Symphony No. 1 in D Major

Symphony No. 1 in D Major, symphony by composer Gustav Mahler, also known as Titan. Begun in Leipzig while Mahler was serving as second conductor of the Stadttheater and drafted in about six weeks, it premiered in Budapest November 20, 1889, after Mahler assumed the post of musical director of the Royal Hungarian Opera. The work was considered unusually grand and ambitious for the time, especially for a composer who was then not yet thirty and better known as a conductor. The work would not win full acceptance in the concert hall until Leonard Bernstein began advocating Mahler’s symphonies in the 1960s.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 consciously evokes the heroic ideals of his day, so often lauded in the period’s literature and visual art. At the time of its premiere, it bore the title “Titan: a symphonic poem in the form of a symphony.” The allusion was to Jean Paul’s popular novel, Titan, in which the protagonist has only his inner strength as a defense against a world of evil. According to Mahler’s original descriptive program for the work, in which he elaborated that the “symphonic poem” was in two parts and not quite a symphony as such, the first half portrays “The Days of Youth, Flowers, and Thorns,” leading to an “awakening of nature,” or at least, an awareness thereof. By contrast, the second half is a human comedy, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the dark side of the world is exposed.

The work was not a success. Mahler began extensive revisions, even entirely extracting the original second of five movements and eliminating the title; that portion survived as an independent piece eventually named Blumine. Those revisions occupied him between 1893 and 1896; while few of the draft scores survive, a letter to Richard Strauss of 1894 indicates that Mahler rethought the instrumentation as well, scaling back the large orchestra envisioned in his original version. He published a four-movement version in 1899.

Symphony No. 1 failed to win acceptance during Mahler’s life, though enlightened listeners found much in it to admire. Mahler’s colleague and biographer, Bruno Walter, even compared the piece to one of the great literary masterpieces of the age, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the protagonist struggles for personal understanding amidst crushing disappointments. In this work, claims Walter, Mahler “finds artistic relief from a heart-rending experience. He does not illustrate in sound that which he had experienced—that would be ‘program music.’ But the mood of his soul, engendered by memory and present feeling produces themes and influences the general direction of their development without, however, introducing itself forcibly into the music issue. In that manner, a compact composition is born which, at the same time, is an avowal of the soul.”

The first movement begins with soft strings and winds in moods of pre-dawn mystery, gradually adding fragments of birdsong-like phrases and then a string theme of firm forward motion, as if evoking the composer’s beloved hobby of hiking in the mountains. Here, as was often the case in his music, Mahler rejected the usual Italian-language movement headings in favor of German phrases that, apparently, he felt better described what he had in mind. Having labeled this movement “Langsam. Schleppend. Wie ein Naturlaut—Immer sehr gemächlich,” he is requesting that it be played as first slowly, then as if dragging. “Like a voice of nature,” he declares, then adding “always very leisurely.” He does not wish it to sound hurried.

The second movement is, apparently, less concerned with nature than with humans, as Mahler introduces Ländler-like folk dance rhythms that evoke Franz Liszt and a pair of contrasting melodies, the first of which recurs after statement of the second Trio theme. Strings carry the larger portion of emphasis, with brighter coloring from woodwinds and brass. Mahler’s tempo marking “Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell—Trio. Recht gemächlich” suggests strong motion, though not too fast, to which notion he adds the notion of “quite leisurely.” He is still in no particular hurry to charge to the end.

Of the third movement, Mahler himself said he was thinking of an art print portraying forest animals escorting a great hunter to his grave. One imagines that the animals might celebrate such an occasion, though Mahler has them doing so in rather ironic fashion, to a dark, minor-key march derived from the old French folk song “Frère Jacques.” Perhaps he thought to imply that the dead hunter is, from a certain point of view, sleeping until those “morning bells” ring. For his chapter heading, Mahler specified “Feierlich and gemessen, ohne zu schleppen,” that is, “stately and measured, though without dragging.”

With musical allusions to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, the last movement is the longest of the four and the most determinedly dramatic. Mahler has asked for it to sound “Stürmisch bewegt,” that is, with stormy motion, and that is certainly what he has crafted. Swirling strings, forthright brass, and crashing percussion drive the music forward from its opening chords, which Mahler called “the cry of a wounded heart.” Mahler then begins to recall fragments of his nature music from the first movement. Perhaps the composer’s message is that nature may triumph when man cannot, for at last the tide is turned. Mahler concludes his Symphony No. 1 in a brilliant blaze of D major, banishing all the storms and stress. Listeners who prefer happy endings can rest assured that this is exactly what they shall receive: a reward well worth the wait in this - somewhat less than an hour in length - the shortest, and, in many ways, the most optimistic, of Mahler’s completed symphonies. By the close, there can be little doubt that here is the music of a gifted young man fully confident in compositional voice.