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Mahler's second symphony, the "Resurrection," was completed in 1894 after a long gestation. The first movement, originally a freestanding piece, was completed in 1888; in its original state it was called Todtenfeier ("Funeral Rites") after a translation by Mahler's friend Siegfried Lipiner of a Polish poem by Adam Mickiewicz. "It is the hero of my First Symphony [the 'Titan']", Mahler wrote of this movement, "whom I bear to the grave."
After a nocturnal slow movement and a typically sarcastic and menacing Scherzo, there comes a song for soprano, contralto and orchestra called Urlicht ("Primeval Light") which Mahler had also first intended as a standalone piece. The text, a hopeful short poem of deliverance from the world's woes, is from a collection of German folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn") from which Mahler would draw throughout his career; he turned to it again for the Third and Fourth symphonies as well as a number of freestanding orchestral songs.
The last movement sees the hushed, rapt entrance of a chorus, which first intones a text by the German Romantic poet Klopstock and proceeds with a poetic continuation penned by Mahler himself, each expressing the triumphant entrance of a man (the "Titan" of the First Symphony?) into heaven. This enormous choral movement, serving as the close of an enormous symphony (lasting well over an hour in performance), inevitably brings to mind the "Ode to Joy" at the end of Beethoven's similarly massive Ninth Symphony.
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