Jaap van Zweden believes that the music of Gustav Mahler is part of his DNA

Gustav Mahler’s star fell in the decades after his death in 1911, and it was only in the 1950s and ’60s, through the advocacy of influential conductors like Leonard Bernstein and Bruno Walter, that he finally took his rightful place on orchestral programs worldwide. 

Today, Mahler’s symphonies (nine plus an incomplete 10th), with their life-and-death emotions and transcendent moments, are part of the bedrock of the classical-music repertoire, with orchestras performing season-long cycles and returning to these works again and again. 

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present two of these pieces — the Symphony No. 6 in A Minor and Symphony No. 7 in E Minor when it undertakes a five-city, eight-concert European tour from May 14 through 23.

The centerpiece of the trip will be May 14-15 performances at the Mahler Festival 2025 in Amsterdam’s renowned Concertgebouw. The CSO is the first North American orchestra to appear at the festival, which has been presented just two times previously, starting in 1920.

Before the CSO’s departure, it will feature each of the two Mahler works on programs in Symphony Center — Symphony No. 7 (April 17-19) and Symphony No. 6 (May 8-9) — giving Chicago listeners a preview of what European audiences will hear shortly thereafter.

Leading both the tour and the lead-up concerts is Jaap van Zweden, who stepped down last year as music director of the New York Philharmonic and now holds the same post with orchestras in Seoul and Paris. The Dutch maestro, 64, has guest conducted the Chicago Symphony regularly since his 2008 CSO debut.

“The beauty of Mahler’s music is that it is a roller-coaster of emotions,” said van Zweden, “and sometimes Mahler finds peace in his music and that is when the beauty starts to come. What we have to realize as a listener is that he always takes us with his personal problems, his personal misère (misery). To lose a child and have a very difficult marriage is, of course, not very easy. Then sometimes, he just lets it go, and he comes into beauty, and he comes closer to the eternal light.”   

Mahler is one of van Zweden’s specialties, and he led CSO performances of the Symphony No. 6 during a visit in April 2022. Music critic Lawrence A. Johnson described it in the Chicago Classical Review as a season highlight and “one of the most powerful and compelling Mahler concerts of recent years.”

Among the first pieces van Zweden played when he became concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw in 1979 at age 19 were Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, which has a major violin solo, and Das klagende Lied (Song of Lamentation), the earliest of the composer’s pieces to survive. And Mahler went on to become a big part of the repertoire that the violinist played during his 18 years with Amsterdam orchestra before he turned full time to conducting. “I played Mahler with Bernstein, with [Bernard] Haitink, and with your great maestro, [Georg] Solti,” he said. “[There is] a big tradition, I think, in my DNA with the music of Mahler.”

“Coming out of the dark and into the light — that is the whole story of these two symphonies, which are so close to each other.” — Jaap van Zweden on Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies

Likewise, throughout the CSO’s history, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler have had a major place in its repertoire. Frederick Stock, the CSO’s second music director, and the ensemble introduced the composer’s music to Chicago audiences in 1907, performing the Fifth Symphony. Since then, there have been notable performances — in Chicago, at the Ravinia Festival, in Carnegie Hall and on tour throughout Asia and Europe — as well as on numerous award-winning recordings.

“Through the whole history of the Chicago Symphony — for decade after decade — this orchestra has been proven to be one of the top Mahler orchestras in the world,” van Zweden said. He believes this extraordinary tradition makes the CSO an ideal participant for the Mahler extravaganza in Amsterdam.  “I’m really happy and proud to lead the Chicago Symphony in this festival,” he said.

The conductor called the Sixth and Seventh symphonies an “incredible pairing” because “they really belong to each other,” each suffused with varying degrees of darkness. Mahler wrote the Sixth Symphony, which he originally subtitled Tragic, during the summers of 1903 and ’04, a happy time for the composer both in his family and professional life. But he had a foreboding of doom happening in his future.

He began the Seventh Symphony during the summer of 1904 and completed the five-movement work a year later, and tragedy struck before its premiere in 1908. In 1907, his daughter died of scarlet fever, he was forced to resign his directorship at the Vienna State Opera, and he was diagnosed with a devastating heart condition. It is believed that Mahler altered the work’s original upbeat nature to reflect these life blows in some of the revisions that he made in the intervening months.

“It was a very dark time in his life,” van Zweden said. “He had many, but this one was really, really obvious in his music. And going from Six into Seven and at the end of the Seventh Symphony, coming out of the dark and into the light — that is the whole story of these two symphonies, which are so close to each other.”

The Seventh Symphony is “absolutely not the most popular” of Mahler’s works in the form, but van Zweden is nonetheless a fan, saying that he is especially drawn to the two Nachtmusik (Night Music) movements in the work, which he described as chamber music of “unbelievable beauty.” He also praised the “triumph” of the final movement, with its spirited role for the timpani.

“It’s a fantastic symphony,” he said. “And, finally, he is happy again.”