Mahler's great aesthetic project was to "create a new world with the symphony”. He composed nine, a fateful number if we remember that Beethoven (a model for all), Schubert and Bruckner (a master for Mahler) also left only nine completed symphonies. Mahler supposedly said that this symphony was his tenth, considering the Song of the Earth as the ninth... But he died at the age of 51 after several years of illness, without having heard its premiere the following year in Vienna.

Mahler saw his Ninth Symphony as the ultimate grail. As was already the case in the Song of the Earth, it ends with a farewell to the world that has made history. This long form requires a great deal of mastery to bring almost an hour and a half of music to converge towards the beyond that gives the impression of passing on to the other side of the world. The harmonies of this symphony are more nostalgic and sublime than ever, the swan song of a composer who bids his farewell. At the beginning of the score Mahler wrote: O beauty and love, farewell! farewell! His Ninth Symphony undoubtedly rings like a testament, but it is above all the culmination of twenty years of symphonic compositions: in this both intimate and grandiose fresco, he remembers his life, taking the expressive means of the romantic orchestra to their most extraordinary limits.