The Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) was born in Dusseldorf and studied at the Dusseldorf Academy. His teacher sent him to Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris to study the old masters and develop his potential. In 1850, after a stint

In his settings of songs from the von Armin and Bretano collection Das Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler set the martial Der Schildwache Nachtlied (The Sentinel’s Night Song), which is the musing of a night guard. As everyone slumbers around him, he

If Mahler could write a scary movie soundtrack, his symphonic poem Totenfeier (Funeral Rites) would be one of his contributions. This 1888 work, which one writer described as a ‘huge symphonic funeral march,’ comes between his first two symphonies. If

For every composer, the first work of a series is a serious undertaking. For the composers who followed Beethoven, the symphony was a particularly daunting mountain. Gone were the days of a composer writing hundreds of symphonies: Haydn wrote 106,

Alma Mahler severely took her husband Gustav to task for composing a series of orchestral songs on texts dealing with the death of children. Merely two weeks after the birth of their second child, Alma found it incomprehensible and feared

In the summer 1907, Gustav Mahler’s mother in law suffered a mild heart attack. When the district physician was called to examine her, Gustav Mahler invited the physician to also take a look at him. To everyone’s surprise, Mahler was

While putting the finishing touches on the menacing finale of his Sixth Symphony in the summer of 1904, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) also drafted two central “Nachtmusiken” (Music of the Night) that would eventually become the second and fourth movements of

Aus “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen From Sinfonia (1968) Gustav MAHLER 10 Frühe Lieder (orch. Luciano BERIO) (2016) Released by Harmonia Mundi Mahler: Aus “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” – Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen ‘It seems