Gatti & Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

International Brucknerfest Linz 2025: The Mask of Mahler  Daniele Gatti and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden bring Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony and Tōru Takemitsu's Requiem for String Orchestra to the Brucknerhaus Linz.

The sound language of composer Tōru Takemitsu, who celebrated his international breakthrough in the 1950s with his Requiem for string orchestra, moves between avant-garde, 'mixed media' and traditional Japanese music. Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony, which characteristically begins with a funeral march, can also be interpreted as a requiem, at the latest when Luchino Visconti uses the fourth movement, the Adagietto, in his film adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice from 1971.

In the film, Mahler's music symbolises the gradual 'disappearance from the world' of the protagonist Gustav Aschenbach and thus becomes the musical leitmotif of his death. Mann's text, in turn, is in a way also a requiem for Mahler, as the writer himself emphasised: "The news of Gustav Mahler's death in the early summer of 1911 played into the conception of my story". Mann not only gave his main character the composer's first name, but also gave her "Mahler's mask" on the outside.