- By Kenneth Woods
In all the long history of symphonic music, with the possible exception of Berlioz, there has probably never been a symphonic debut as audacious as that of Gustav Mahler in his First Symphony.
Becoming Mahler
In the 130 years since it was written, this work has become so popular that is easy to forget how outrageous it must have seemed to early audiences. Mahler emerges in this breakthrough work fully formed. “Beethoven was lucky in his First Symphony to be able to be quite like Haydn. From the very beginning, I was cursed to be Mahler,” the composer wrote. Mahler’s orchestra was not only huge for its time, but used in shocking and unusual ways – from the famous double bass solo, to the offstage trumpets, to the standing horns on the last page – the piece overflows with new and strange ideas and stranger sounds. At one point Mahler asks for a special effect, scraping the strings with the wood of the bow, so unusual that he writes a footnote to make clear he really wants what he’s asked for: “not a mistake!”
Where does such daring and mastery come from? It’s a potent mix of musical innovation and personality, both strikingly fully developed. The First fully embodies Mahler’s love of nature, his fascination with vernacular music (it’s no accident one of our concerts starts with a Strauss waltz), his invocation of his Jewish roots (something that would inspire his younger colleagues Schoenberg, Ullmann, Korngold and Krása), his stylistic eclecticism, his radical ideas about form and time, and his mixing of song and symphony (on Saturday we present his first song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, from which he quotes extensively in the First). All of these crucial elements of his artistic identity are present and complete in this work. No other work of Mahler’s had so long and complicated a gestation as the First, but once the work was done, the making of Mahler was complete.
Mahler’s Influences
Musically, there are many important influences on Mahler’s early approach to the symphony. One of Mahler’s formative influences was Anton Bruckner, who taught Mahler counterpoint. Bruckner’s monumental approach to symphonic form opened the door for Mahler’s own, very different, expansion of the temporal horizons of the symphony. At our Friday chamber concert, we perform our first major work by Bruckner at MahlerFest, the String Quintet, a symphony for five players in all but name.
The greatest influence on Mahler the symphonist was always to be Beethoven, the composer who Mahler saw as his most essential forbear. During this year’s festival, we explore Mahler’s debt to Beethoven through a performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony as arranged for solo piano by Liszt. Mahler modelled the magical opening of his First Symphony on the opening of Beethoven’s Fourth, the first of hundreds of tips of the hat to Beethoven, which also include Mahler’s inclusion of the cuckoos from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in his First.
Mahler’s First Symphony was written in the early years of what was to be possibly the greatest conducting career in musical history. I believe that understanding Mahler the interpreter can help us understand Mahler the composer. Two other works of Beethoven will help illuminate Mahler’s approach to interpretation. In our Sunday concert, we open with Beethoven’s ‘Leonore” Overture No. 3, one of the works Mahler conducted most often. We’ll be performing this overture incorporating Mahler’s ‘Retuschen’, or changes of orchestration and expression, and in the symposium, I’ll be talking about how Mahler’s changes to Beethoven’s scores compare to his Retuschen of his own First Symphony. On Saturday night, we meet Mahler the arranger as we perform his powerful string orchestra version of Beethoven’s ‘Serioso’ String Quartet. Mahler’s arrangement was hugely controversial when it was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic, and Mahler abandoned his plan to arrange all the late Beethoven quartets. However, an important precedent was set – Mahler had shown the viability of such arrangements and opened the door for future string orchestra versions of Beethoven quartets by Felix Weingartner, Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Fürtwängler, and further string quartet arrangements by Schoenberg, Barshai and many others. My orchestration of Viktor Ullmann’s powerful Third String Quartet, which we also play on Sunday, might be seen as the great-grandchild of Mahler’s Beethoven arrangement.
Mahler’s Influence
Viktor Ullmann was one of the most talented and important composers of a generation of Central European Jewish composers whose musical development was profoundly shaped by Mahler’s influence. Ullmann and his contemporaries, who reached their musical maturity in the years between World War I and the 1930’s, were well on their way to reconciling many of the tensions between the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and the tonal language of Mahler and Strauss. Tragically, much of what this generation could have given the musical world was lost amidst the insanity of Nazi rule, as Jewish composers saw their music banned and suppressed. Many, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, one of the greatest operatic composers of the 20th Century whose Violin Concerto we perform in our Sunday concert, were forced into exile, and their music fell into near-total neglect.
Ullmann was one of the unluckiest. He was arrested and taken to the camp at Terezin outside Prague. Terezin had an important propaganda role for the Nazis. They allowed a certain amount of cultural life to flourish there in order to persuade the world that they were treating the Jews humanely. For a time, Terezin had a rich concert life, driven by composers Ullmann, Paval Haas, Gideon Klein and Hans Krása, all of whom wrote prolifically while there and had their music performed. Krása had penned the most celebrated of all the Terezin works, the children’s opera Brundibar, which was performed 55 times. The last performance was filmed for a distribution in a propaganda film made for the Red Cross. After that performance, on the 16th of October 1944, all of the participants in the production were forced into cattle trucks and sent to Auschwitz. Most were gassed immediately upon arrival on the 17th of October, including the children, the composers Krása, Ullmann and Haas, the director Kurt Gerron, and the musicians. Krása’s two short string trios which we perform on Friday, Tanec (Dance) and Passacaglia and Fuga, were the last works he completed.
But Mahler’s influence was soon to reach far beyond Central Europe. Benjamin Britten was hugely influenced by Mahler, and always cited Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde as his favorite work. It would also be Britten, like Mahler a conductor of genius, who premiered Blumine, the short movement Mahler cut from the First Symphony after its earliest performances, when it was rediscovered in the 1960’s. This year, we give the world premieres of a new critical edition of both Blumine and the First Symphony by Breitkopf & Härtel. Britten was, like Mahler a composer with a completely unique artistic personality, and like Mahler, that personality seems fully formed even in his earliest works. Britten was a prodigy, and the Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and Strings, written when he was just eighteen, is an astonishingly mature work. It is another breakthrough.
Welcome to MahlerFest XXXII
The complete list of MahlerFest concerts and events is here
Check out the MahlerFest XXXII Playlist –
Every piece we’re playing this year
