New German Theatre

“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound.”

Are you done imagining? And what do you think it would be like?

According to Mahler, like his Eighth Symphony. That was his description of it.

Speaking of the universe, according to Semyon Bychkov, the composition works on the principle that the human mind is incapable of “imagining travel through time and space. Especially in the last ten or fifteen minutes, you feel as if you are floating above your body in a place where there is neither beginning nor end.”

At the present-day State Opera, Mahler conducted quite a bit of his own music and works by other composers between 1888 and 1904, but he did not live to conduct his Eighth Symphony there. When Alexander Zemlinsky conducted it at the New German Theatre in March 1912, a year after Mahler’s death, he was faced with the task of reining in two mixed choirs, a children's choir, three sopranos, two mezzo-sopranos, a tenor, a baritone, a bass, and an orchestra augmented by tam-tam, tubular bells, glockenspiel, celesta, harmonium, and mandolins.

Challenging—like trying to direct traffic at Prague’s busiest intersection.

The work, nicknamed the Symphony of a Thousand, perfectly evokes the surging movement of traffic. In particular, we recommend the section Infirma nostri corporis virtute firmans perpeti (Fortifying the weakness of our body through strength to persevere). Or even better, the symphony’s already mentioned conclusion with its text from Goethe’s Faust: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis. All that is transient is but a metaphor.