The composer Mahler described the finale of his Symphony No. 6 as “the hero on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him, as a tree is felled.” Sometimes called his “Tragic” Symphony, he wrote this work during a happy time in his life, after his marriage to his love Alma and the birth of his second daughter. To open the program, Bruce Wood Dance Dallas interprets another work by Mahler, the Songs of a Wayfarer song cycle, written after an earlier unhappy romantic quest.