Fabelhaft

Werner is madly in love. With Margareta. Since he works full-time as The Trumpeter of Säckingen, he plays a serenade for his beloved on the instrument he trusts most: an ideal starting shot for Gustav Mahler’s compositional imagination. In 1884, for a stage adaptation of the novel about Werner and Margareta at the Court Theatre in Kassel, he writes incidental music. Blumine is the only surviving piece from it. The rest was destroyed by the then 24-year-old second conductor Mahler. Quality control in the most radical way imaginable. Since the highly romantic but stand-alone movement didn’t quite fit into Mahler’s next major project, his Symphony No. 1, Blumine ultimately had to wait about seventy years to be rediscovered: Mahler in an almost unclouded idyll, including a trumpet solo to melt away to.

The collection of texts Des Knaben Wunderhorn is a fixed point in Gustav Mahler’s musical thinking, a constant source of inspiration for him. Joy and sorrow in love, life as a soldier, and the terror of death: the Gürzenich Orchestra once again looks forward to the celebrated Cologne mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter and her interpretation of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

What is now referred to as Franz Schubert’s “Little” C major Symphony was, for the then only 21-year-old composer, a truly “Great” one:  
It employs an orchestra that, for 1818, is quite lavishly equipped, with the wind section experiencing a genuine boost in terms of emancipation—rarely had it played such a central role in a symphony as here. The young man skillfully takes up the achievements of his Viennese predecessors Haydn and Beethoven, even putting a rhythmically cheeky scherzo on paper, which surely would have pleased the great Ludwig. And yet Schubert tells his very own symphonic story—far removed from heavy-handed pathos and always with an inimitably dreamlike weightlessness. Simply fabulous!