Die Welt ohne Schwere (2024)
(The World without Gravity )

This piece was originally written for chamber orchestra, and commissioned as a companion piece or overture to a chamber arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s fourth symphony, and premiered at Festival & Friends in Copenhagen, the summer of 2024.

I discovered that Mahler had originally conceived the fourth symphony in six movements, and planned out several ideas and themes that did not make it into the piece in the end. For example, the childlike image of heavenly bliss in the symphony’s finale was originally planned to contrast a movement describing the heavy burden of earthly life, a movement based on his Lied “Das irdische Leben”.

Some of these ideas inspired me to write my work — I also borrowed the iconic sleigh bells from the first movement and quoted a short passage from the finale’s soprano solo.

It seemed fitting also to borrowed the title of one of the movements he didn’t write — Die Welt ohne Schwere, the world without gravity — especially since the contrast between weightlessness and weight runs throughout the piece. The middle section in E-flat minor is a heavy lament for brass, offset with two more “floaty” outer sections, the first one contemplative and elegiac, the last one sweet and nostalgic.

The version for full orchestra was completed in 2025. If the piece is performed in a program with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, an off-stage soprano may sing the brief quotation in bars 137-140.

Matias Vestergård, 2025