Bruno Walter on Mahier’s Symphony No. 1
In June 1894, Gustav Mahler performed his First Symphony at a
musical festival in Weimar, and a cry of indignation arose from
the German musical press, condemning the work as a crime against
law and order in the realm of symphonic music. Only a few voices
had greeted it with enthusiasm and acknowledged it as a bold work
of genius, as the conquest of a new land in the territory of music.
I vividly recall the fascination with which I devoured all the notices
I could get hold of, and I still feel the burning interest with which
I read about the third movement of the symphony, a Funeral
March, that had particularly incensed the minds of the writing Phil-
istines. I was under the strange impression that it represented an
important event in my own young life—I was seventeen years of
age at that time—and I fervently longed to get acquainted with
that work and its composer. In the fall of the same year the miracle
happened: destiny granted the fulfillment of my wish. I was en-
gaged as coach and musical assistant at the Hamburg Opera House,
where the leading conductor was Gustav Mahler. There I met him
on the first day after my arrival, and the impression he made on me
was an overwhelming one. He looked just as I had expected the
composer of such a revolutionary symphony to look, and.at the
same time there radiated from him a human kindness and honesty
that went surprisingly well with the ascetic and introvert character
of his features. From the beginning of my eager activity, first as a
coach and soon as chorus director, I was happy to experience
Mahler’s growing interest in my youthful musicianship, and very
soon I summoned up all my courage to ask him about his First
Symphony. At that time he had already completed his second one,
so entirely different from its predecessor, and he played both works
for me at the piano—as he later used to do with all his works until
the Song of the Earth—and the impressions exceeded my most
glowing expectations. From then on began a friendship between us
as close as the differences in age and maturity between the master
and an “apprentice” would permit. That friendship increased with
my own development and lasted until Mahler’s death in 1911. These
pages do not afford the opportunity to describe Gustav Mahler’s
complex and powerful personality. Suffice it to say that his was a
great human soul whose visions, longings and emotions reached to
the very boundaries of man’s limitations. His works show him to
be a creative musician of genuine originality, whose inspirations
came from his deep humanity, from his love for nature and from
his spiritual inner life. Until his death he was a God-seeker, and his
music speaks of that longing of his heart which found also a verbal
expression in vocal parts of his symphonies. But moved as he was
throughout his life by the eternal questions of man’s destiny—
and influenced by them in his creative work—as a composer he
wrote elemental music that can be understood from a purely
musical standpoint.
Mahler was twenty-eight years old when he completed his First
Symphony in 1888. He called it at that time “Titan” because of his
admiration for the novel “Titan” of the great German poet Jean
Paul, for whose emotional apundance, boundless fantasy and
grotesque humor he felt a deep affinity in his own heart and mind.
As an enthusiastic reader of Jean Paul in my own young years I
wholeheartedly confirm the spiritual kinship between the poet and
the musician, which the exuberant and passionately eloquent musi-
cal language of Mahler’s First Symphony reveals.
But the title “Titan,” which he abolished in later years, indicated
no more than the general Promethean atmosphere of a work, the
immediate source of which was a very personal experience—a
passionate love that had set the young musician’s heart in flames
and had come to a tragic end. In his symphony, Mahler found an
expression in his art for that fateful epoch in his life, and so we may
rightly consider this work a kind of personal confession in music.
In my book on Gustav Mahler, written in 1936 on the occasion of
the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, I called the symphony his
“Werther,” in a comparison with the young Goethe's first novel
“Werther's Leiden.” For, as to Goethe, it was given to Mahler to
lift a heartrending personal experience of his youth into the realm
of art. I may add that in Mahler’s as in Goethe's creative activity
the first great work has remained unique as the only one that was
inspired by an actual episode in the author's personal life.
The first traces of the work had appeared already, four years
before its completion, when Mahler composed his Songs of a Way-
farer, a cycle of four songs with orchestra. Mahler himself wrote
their poems, in the poetical wording and romantic feeling of which
he appears like one of the authors of that medieval collection of
poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic
Horn”). The Songs of a Wayfarer tells the story of a youth carrying
his love, passion and grief into the wide world. Their emotional
content and partly even their musical thematic material developed
during the following years in Mahler’s soul until they had ripened
into the full fruit of his First Symphony.
But whatever the ecstasy of his feelings and the impact of actual
events had done to arouse Mahler’s musical imagination, the final
product of his creative self-expression was “absolute” music in
symphonic form. For Mahler was by nature a symphonic composer,
and his musical fantasy—unfettered by traditions or conventional
influence but nourished on Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert—
was of a symphonic character. As in Brahms’, there was in Mahler’s
nature a romantic as well as a classic strain. In contrast to Brahms
he did not endeavour to subject the emotional floods of his musical
fantasy to the imperative logic of the symphonic form, but adapted
to the passionate excesses of his ecstatic nature this symphonic
form which—although with considerable innovations—remained
a dominating power through his whole creative activity.
So we must acknowledge also that this tempestuous “firstling”
of his Muse is a real symphony, in the standard four movements.
The first one begins with a slow introduction, followed by an
allegro that is interrupted by another slow episode; the second
movement shows the usual form of scherzo, trio, scherzo; the third
one represents the slow movement of the symphony in form of a
funeral march, and the fourth is its stormy finale. The first two
movements are fundamentally of an idyllic nature, the third and
fourth of a tragic character. Mahler said to me when we discussed
this contrast: “Imagine before the third movement a catastrophic
happening which is the emotional source of the Funeral March
and Finale.”
The voice of a cuckoo announcing the advent of Spring—but
oddly enough in a fourth Pees] instead of the =
usual third
had enchanted Mahler. He chose it as a Leitmotiv of the first
movement (originally entitled “Spring Without End”) and in a
sense, of the whole symphony. The first movement sings of inno-
cent youthful days, of love for nature, of joy of life, and ends in
an outburst of jubilation. The music of Moravian peasant dances,
to which Mahler had often listened in his childhood, we find raised
to a symphonic level in the second movement, whose rough vigor
is answered by a floating waltz-like theme in the trio. From tunes
like this we learn that there was song in the depth of Mahler’s
soul. They reveal his affinity with Schubert and Bruckner, and in
his singing themes, like in those of his great predecessors, we hear
the musical voice of a timeless Austria. Without transition the
muted kettledrums of the third movement begin to beat their
relentless marching rhythm over which the spectral chant of a
canon rises and falls, and we are led through an inferno which
perhaps has not its equal in symphonic literature. In its center it is
interrupted by a moving lyric episode; then the march starts again
with increased bitterness, and it ends in a mood of annihilation.
Mahler had called the movement “Funeral March in Callot’s Man-
ner.” A drawing of the French engraver Jacques Callot had once
strongly appealed to his whimsical humor. It shows a procession
of gaily dancing animals, accompanying the body of the dead hunt-
er on its way to the grave. But I am sure that Mahler’s imagination,
when he wrote this revolutionary piece of music, was haunted also
by the demonic figure of “Roquairol” from Jean Paul’s “Titan.” In
him he found the terrible inner dissonances, the scorn and the
despair, the vacillation between heavenly and hellish impulses
which for some time may have invaded also his wounded heart,
and so I seem to feel the influence of Roquairol’s wild nature on
Mahler’s musical fantasy in the terrible gloom of that Funeral
March, in the glaring fires of the flashes flaring up in the dark
hopelessness of that night of the soul. In the fourth movement we
witness an heroic fight of titanic dimensions, a violent and con-
tinuous rebellion against the powers of darkness and against the
foe in the breast, which at the end of the movement rises toa hymn
of final triumph.
I want to repeat that this work, like the other symphonies of
Mahler, has to be understood in no other sense than that of
symphonic music and certainly not as a musical illustration of such
emotions and imaginations as I have outlined. Whatever went on
in Mahler's volcanic nature and kindled his musical fantasy, it was
sublimated into genuine music.
When Wagner wrote his Prelude to Lohengrin he was inspired
by the idea of the Holy Grail brought down to mankind by a host
of angels that then ascended again to heaven. However, this im-
mortal music is in no way “descriptive’—it is pure music, but it
carries in its thematic substance, development and instrumentation
an atmosphere of holiness of which every sensitive mind will be
aware as a kind of “aura” emanating from its unworldly sounds.
Beethoven, in the titles over the single movements of his Pastoral
Symphony, pointed to the images and emotions which lived in his
soul while writing this music. But the outcome—perhaps with the
exception of the Tempest—was real symphonic music. Music has
the power to arouse feelings in us and sometimes even images,
and feelings and images have the power to produce musical im-
pulses in the creative musician. Friedrich Nietzsche said that music
throws sparks of images (Bilderfunken) around itself. To such
images and emotions, which music arouses in us—or which arouse
the musical fantasy of a composer—we can ascribe only a vague
or dreamlike association with the actual music. Of such nature is
also the relation between Mahler’s music and the visions and feel-
ings which lived in his soul when he wrote it.
Approximately in 1909, one and a half years before his death,
Mahler wrote me from New York, after a performance of his First
Symphony that he had conducted: “I was quite satisfied with this
youthful venture. I am strongly affected when I conduct one of
those works of mine. There is crystallizing a burning pain in my
heart. What a world is this that casts up such sounds and reflec-
tions of images? Things like the Funeral March and the outburst
of the storm which follows it seem to me like a flaming accusation
of the Creator.” Certainly Mahler rebelled against God when he
wrote this symphony. But it was the rebellion of a fiery young
heart torn by inner conflicts and doubts. His later works show him
on an ascending path gradually leading upwards and opening to
his searching mind wider horizons and higher aspects than those
darkened by passionate youthful experiences. His First Symphony,
in which that tempestuous epoch of his life had found an expres-
sion in art, will—in its musical richness and originality—remain
an historic milestone in music, and I fervently hope this record
may convey in some way its greatness to our listeners.
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