Dendievel, Bostridge

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Des Knaben Wunderhorn («The Youth’s Magic Horn») is a collection of folk poems and songs published in three volumes between 1805 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, developing various themes, above all love, war and travel. In Germany it was a kind of foundational text of literary national identity, a book never absent from a German-speaking home. Mahler discovered it at the house of Captain Karl von Weber, grandson of the composer Carl Maria, «founder» of nineteenth-century German opera, and was immediately spellbound. Altogether, between 1888 and 1901, Mahler set about two dozen songs from the Wunderhorn, some of which would also find their way into the Third and Fourth symphonies. Why was the Moravian composer so fatefully drawn to it? Because in the Wunderhorn — entrusted here to the great English tenor Ian Bostridge — the three fundamental components of Mahler’s temperament live together: a sense of drama, a sense of the popular and a sense of the religious.
Symphony no. 7 in E major, WAB 107 (Cahis 13)

«It had never happened to any composer to be called to the stage four or five times after each movement. Bruckner is the new idol of the Wagnerians». So wrote Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s great champion, after hearing the Seventh Symphony in E major in Vienna. Words full of astonishment, spoken in a poisoned climate, with the pro-Wagnerians firing on Brahms and the pro-Brahmsians going after Bruckner. For all its customary architectural monumentality, the composer gives himself here to an unexpected sensuality. When Luchino Visconti chose the Seventh as the unforgettable soundtrack of Senso, with Alida Valli, he caught precisely this suffering, feverish side, almost a tremor under the skin, which nevertheless dissolves into one of the longest, most poignant and most dazzling adagios of the nineteenth-century symphony. To hear the Seventh on its own terms is a one-way journey into a work that is a world, an itinerary of the spirit watched over by music that stands tall, solid and mysterious as an ancient cathedral.