Mahler: Rückert-Lieder & Symphony No. 10
Lucerne Festival 2025

In the summer of 1910, Gustav Mahler worked on his 10th Symphony in Toblach, while his wife Alma began an affair with architect Walter Gropius in Tobelbad near Graz. This news plunged Mahler into deep despair. He would often lie on the floor of his composing hut, crying, and even sought advice from Sigmund Freud. Yet Alma's infidelity was not his only sorrow: the death of his daughter, his severe heart condition, his departure from Vienna, and his withdrawal from New York – all of this caused the world to collapse for the 50-year-old composer. His anguish is reflected in notes on the margins of the score: "Have mercy! O God, why have you forsaken me?" The 10th Symphony became a painful love letter to his "Almschi" – one that transcended death.

Mahler died before he could complete the work, leaving behind five movements in various stages of completion. Alma later entrusted the drafts to musicologist Deryck Cooke, who created a performance version in 1964. Desmond Shawe-Taylor enthusiastically wrote in The Sunday Times: "'The practical result is that the world has a new Mahler symphony, and a very good one at that, which in the last of its five movements rises to towering grandeur."

In his internationally acclaimed interpretations of Mahler’s symphonies, Riccardo Chailly focuses on the musical quality of the works, avoiding false pathos and sentimentality while retaining the music’s dramatic intensity. Together with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanca, he opened the 2025 festival summer festival with Mahler’s poignant, unfinished 10th Symphony and Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. The concert opened with Pierre Boulez's Mémoriale, in reverence of the inaugural director of the Lucerne Festival Academy, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2025.