Gustav Mahler was a huge inspiration to conductor and composer Bruno Maderna. With a wink, he remarked on one occasion that: We will be forever linked by the fact that we both compose “music for conductors”. It is a wonderful experience when Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony (Auferstehungssinfonie) is performed in the 1,000-year-old Basel Minster during Easter to mark the occasion of Mahler’s 100th birthday. As Mahler himself conducted this work in the same place in 1903. In contrast, Maderna arranged Giovanni Gabrieli’s Canzoni for orchestra with the original church interior of San Marco in Venice and its acoustic requirements in mind.

The Zurich poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer wrote a type of modern hymn on the birth of Jesus in Peace on Earth (Friede auf Erden). The young Arnold Schoenberg set it to music and originally entered his choral work in a competition.