Mahler in Amsterdam - Ten symphonies in Amsterdam for the first time in 30 years

‘The Symphony must be like the world’, said Mahler, ‘it must embrace everything’. Even as a child he was playing with extremes: his first composition, at the age of ten, was a funeral march followed by a polka. Dance music and dirges, tenderness and extreme violence, exquisite song-like melodies and brash military marches, evocations of the heartbreaking beauty of nature and nightmare visions of the abyss – it’s all there.

The miracle is that these teeming musical collages somehow hang together, tell compelling stories, and for all the apparent self-dramatisation, they can seem to be addressed to us personally. With his ability to confront the fullness of life in all its joy and terror, Mahler can help us confront and endure stark reality. He can take us to the edge of despair, then sing us the sweetest songs of consolation. If we allow ourselves to make this journey with him, we may find that we too are the better for it.

In his own lifetime Mahler was revered as a conductor, but only a precious few understood his music. Most scratched their heads or sneered. But one crucial early champion was Willem Mengelberg, chief conductor of the Concertgebouw, who gave the world the first ever Mahler Festival in 1920, at a time when Mahler remained a minority interest even in his adopted home-city Vienna. After the Second World War, when his name was erased throughout Nazi-occupied or -Allied territories, the Concertgebouw spearheaded the Mahler revival, soon taken up throughout the world. There is no more fitting place to celebrate Mahler’s enduring significance than this great concert hall, one of the first in the world to welcome him.