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gustav mahlersymphony no.1 with "blumine"

florida philharmonic orchestrajames judd

HMA 1957118

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)

symphony no.1 with "blumine"

FLORIDA PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

JAMES JUDD

Although there are many recordings of Mahler’s First

Symphony, this is one of the very few to offer a chance

to discover ‘Blumine’, the extra movement he finally

decided to delete.

‘Superior dynamic range… Highly recommended’

Fanfare

‘Plenty of excitement’ – CD Review

‘One of the best orchestral recordings of the digital era’

Stereophile

Gustav Mahler began work on his First Symphony in 1884. He was then twenty-four, and had begun his slow but carefully orchestrated rise toward success in the conservative, hypocritical and snob-ridden musical world of Central Europe – primarily as a conductor, but already with a few discernible twitchings toward composition as well. His first respectable post had come in 1880, as music director of an operetta theater in Upper Austria; from there he moved on to greater rewards at Laibach (now Ljubljana), where he conducted his first real opera performance, Verdi’s Il trovatore, in October 1881. By January 1883 he was in misery at the Stadttheater at Olmütz (now Olomouc) in Moravia. ‘I am crippled,’ he wrote to his longtime friend Friedrich Löhr, ‘like a man who has fallen from Heaven. . . . If you harness the finest horse to a cart with oxen, all it can do is sweat away and drag along at an ox’s pace.’By October 1883, Mahler had slipped one harness and moved on to another even more chafing, at Kassel, as assistant to a principal conductor at the Royal Theater, one Wilhelm Treiber (‘the jolliest 4/4-beater I have ever come across’). The great Hans von Bülow came through Kassel; Mahler sent him an imploring note, begging for an interview and a possible assistantship. Von Bülow, instead, turned the note over to the Kassel management, where it was lodged in Mahler’s personnel file. Another Kassel misfortune, however, at least proved productive, in the person of the coloratura soprano Johanna Richter, who had joined the company at the same time as Mahler himself. He was quite smitten; she, apparently, was not. ‘She is all that is lovable in this world,’ he wrote to Löhr, ‘but I know that I have to go away.’ As is its wont, unrequited love produced some splendid music: a cycle of songs (to Mahler’s own texts) about a wayfarer who, after great sorrow, wanders aimlessly through the world: the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. They were, of course, dedicated to Johanna. ‘[But] what can they tell her’, he asked, ‘that she does not already know?’Previously, Mahler had composed a number of songs, and one major choral work, the sprawling cantata Das klagende Lied, immature but frequently prophetic of the genius to come. The ‘Wayfarer’ songs, completed in the version with piano accompaniment at the end of 1884, signalized the beginning of Mahler’s true expressive mastery, and provided the impetus for his serious entry upon a composer’s career. Simultaneous with the song cycle, he began work on the gigantic D major orchestral work that would eventually become his First Symphony. That work would demand his attention for the next five years; the ‘Wayfarer’ songs would play a large part in the result, providing important melodic material for three of its movements.So, for that matter, would another early score. In 1884 Mahler produced some background pieces for a reading of scenes from Joseph Scheffel’s popular dramatic poem Der Trompeter von Säkkingen. The score has been lost, but Mahler provided a link to at least one of its movements. For the principal theme of ‘Blumine’, the Andante of the new symphony, he ‘borrowed’ a tune from Der Trompeter, the haunting trumpet solo that winds through the orchestra at the start and end of the movement.

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gustav mahlersymphony no.1 with "blumine"

florida philharmonic orchestrajames judd

While he worked on the symphony, Mahler’s career as a conductor continued to progress through the major Middle European opera houses: Prague (where he enjoyed particular success in Mozart and Wagner), Leipzig (where another wretched love affair drove him to complete the First Symphony and begin the Second) and Budapest (where his conducting of Don Giovanni won the admiring notice of Johannes Brahms). And it was in Budapest, on 20 November 1889, that Mahler conducted the premiere performance of his First Symphony.‘The symphony’, wrote Jozsef Keszler in Nemzet, ‘knows no limits. The Director of the Opera can feel content with his success.’ ‘We shall always be pleased to see him on the podium,’ rebutted Victor von Herzfeld in the Neues Pester Journal, ‘so long as he is not conducting his own compositions.’ Both in name and shape, the work Budapest listeners both cheered and deplored that night was somewhat different from the version we know today. Mahler presented the work as a ‘symphonic poem’ in two parts: the first consisting of three movements – an opening allegro, an andante and a dance-like scherzo; the second made up of a funeral march and a ‘molto appassionato’ finale. Four years later, for a second performance in Hamburg, Mahler had wreathed the symphony in literary analogies. From his adoring readings of the archetypal Romantic poet Jean Paul Richter, he gleaned an overall title, ‘The Titan’. The first part was now subtitled ‘From the Days of Youth: Flowers, Fruit and Thorns’; its three movements bore the titles ‘Spring without End’, ‘Blossoms’ (‘Blumine’) and ‘Full-sail onward!’ The second part, ‘Human Comedy’, contained two movements: ‘Failure! A Funeral March in the Manner of Callot’ and ‘From the Inferno: a Sudden Outburst from within a Deeply Wounded Heart’. By 1899, when the symphony achieved publication, the titles, both overall and individual, had been discarded. The slow movement titled ‘Blumine’ was discarded altogether; it would not again be heard until revived at Britain’s Aldeburgh Festival in June 1967. The symphony had been given the customary four-movement form. (In this performance ‘Blumine’ is placed at the end, and can be programmed back into its ‘authentic’ position between tracks 1 and 2.)By 1899 symphonic standards, however, the Mahler First is hardly a ‘customary’ work. Its opening tells us that right off: the sustained A, eight octaves deep, becomes itself a vast, sun-swept panorama across which mysterious distant shapes pass, vanish and reappear. One of those shapes is a tune from the ‘Wayfarer’ songs, itself a kind of panorama: ‘This morning I walked over the fields . . .’ A distant horn-call adds to the sense of limitless landscape; at the climax of the first movement it will burst forth from a closer distance. The reverie-like ‘Blumine’, with its haunting trumpet solo (a sound Mahler was to invoke again in his Third Symphony) and the scherzo, in the measure of a rustic folkdance, maintain the ‘outdoors’ condition; a sweet, tender middle section has the texture of a dream.The justly famous ‘Funeral March’ never ceases to amaze. Mahler’s inspiration here was a satiric sketch by the seventeenth-century printmaker Jacques Callot, redrawn by the Austrian artist Moritz von Schwind: the animals of the forest celebrating the death of the Hunter in a grotesque funeral procession. Mixed into the parodic playing of the old ‘Frère Jacques’ tune, by a solo double bass, are echoes from Mahler’s own background, the raucous Klezmer bands of the Jewish village ghettoes. And, in a fleeting, ethereal contrasting episode another ‘Wayfarer’ tune is heard, from the mournful final song in the cycle.The gates of the Inferno burst open at the start of the finale; nothing this crazed, this tumultuous had hitherto been brought into the symphonic repertory. The demons howl, but eventually a theme enters that seems to spell out Redemption. The howling dies down; a few moments of exquisite nostalgia recall the serenity of the opening movement and, perhaps, sound a fragmentary echo of the Funeral March as well. The last moments are like an Apocalypse, with the massed brass of Mahler’s stupendous orchestra proclaiming some kind of unnamed victory.

ALAN RICH