Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1 "Titan"
Composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
“On what dark subsoil our life is built!” Mahler once exclaimed in a letter to a friend. “Where do we come from? Where does the way out lead? Why do I believe myself free, and yet am wedged into my character as into a prison? What is the purpose of suffering? How can I understand cruelty and malice in the creation of a kindly God? Will the meaning of life finally be revealed in death?”
To these questions Mahler sought answers both psychological and spiritual. He consulted for treatment no less a personage than Sigmund Freud – who, unsurprisingly, told the composer that the roots of his angst lay in his early childhood. And he searched in religion, converting from the largely-secular Judaism in which he was raised to Catholicism, and finally drifting into an unorthodox, transdenominational Christianity. And he sought to work out the answers for himself in his nine monumental symphonies, every one of them shot through with its composer’s quest for spiritual and metaphysical truth.
Mahler’s training, and the better part of his fame during his life, was in conducting more than in composition. In less than two decades he worked his way from opera houses in provincial backwaters of the Austrian empire to the directorship of the Vienna State Opera – then the world’s most prestigious position for an opera conductor – and in 1898 added to his responsibilities command (such as it was) of the fractious Vienna Philharmonic. In 1907, disenchanted with the continual squabbles and the anti-Semitism he was subject to in Vienna, he moved to New York, where he directed the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. A heart attack, brought on by a long-running bacterial infection, ended his life in 1911.
“My music is lived,” wrote Mahler in another letter. What attitude should those people take to it who do not themselves truly live, who feel no breath of the rushing gale of our great epoch?” Mahler’s conducting was famed for its obsessive attention to detail, and his compositions unquestionably show the same quality. He composed painstakingly during his summer breaks from conducting, which he spent in the Austrian Alps. His symphonies employ (literally! Most orchestras that program Mahler do so knowing that their instrumentalists’ payroll that week will be the largest all season) vast numbers of players and in several cases add to them a chorus and vocal soloists, but he orchestrated with the delicacy and intimacy of a chamber musician.
The First Symphony was composed over the course of five summers, finally reaching completed form in 1888. Like most of his works it bore a program – that is, it told a specific story – and, like most of his works, that story was largely autobiographical. Its first and third movements call on music Mahler had written earlier for settings of German folk poetry, but those melodies, catchy thought they may be, are nowhere near the most familiar in the piece. That would surely be “Frère Jacques,” which is first stated by the double bass (in what is among the biggest bass solos in all orchestral music!) to begin the third movement and becomes the basis of a mordant, ironic funeral march. The piece’s soul (and, it’s safe to imagine, the composer’s soul) is most clearly revealed in its climactic finale, where Mahler takes the mysterious descending intervals that began the symphony and transforms them into a triumphant and joyous celebration of life.
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Hear Mahler’s Symphony No. 1
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.