1 CD - 33C37-7537 - (p) 1985.7

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)







Symphony No. 1

54' 46"
I. Langsam, Schleppend. / Im Anfang sehr gemächlich
[Tracks 1-4] 16' 06"

II. Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell
 [Tracks 5-8] 8' 06"

III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen
 [Tracks 9-12] 10' 40"

IV. Stürmisch bewegt
 [Tracks 13-22] 19' 54"





 
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
Eliahu INBAL
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
Alte Oper, Frankfurt (Germania) - 28 febbraio / 1 marzo 1985

Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Recording Director
Yoshiharu Kawaguchi (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Clemens Müller (Hessischer Rundfunk)

Recording Engineer
Peter Willemoës (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Detlev Kittler (Hessischer Rundfunk)

Editing
Hideki Kukizaki

Edizione CD
Denon | 33C37-7537 | (1 CD) | durata 54' 46" | (p) 1985.7 | DDD

Note
Co-production with Hessischer Rundfunk
Specia thanks to Brüel & Kjær.












Mahler wrote his First Symphony in D Major at the age of 28 when conductor together with Arthur Nikisch at the City Theatre in Leipzig. At the premiere of the work by the young composer - he had by then advanced to be Director of the Royal Hungarian Opera - in Budapest a year later, it was announced in the programme without further elaboration as a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts”. The first part was formed by the first movement, a later deleted andante and the dance-like movement in A Major, at the end of which the following instruction was to be found: “Make a considerable pause here before starting the next movement”. The second part of the symphonic poem was formed then, as now, of the slow movement in d minor and the immediately following final movement; the work therefore originally had five movements. The public and the press reacted negatively to the premiere on November 20th 1889. Besides a well-meaning discussion in “Pester Lloyd” and a partially bad review in “Pesti Hirlab”, the “Neue Pester Journal” published in its features section a scathin criticism, the end of which read as follows: “If we summarize all of this in one overall impression, we can only say that Mahler is worthy of being counted amongst the foremost in his field, not only as far as his eminent talents as a conductor are concerned, but also because he is similar to other leading conductors in that he is not a composer of symphonies.... We will not for this reason be any less grateful in recognizing his successful efforts as Director of the Opera, and will see him on the conductor’s rostrum time and again with pleasure, provided he does not conduct his own works.”
After such a negative judgement of his abilities as a composer, Mahler was bound to feel misunderstood. For the next performances of the symphony (1893 in Hamburg and 1894 in Weimar), he wrote an explanatory programme so that his work could be better understood and named the symphony “The Titan” in imitation of Jean Paul.
Part 1: From the days of youth, fruit and thorns.
l. Spring without end. The introduction depicts the awakening of nature in the early morning.
2. Flower movement (andante)
3. In full sail (scherzo)
Part 2: Commedia umana.
4. Stranded. A funeral march in the manner of Callot. The following may serve as an explanation, if one is required: The author received the external stimulus for this masterpiece from the parodic picture “The Huntsman’s Burial” known to all children in South Germany, which he found in an old book of children's fairy tales the animals of the forest are accompanying the coffin of the dead forester to the grave; hares are carrying the banner, at the front is a group of Bohemian musicians accompanied by musical cats; toads, crows and other four-footed and feathered forest animals strike droll poses as they accompany the procession. The piece is at this point intended to express a mood which is sometimes ironic and sometimes terriby oppressive, followed immediately by
5. Dall'inferno al Paradiso (allegro furioso), the sudden expression of a heart wounded to the core.
Mahler’s programmatic explanations did not make it any easier to understand his work. On the contrary, he had to experience how the audience was misdirected by them, and he therefore dropped both explanation and title before the fourth performance of the symphony in Berlin in 1896. The work had moreover experienced major musical surgery before this performance: it had no longer five, but four movements. Mahler had deleted the original second movement (flower movement, andante) from the piece and not replaced it. It was in this new classic four-movement version that the symphony, after a thorough revision of the instrumentation, later went into print.
In 1884, the year in which the first sketches for the First Symphony were made, Mahler had composed the “Songs of a Wayfarer", based on four of his own poems. They were an attempt to process the bitter experience of his unhappy love for the singer Johanne Richter from Kassel, who he had met whilst Deputy Orchestra Leader at Kassel Theatre. The First Symphony as well drew its inspiration from this profound experience, although Mahler later expressed the reservation to the music critic Max Marschalk “that the symphony goes beyond the love affair; it is based on it, that is to say the one preceded the other in the emotional life of the artist. But the external experience was the stimulus and not the content of the work.” The “external experience” of the unhappy romance in Kassel is included together with the melodies from the Kassel period in his Leipzig symphony: the theme “I walked this morning across a field” (the second of the “Songs of a Wayfarer") appears in the first movement of the symphony. Mahler developed the second movement from the song “May Dance in the Country”, which he had written as early as 1880; and finally in the third movement can be heard the folk melody “By the Road there stood a Lime Tree", which Mahler also used in his final wayfarer’s song. The wellknown French children’s song “Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?” appears as a ghostly and insidious canon to open and close the third movement. This movement, with its extreme contrasts between the macabre and the scornful parody, the vulgar and the dream-like melancholy was initially misunderstood like no other. In it, the young composer freed himself from his experiences. Mahler described the ironic oppressive sultriness of the movement as “heart-rending, tragic irony”, and it is followed in the finale by the “battle of the hero for the true victory”. In a letter to Richard Strauss he wrote, “I intend to show a battle in which victory is always furthest from the fighter just when he believes it is closest. This is the essence of every spiritual battle. For it is not that simple to become or to be a hero.”
Mahler did not translate his heart-rending experience into music in the First Symphony - that would have been programme music. The colour of his mood evoked by memories and present feelings produced themes and affected the overall direction of their musical development, without ever becoming directly involved in the musical process. Thus he created a complete composition which is also a confession. The symphony has the elemental force of the genial juvenile composition in its excess of feeling, in the unconditional and unconscious courage in finding new expressions, in the richness of its invention. It is music and it is experience. “I have a strange feeling when I conduct all these works,” wrote Mahler two years before his death after a performance of the First Symphony in New York. “A burningly painful feeling crystallizes inside me. What sort of a world is this, which throws up such sounds and figures in its image! Such things as the funeral march and the storm which breaks out after it seem to me to be an accusation against the Creator.... ”
Andreas Maul