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Mahler’s first song cycle, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, was composed between 1883 and 1885. At that time, the young composer fell passionately in love with the soprano Johanna Richter. She did not reciprocate his feelings, and out of Mahler’s disappointments, frustrations, and suffering, the song cycle was born.
Amidst the turbulent years of the Great Purge — a large-scale campaign of persecutions in the Soviet Union — Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony. The authorities interpreted the work, with its ecstatic finale, as the story of a Soviet hero whose personality was forged through various crises, ultimately triumphing in the finale and looking optimistically towards the future. However, others heard in the four-part symphony a hidden criticism of the regime.