Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was written between 1903 and 1904, mostly in Vienna, during a period of professional success and private happiness. But musically the ‘Tragic’, as the symphony is sometimes called, seems like a bizarre reversal of Mahler’s life events and an anticipation of future tragedies: the death of a daughter, the diagnosis of Mahler’s heart disease, and his profound occupational crisis at the Vienna Court Opera. They would soon bring to an abrupt end Mahler’s short spell of good fortune.

In retrospect, these three strokes of fate were identified with the famous hammer blows of the final movement. Alma Mahler wrote in her memoirs to the symphony: “No work has flowed from his heart so directly. The Sixth is his most personal work and a prophetic one on top of that.”

In mid-May 2019, Essen’s general music director Tomáš Netopil conducted the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra in two acclaimed performances of the Sixth Symphony. The work was performed almost exactly 113 years earlier, on 27 May 1906, by the same orchestra under the composer’s direction.