and heart-wrenching performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, often referred to as the “Tragic Symphony”.

At the height of his career as Music Director of the Vienna Opera, Mahler was celebrated, successful, and deeply in love with his wife, Alma, and their two young daughters. Yet, in this time of personal and professional fulfillment, he composed his darkest and most uncompromising work – the foreboding 6th Symphony.

The symphony’s final movement features three infamous “blows of fate”, symbolised by strikes of a massive wooden hammer. Mahler instructed the sound to evoke “a massive, wooden, dull crack, like a tree being felled by an axe.” Tragically, within a year of the symphony’s premiere, Mahler endured three devastating blows of his own: the death of his eldest daughter, his dismissal from the Vienna Opera, and a diagnosis of a fatal heart condition.

A deeply superstitious man, Mahler may have wondered if he had tempted fate. Alma later reflected, “In the 6th Symphony, Mahler described himself and his downfall: ‘He was the hero on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him, as a tree is felled’”.

This is Mahler at his most profound and prophetic – a must-hear journey into the depths of human resilience and tragedy.

Program

Mahler – Symphony No. 6