The Music Plays On — Mahler Symphony №9
Mahler wrote his Symphony №9 during the summers of 1908 and 1909 in a hastily built composer’s hut behind the Hotel Trenkerhof in Toblach, which is now part of Northern Italy.
The Mahler family spent the summers of 1908 and 1909 at this hotel because during the previous summer their daughter, Maria Anna Mahler (1902–1907), had died of diphtheria in their villa in Maiernigg. It was impossible for them to ever go back.
Without doubt, the ninth symphony is infused with a sense of remembrance and farewell for not just his daughter, but for his siblings and parents, all of whom were now gone. This farewell motif heard throughout the first movement is a quote from Beethoven’s “farewell” sonata, the Piano Sonata №26 in E flat major, Op. 81a “Les Adieux”
