Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony is primarily regarded as the composer’s reaction in the summer of 1908 to the diagnosis of a heart ailment, which he received just before writing the first sketches for the work. Mahler was deeply distraught and cannot have known how few years he still had left to live. His processing and exploration of his life experiences, and of valedictions, the meaning of life, death, salvation, life after death and love, always took place in and through his music. The Ninth Symphony was composed between 1909 and 1910 in Toblach, in a kind of creative frenzy, and was first performed in Vienna on June 26, 1912 by the Vienna Philharmonic, under the baton of Bruno Walter. Mahler had already died on May 18, 1911, and was no longer able to experience the premiere of his last completed work.
One of the very first reactions to the premiere likened the syncopated rhythm, with which the four-movement work begins, to the beating of an ailing heart. Since Mahler did indeed die of heart disease, his last completed symphony was very soon associated with his death. Paul Bekker gave the work the secret title "What Death Tells Me"; Peter Andraschke suspected quite specifically that here, “probably because of his heart ailment, Mahler had composed his own premonition of death"; and, more poetically, Willem Mengelberg, the first ardent conductor of the composer’s works, wrote in his score: "Mahler's soul sings its farewell!"
Mahler's Ninth Symphony represents the culmination of a development process. The compositional style of progressive chromaticism and maximum utilization of the tonal are here taken to their limits - and, for the first time, beyond them. Indeed, the two movements that frame the work, in particular, depart from the tonal entirely, pointing clearly to the dawn of a new musical epoch. Alban Berg even called this symphony "the first work of New Music".
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