Proms 5: The best musical account of dying?

Mahler write his Ninth Symphony, which he never heard performed, in1909-10. At the time he wrote the symphony there was much suffering in his life. Maria, his eldest daughter, had died of scarlet fever. He’d been forced out of his job as the Artistic Director of the Vienna Court Opera and diagnosed with a serious and potentially life-threatening heart condition. And both he and his wife Alma, who was 19 years younger than Mahler, were unhappy in their marriage. This unhappiness is to be heard in his Ninth Symphony, which is called “existential” by last night’s conductor Philipp von Steinaecker and “music coming from another world…from eternity,” by Herbert von Karajan. But there is also joy, not least in nature, and some, possibly drunken, rumbustiousness. The symphony was judged the fourth best symphony by an international collection of conductors. What, I wondered (and probably you do as well), were the first three? Well, here you are: the Eroica, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, came in…