Mahler’s Eighth Symphony– written for a large orchestra, several soloists, and such extensive choral forces as to have earned itself the nickname “Symphony of a Thousand”–was, like most of this composer’s music, the product of a furiously busy holiday. He completed the draft of the enormous work between June and August of 1906 at his summer home in Maiernigg, in Carinthia, and wrote to the conductor Willem Mengelberg: “It is the biggest thing I have done so far. Imagine that the universe begins to vibrate and to sound. These are no longer human voices but planets and sun rotating.”