Barbara Bannigan

The 2025 Polar Music Prize is awarded to Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan.

At the beginning of the 21st century, I was in the midst of rehearsing a recital program with the great Dutch pianist and conductor Reinbert de Leeuw. Reinbert was my mentor and friend, and the founder of the Schoenberg Ensemble. We worked together for more than 20 years. Reinbert was putting together a program for us...a world, in fact...which centred around the fin de siècle period in Vienna, at the turning point of the 19th to the 20th century. He selected songs from Alban Berg, Schonberg, Webern, as well as Zemlinsky and Hugo Wolf. All were written early in the composers’ lives, during a very intense period of development in the world of classical music. Reinbert insisted on including the songs of one more composer: Alma Mahler. 

He felt that not only her music, but her entire being, and even the myths surrounding her, epitomized the word sehnsucht, which was a feeling so central to this time. Sehnsucht is a hard word to translate, but has to do with nostalgia, with melancholy, with being in one place but wanting to be somewhere else, with someone else. 

Almost 100 years after Alma Mahler’s songs were published, Reinbert and I were performing them alongside the songs of her teacher Zemlinsky, and other composers including Schoenberg who Alma knew and supported until his death. Also the 7 early songs of Alban Berg, the composer who dedicated his violin concerto to Alma’s 3rd daughter Manon who died tragically at only 18 years old, “To the Memory of an Angel”.

In Alma Mahler’s songs we found a tender quality, combined at times with feverish restlessness that burst out in a kind of frustrated passion, or so we imagined. We wished there were more, and wondered what might have happened if she had continued to compose? What might have happened if her husband Gustav had encouraged her compositional journey instead of demanding that she put down her pencil and close this part of her being, in order to become his wife? 

During the touring of this program, which lasted 10 years, we spoke much of Alma Mahler, and I became fascinated, reading everything I could on her, as well as what she herself wrote about her own life and experiences. And during that time I met and became friends with her granddaughter, Marina Mahler. And as Marina - who so tirelessly advocates for the power of music and of music-making, and is especially connected to nature and to children - asked me to write a few words, I remembered these conversations, these discoveries. I remembered how it was to sing these songs, to be immersed in Alma Mahler’s compositional world, and I look at these photographs of a woman who made choices, who perhaps longed to have made other choices, who knows? And every new detail fascinates, and if I look closely, I imagine I glimpse the fleeting presence of sehnsucht.