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Home Podcast Photos Upcoming Events Videos Concert Reviews Radio Broadcast Schedule History of the EPO Mission and Values Board of Directors 2024-2025 Sponsors 2024-2025 Philharmonic Gives Back Donors 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024 Thoughtful Tributes 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024
Symphony No. 1
By Gustav Mahler

In many ways you may think of Mahler as the final and quintessential Romantic composer.  His life (1860-1911) spanned the final decades of the 19th century and the political and cultural ferment of that time while his death preceded the horrors of the world wars and the rise of authoritarianism in Europe.  He was raised in Moravia (a Czech-speaking region not far from Vienna) though he and his family spoke German.  More significantly, he was Jewish in a predominantly Christian social environment.  One of 13 children, he watched eight of his siblings die in their youth; Mahler himself inherited a weak heart that compromised his health throughout his life.  

These biographical facts may help to explain the fairly neurotic adult that he became:  Mahler could never feel himself at home.  He grew up isolated from his Czech neighbors; though he spoke German he was always recognized (and generally scorned) as a Jew (despite converting to Christianity later in life) and was never fully accepted into Viennese society of the time, where the stamp of anti-Semitism was powerful and ugly.  His early life experiences prefigured themes in his music—the struggles of humans to find acceptance in a dark and doleful world.  Mahler biographer Deryck V. Cooke has written:  “[Mahler] lived out the spiritual torment of disinherited modern man in his art, and the man is the music.” 

Much of Mahler’s orchestral music was influenced by song, and Mahler wrote several important song cycles with orchestral accompaniment.  The text of one of these songs, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”) concludes with these words: “Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, // In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!” (“I live alone, in my heaven // in my love, in my song.”)  The artist faces an unaccepting world but a world whose troubles give voice to his most private and powerful feelings, which he shares in his art.  Jessye Norman and the New York Philharmonic have recorded a most wonderful performance of this song whose words pretty fairly describe the composer himself.
Despite the dour tone of the previous paragraphs, Mahler was in fact remarkably successful in his relatively short life.  Though impoverished as a child, he picked up accordion and piano and began composing at an early age (interestingly, his first composition was a dirge!).  His precocity was quickly recognized, and he was able to leave the Moravian countryside for the Vienna Conservatory when he was 15.  Realizing that composition would not likely pay the bills of adult life, the young musician turned to conducting for remuneration, and at the young age of 37 became conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, a position he maintained for the next ten years.  He married fellow composer and musician Alma Schindler in 1902 and had two daughters.  In 1907 he came to the United States as an international celebrity and led the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera orchestras.  Though regularly mocked in the ethnocentric musical enclave of Vienna, Mahler was revered by many of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, among them Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Alban Berg.  In the perverse social miasma of the years leading up to the Third Reich, Mahler’s music was considered decadent and ignored.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that Leonard Bernstein, himself a Jew, restored Mahler’s place in the pantheon of great composers when he performed all nine symphonies in Vienna—and to world-wide applause.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 was composed between 1887 and 1888 although it underwent a number of revisions before its final form in 1896.  At first Mahler conceived of the symphony programmatically, in his words a “symphonic poem.”  For several of the movements he used the name “Titan,” an allusion to the 900-page sentimental novel of the same name by German writer Jean Paul Richter.  In the novel, the protagonist faces great perils in an evil world; only by building his inner strength does he finally thrive.  In the course of the symphony’s development, Mahler dropped not only the reference to the novel but also one of the original five movements, but the symphony maintains the novel’s essentially heroic qualities.

What remains is a symphony that is classical in form though Mahler put the fast-moving scherzo in second position before the famous slow third movement.  This symphony shares many characteristics of the later eight symphonies (Symphony No. 10 was never completed).  Mahler writes for a large orchestra, with especially expanded horn and brass sections.  His symphonies often quote popular music (listen for Klezmer-like sections in Symphony No. 1) and incorporate sounds of birds or distant mountain horns for color.  Themes from early movements may appear later in the symphony but always in another context or with some emendation.  Some listeners have found his melodies lachrymose, yet there are always striking tunes, many borrowed from the composer’s other works.  Finally, especially toward the end of his composing career, tonality itself disappears:  the music has entered the twentieth century.  

Dropping the convention of providing musical instructions in Italian, Mahler begins the first movement “Langsam, schleppend.  Immer sehr gemächlich.” (Slowly, dragging.  Very restrained.); all movements are similarly introduced.  The movement begins quietly; day breaks as the strings shimmer underneath a descending figure of sustained half notes.  There is a fanfare as light awakens the forest.  Distant horns sound, a cuckoo intones his two-note chant.  The music modulates through a number of keys but ends emphatically in D major.

With its dance rhythms, particularly the lilting ländler-like Trio section, the second movement leaves the symphony’s evocation of the natural world for a visit with its human inhabitants. Mahler instructs the orchestra to “move strongly, but not too quickly” at first.  He notes that the Trio should be more restrained.

Movement three opens with the unusual choice of string bass to sing a minor-mode version of “Frère Jacques” (its German equivalent “Brüder Jakob”) over a tympani ostinato.  In this haunting section Mahler was inspired by a famous wood-cut of a forest funeral, the animals carrying the body of a hunter through the trees.  Mahler indicates that the tempo should be “stately and measured, without dragging.”  You might wonder if Mahler is exercising a little irony here, as the hunter’s prey are in this case doing away with their nemesis.  

Finally, the final movement, which opens as its instructions indicate—“Stürmisch bewegt”—stormily agitated.  And that’s exactly what happens.  The movement begins as if a bolt of lightning had ignited the stage as strings swirl and percussion crashes.  The natural calm of the first movement gives way to apparently implacable, frightening forces.  In its raucous development the movement recalls fragments of earlier themes in the symphony—as well as references to music by Wagner and Liszt.  Yet, by the composition’s end, peace—in the triumphant key of D major—is restored.  Many listeners have suggested that the symphony is autobiographical of the composer’s early life.  In that case, anxiety and pain have given way to joy.

Symphony No. 1
By Gustav Mahler

In many ways you may think of Mahler as the final and quintessential Romantic composer.  His life (1860-1911) spanned the final decades of the 19th century and the political and cultural ferment of that time while his death preceded the horrors of the world wars and the rise of authoritarianism in Europe.  He was raised in Moravia (a Czech-speaking region not far from Vienna) though he and his family spoke German.  More significantly, he was Jewish in a predominantly Christian social environment.  One of 13 children, he watched eight of his siblings die in their youth; Mahler himself inherited a weak heart that compromised his health throughout his life.  

These biographical facts may help to explain the fairly neurotic adult that he became:  Mahler could never feel himself at home.  He grew up isolated from his Czech neighbors; though he spoke German he was always recognized (and generally scorned) as a Jew (despite converting to Christianity later in life) and was never fully accepted into Viennese society of the time, where the stamp of anti-Semitism was powerful and ugly.  His early life experiences prefigured themes in his music—the struggles of humans to find acceptance in a dark and doleful world.  Mahler biographer Deryck V. Cooke has written:  “[Mahler] lived out the spiritual torment of disinherited modern man in his art, and the man is the music.” 

Much of Mahler’s orchestral music was influenced by song, and Mahler wrote several important song cycles with orchestral accompaniment.  The text of one of these songs, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”) concludes with these words: “Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, // In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!” (“I live alone, in my heaven // in my love, in my song.”)  The artist faces an unaccepting world but a world whose troubles give voice to his most private and powerful feelings, which he shares in his art.  Jessye Norman and the New York Philharmonic have recorded a most wonderful performance of this song whose words pretty fairly describe the composer himself.
Despite the dour tone of the previous paragraphs, Mahler was in fact remarkably successful in his relatively short life.  Though impoverished as a child, he picked up accordion and piano and began composing at an early age (interestingly, his first composition was a dirge!).  His precocity was quickly recognized, and he was able to leave the Moravian countryside for the Vienna Conservatory when he was 15.  Realizing that composition would not likely pay the bills of adult life, the young musician turned to conducting for remuneration, and at the young age of 37 became conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, a position he maintained for the next ten years.  He married fellow composer and musician Alma Schindler in 1902 and had two daughters.  In 1907 he came to the United States as an international celebrity and led the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera orchestras.  Though regularly mocked in the ethnocentric musical enclave of Vienna, Mahler was revered by many of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, among them Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Alban Berg.  In the perverse social miasma of the years leading up to the Third Reich, Mahler’s music was considered decadent and ignored.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that Leonard Bernstein, himself a Jew, restored Mahler’s place in the pantheon of great composers when he performed all nine symphonies in Vienna—and to world-wide applause.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 was composed between 1887 and 1888 although it underwent a number of revisions before its final form in 1896.  At first Mahler conceived of the symphony programmatically, in his words a “symphonic poem.”  For several of the movements he used the name “Titan,” an allusion to the 900-page sentimental novel of the same name by German writer Jean Paul Richter.  In the novel, the protagonist faces great perils in an evil world; only by building his inner strength does he finally thrive.  In the course of the symphony’s development, Mahler dropped not only the reference to the novel but also one of the original five movements, but the symphony maintains the novel’s essentially heroic qualities.

What remains is a symphony that is classical in form though Mahler put the fast-moving scherzo in second position before the famous slow third movement.  This symphony shares many characteristics of the later eight symphonies (Symphony No. 10 was never completed).  Mahler writes for a large orchestra, with especially expanded horn and brass sections.  His symphonies often quote popular music (listen for Klezmer-like sections in Symphony No. 1) and incorporate sounds of birds or distant mountain horns for color.  Themes from early movements may appear later in the symphony but always in another context or with some emendation.  Some listeners have found his melodies lachrymose, yet there are always striking tunes, many borrowed from the composer’s other works.  Finally, especially toward the end of his composing career, tonality itself disappears:  the music has entered the twentieth century.  

Dropping the convention of providing musical instructions in Italian, Mahler begins the first movement “Langsam, schleppend.  Immer sehr gemächlich.” (Slowly, dragging.  Very restrained.); all movements are similarly introduced.  The movement begins quietly; day breaks as the strings shimmer underneath a descending figure of sustained half notes.  There is a fanfare as light awakens the forest.  Distant horns sound, a cuckoo intones his two-note chant.  The music modulates through a number of keys but ends emphatically in D major.

With its dance rhythms, particularly the lilting ländler-like Trio section, the second movement leaves the symphony’s evocation of the natural world for a visit with its human inhabitants. Mahler instructs the orchestra to “move strongly, but not too quickly” at first.  He notes that the Trio should be more restrained.

Movement three opens with the unusual choice of string bass to sing a minor-mode version of “Frère Jacques” (its German equivalent “Brüder Jakob”) over a tympani ostinato.  In this haunting section Mahler was inspired by a famous wood-cut of a forest funeral, the animals carrying the body of a hunter through the trees.  Mahler indicates that the tempo should be “stately and measured, without dragging.”  You might wonder if Mahler is exercising a little irony here, as the hunter’s prey are in this case doing away with their nemesis.  

Finally, the final movement, which opens as its instructions indicate—“Stürmisch bewegt”—stormily agitated.  And that’s exactly what happens.  The movement begins as if a bolt of lightning had ignited the stage as strings swirl and percussion crashes.  The natural calm of the first movement gives way to apparently implacable, frightening forces.  In its raucous development the movement recalls fragments of earlier themes in the symphony—as well as references to music by Wagner and Liszt.  Yet, by the composition’s end, peace—in the triumphant key of D major—is restored.  Many listeners have suggested that the symphony is autobiographical of the composer’s early life.  In that case, anxiety and pain have given way to joy.