The Commemorative Plaque on Mánes Bridge

“On the 19th day of May of this year, Vienna’s morning newspapers announced: ‘At 11 o’clock last night, the former music director of the Court Opera, the composer Gustav Mahler, took his last breath.’ Deeply moved, I went to fulfil my duty, and, to my amazement, I saw that this ungrateful city—the one that had been Mahler’s second home, that had witnessed his beginnings, his greatest triumphs, but also his fall and his death—remained unchanged. The streets bustled as on any other weekday; the faces of passers-by were smiling or serious, the façades gracious or gloomy, and nowhere was there even a trace of the great event that had taken place only a few hours earlier.”

– from the memoirs of Josef Bohumil Foerster

Looking for a commemorative plaque on Mánes Bridge? Perhaps you took the wrong route. Mahler never crossed it, nor did Antonín Dvořák, whose star you will find on the opposite bank. When Mahler died on 18 May 1911, construction had just begun. He did not even live so see the premiere of his last completed symphony despite the fact that, fearing the examples of Ludwig van Beethoven and Anton Bruckner, who died after finishing their Ninths, he avoided the unlucky number for a long time. He had originally begun writing his orchestral work Das Lied von der Erde as his ninth symphony, but then he crossed out that designation. Then, on the other hand, when composing his Ninth, he spoke of it as his Tenth to make doubly sure.

This is what the last movement of Mahler’s last symphony sounds like: