Symphony No. 1 in D

Mahler did most of the work on his Symphony No. 1 in February and March 1888, having begun to sketch it in earnest three years earlier and using material going back to the 1870s. He revised the score extensively on several occasions; the second, and last, edition published during Mahler’s lifetime was dated 1906. Mahler led the premiere of the original five-movement version on November 20, 1889, with the Budapest Philharmonic, and the final, four-movement version on December 16, 1909, with the New York Philharmonic. The first BSO performance was on November 23, 1923, Pierre Monteux conducting. The BSO’s first Tanglewood performance was led by Richard Burgin, July 29, 1956.

As a young conductor and composer, Mahler wrote his first major orchestral work from 1884 to 1888. Shortly before the 1889 premiere in Budapest, he inserted an extra movement (“Blumine,” salvaged from a discarded composition) after the first movement. The resulting “symphonic poem in two parts” met strong criticism. On the manuscript of this intensely personal work Mahler scrawled the title From the Life of a Loner.

Ready to try again in 1893 in Hamburg, where he had been opera director in 1891, Mahler revised the work, including “Blumine.” Still apprehensive, he enlisted a Hamburg critic to craft literary and artistic movement titles and descriptions to guide the audience. Thereafter, still facing criticism, Mahler cut “Blumine.” Although he ultimately discarded the extramusical titles, preferring the designation First Symphony, these programmatic guidelines are illuminating.

Since Part I met fewer objections at the premiere, Mahler offered minimal programmatic explanation. The first movement was the awakening of nature after winter. The vigorous Scherzo (now the second movement) was titled “With Full Sails.” Part II, more demanding on listeners, called for detailed guidance. The third movement was “a funeral march in ‘the manner of Callot,’” referring to both the virtuosic and gruesome etchings of Jacques Callot (d.1635) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s celebrated story collection Fantasy Pieces in Callot's Manner (1814). Scholars hear echoes of Klezmer and Bohemian folk music, but Mahler pointed to a different source of inspiration, namely a painting, The Hunter's Funeral Procession (by court painter Moritz von Schwind), popularized in children’s books: animals march upright, some sobbing, but to an “ironically merry” effect. Mahler’s title for the finale, Dall’Inferno, alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy, but his description is personal: the sudden cry of someone wounded to the depths of their heart. Another layer of interpretation comes from Mahler’s decision to quote from his own song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Wayfarer Songs), in the First Symphony. 

In a nod to tradition, recalling the openings of Beethoven’s Ninth, Wagner’s Ring, and several Bruckner symphonies, Mahler blurs the boundaries between silence, sound, and music in the slow introduction to his First Symphony. The score instructs “like a sound of nature.” For most of the string players, the bow barely touches the string (playing harmonics) as a single note shimmers across registers, forming a primeval sound cloud. A fanfare in the clarinets and then offstage trumpets (two “in the very far distance”) signals an arrival. From scattered gestures, symphonic fragments begin to coalesce. A falling fourth, passed among woodwinds, grows into a full chain of fourths. The spritely clarinet adapts that same interval “like a cuckoo.” A sinuous ascending line in the lower strings gathers the orchestral forces, preparing for the cheerful melody—Mahler’s own song Ging heut’ morgens übers Feld from Wayfarer Songs, built from those same fourth intervals. Through pizzicato, harmonics, and performance instructions such as “very tender,” Mahler preserves the song’s vernal bloom.

In keeping with the convention of large-scale symmetry, the repeated exposition leads into a development section that subtly reworks material from the introduction. A striking transformation occurs toward the end when a fulsome horn solo heralds the return to D major and the main theme. At the movement’s climax, the distant fanfares from the introduction return in the brass at their strongest; a triumphant horn solo marks the final splendor. 

The second movement follows classical convention in its triple meter and formal structure. The scherzo, here an Austrian Ländler, opens the movement, repeats, develops, and returns after a contrasting Trio section. After a brash climax within the scherzo, the orchestra texture recedes in a hushed allusion to the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where an imitative pattern builds quietly in the lower strings. The Trio exudes a leisurely pastoral charm, a lilting violin melody above a light bass evoking the rustic character of an oom-pah-pah bass. To conclude, as in the opening movement, momentum builds, lurching forward with unrestrained energy.

The third movement, originally set apart from the prior movements via an extended pause when the work was conceived in two parts, undercuts the prevailing optimism. Yet beneath its irony is a thread of continuity: the timpani’s persistent fourth interval supplies a unifying bedrock. In consummate irony, Mahler turns the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques”—traditionally sung to rouse the friar who rings the matins bells—into a funeral march. Preserving the song’s structure as a round, the haunting melody moves from basses to bassoon to bass tuba, interrupted only by the oboe’s sensuous lament. Mahler instructs the musicians to play “with parody”; in a theatrical gesture that challenges symphonic propriety, a single percussionist must alternate between cymbal crash and bass drum. The violins, marked “very tender,” bring depth to the movement, interlacing its grief with fragile beauty. 

To dispel the funeral mood, Mahler quotes from the last song of the Wayfarer Songs. Sweet harp chords, enveloped by horn, clarinet, and flute, open into a luminous G major. The first violins, muted and divided into three groups, spin a diaphanous web of sound as they introduce the quotation, which should be “very simple and plain, like folk song.” The gentle, mostly stepwise melody is borrowed from the protagonist of Mahler’s song, remembering his beloved amid the beauties of nature. A hushed falling arc in the divided violins draws the music inward, until Mahler leads us back into the bleak dirge that concludes the movement. 

In German culture, the genre of symphony carried profound ethical and political associations and was revered as both a psychological journey and promise of social unity. Within this framework, the symphonic finale held special significance, expected to deliver resolution and affirmation. Mahler’s contemporaries found it especially gratifying when the finale quoted from an earlier movement. So central were closure and summation to Mahler that one contemporary dubbed his works “finale symphonies.” Richard Strauss, master of the symphonic poem, urged Mahler to shorten the finale of his First Symphony, an exchange that steeled the latter’s convictions about the true meaning of heroism.

Mahler’s finale draws on the same formal tradition as the opening movement yet achieves a strikingly different effect. While the first movement gradually emerges from silence, the finale begins in medias res with a triple fortissimo cymbal crash. A maelstrom of dissonance erupts as piercing brass chords clash with “wild” swirling violin figuration. Surges of chromatic motion drive the listener to the brink. Yet there is order beneath the chaos. The acerbic harmonic language prepares for the home key of F minor as fragmentary brass motifs point forward, until a singular cymbal crash marks the entrance of the rugged main theme, strongly proclaimed in brass, clarinet, and oboe. 

As a stark antithesis to the harrowing momentum of the finale’s opening, the approach to the contrasting “second” theme is marked by pulling back the orchestra until nearly a full measure of silence ensues. Time stretches as most instruments are silenced, leaving behind a triple pianissimo chord and a slow chromatic ascent in the violins (“extremely tender, but very expressive”). The second theme, in a glowing D-flat major, radiates a gentle lyricism, ranging from pianissimo (pp)to ppp, enriched with horns. As the theme unwinds, the harmonic repose is complete, despite the ominous timpani roll that enters in the background. 

Mahler disrupts the expected symphonic progress by interpolating reminiscences from the symphony’s opening. Something seems askew in the buildup to the apparent climactic moment that prompted Strauss to suggest tightening the score. Mahler demurred, since a true “spiritual victory” comes after the hero recognizes the initial victory as illusory and perseveres in the struggle. In a poignant remark, coming from a young composer and opera director who would experience challenges through most of his life, Mahler notes that being a hero is not so simple. 

In a conventional form, the reprise restores balance with the return of both themes in a stable key area. Mahler subverts this expectation to sustain the finale’s larger dramatic arc. The lyrical second theme, passed from cellos to first violins, is not, as before, a quiet escape from the tempestuous F minor. Rather, it unfolds in suspended animation, with transcendent harp chords. This remarkable stillness is anchored in a “pedal point” (mostly in the double basses) on the pitch C, without interruption, for 84 measures, which resolves into the home key of F minor just as the first theme returns, exchanged as angry and mysterious whispers among strings and clarinets. 

These final exchanges, shaped as a “fugato,” show Mahler working through the symphony’s essential materials—here, the first theme—before the final climactic moment has full justification. This exploration is hushed and introspective, fragments of the first theme scattered through the orchestra. The ensuing buildup, this time more emphatic, shifts decisively to D major, bursting forth in triple fortissimo brass. The brass chorale, previously tentative, now radiates in jubilant determination. The orchestral space expands with simplified repetition ensuring the musical logic of the optimistic key area, now commanding full attention. Exuberant trills, bright motivic fragments, and glorious timpani bring the symphony to a resounding and definitive close. 

KAREN PAINTER

Karen Painter, Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, was previously on the faculty of Harvard University (1997-2007) and Dartmouth College (1995-1997). She is the author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 and editor of Mahler and His World.