I am the Music Historian at the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, providing program notes, lectures, and curated research for their upcoming performances. Learn more about them and purchase tickets at www.njfestivalorchestra.org

Selected Program Notes:

Season Opener | October 13, 2018

Season Finale, Mahler’s First Symphony | May 20, 2017

“A symphony must be like the world—it must contain everything.” - Gustav Mahler  

When we think of the great symphonists, we must put Mahler in a class of himself, not because his symphonies are superior (although they might be), but because of their exclusivity and how specifically Mahler approached this mature genre. Compared to his predecessors, his output was relatively small and, more importantly, almost entirely symphonic. The symphony meant the world to Mahler, literally, and his first is a natural, yet puzzling, place to start understanding why. 

Mahler was not unique in his structural approach to this symphony. It had been a national trend, for about 50 years, to confront the new limits that Beethoven set for the symphony—particularly in his 9th. Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler, are but a few that felt appointed to this. Mahler is unique, however, in the way he presents his materials, both in depth and confluence. We hear this right from the opening of his first symphony. The music is more concerned with atmosphere and ambience than actual musical material. Mahler is setting the stage, musically depicting open space in his sonic landscape. He goes so far as to mark trumpets off stage, “at a very far distance." The first movement eventually moves to its exposition, filling that said space with themes of nature and peace. This music is taken from an earlier song cycle, Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), one of Mahler’s first canonical works. There is blissful comfort in this music, but it is not triumphant, as the introduction may have suggested. The mysterious introductory music returns, followed by a dramatic build to that anticipated triumphant end. 

A compulsive ländler, a three-step dance believed to be an early version of the waltz, follows as the second movement. The third movement is when we really hear the character of the Mahler we recognize today—ironic, manic music, displaying damaged innocence, and shifting from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes without warning. This movement, in three distinct sections, is a small seed of this behavior, but, nevertheless, ever present. The first section is a darkened version of the nursery rhyme Frère Jacques. Mahler’s initial inspiration was an ironic image of animals mourning a hunter, crying in a funereal procession (this is from a satirical painting by Mortiz von Schwind, entitled “The Hunter’s Funeral). The second section is rather unexpected, and almost feels out of place in this movement. Mahler fashions together a small klezmer band from his instrumentation, a traditional music group of European Jewish heritage. He elevates this communal Bohemian music to the high art concert stage, but the sound is exaggerated, almost brash. And when the unexpected has seemed to run its course, Mahler quotes his Songs of a Wayfarer cycle again to begin the third section. The sound is lyrical and sublime—a fleeting sense of paradise. As Mahler closes the movement, recalling all the previous themes as if they were members of a dysfunctional family, the music is unsettling and any sense of finality is shattered by the instant segue to the cacophonous opening of the final movement (this idea very much harkens back to the corresponding place in Beethoven 9). The composer explains his music: “now ironic and merry, now uncanny and brooding. Upon which—immediately—Dall’inferno follows as the sudden despairing cry of a heart wounded to its depths.” 

Mahler’s process in reaching the final form of this symphony—and the public’s reaction during its first years— was as bipolar as the music itself. Despite the well-rounded 4th movement, which recalls first movement themes and reconciles the work in a triumphant D major finale, the Viennese audience misunderstood its intent. They may have felt the symphony as a genre was violated, while audiences in Prague and Amsterdam understood Mahler’s exaggerations and juxtapositions. The work didn’t reach its final form until the twentieth century. It first existed as a symphonic poem in five movements, each with programmatic titles. Later, Mahler titled it “Titan: A Tone Poem in the Form of a Symphony”. Finally, he rejected all previous extra-musical titles (including “Titan", although that nickname has remained, at least colloquially. “Titan” is the title of a novel by the German author Jean Paul, most likely Mahler’s inspiration), and reduced it to the classic 4-movement layout of a symphony. Although we may never know why Mahler had such indecisive feelings towards his premier symphony, we can speculate as to why his material found its final form as a symphony. The contrasting dimensions of nature, open space, pure love and joy, with satire, irony, corruption, and terror, are but a few necessities in Mahler’s symphony, which "must be like the world—it must contain everything.” Mahler’s hyperbole is quite ambitious, but it is this idea that committed him to create ten of the most spectacular works of shared musical and human expression in Western history. 

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