Mahler's First Symphony

The US Premiere
New York was the site of the US Premiere of Mahler's First Symphony on December 16, 1909, with the composer conducting the Philharmonic. Since then, the Philharmonic has performed Mahler’s First Symphony 198 times in regular subscription concerts, free concerts in New York City Parks, on tour, and at a Young People’s Concert.

Conductors have included Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Artur Rodzinski, Sir John Barbirolli, Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Rafael Kubelik, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert, and Jaap van Zweden.

The Trib's Music Man
Henry Krehbiel was the most outspoken and disapproving critic of Mahler’s tenure at the Philharmonic. A vindictive man, Krehbiel wrote reviews and articles for the New-York Daily Tribune as well as the program notes for the Philharmonic. The reasons for Krehbiel’s attacks on Mahler are unclear, but perhaps Krehbiel took offense at Mahler’s request for no program notes for his compositions. Krehbiel also had personal and professional ties with Walter Damrosch, who led the New York Symphony Society — the Philharmonic’s rival orchestra in the city (the two merged in 1928).

When Mahler died in 1911, Krehbiel wrote in a vicious and notorious obituary that Mahler “was looked upon as a great artist, and possibly he was one, but he failed to convince the people of New York of the fact, and therefore his American career was not a success.”​

New York Times, March 2, 1959, by Harold C. Schonberg

Drawings, by the author, of Leonard Bernstein in his first season as Music Director, 1958–59. Published in Harper's.

Cuckoo culture
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (1808) is a hymn to an idealized rural life, echoing with birdsong, the murmur of streams, and the music and dances of farmers. And though Beethoven mimicked the nightingale and quail in his Pastoral symphony, it was the sound of the cuckoo in this work that caught on with composers as a means of celebrating the simple pleasures of the countryside — albeit in the highly artistic form of the symphony. Due to its inclusion in both design (as cuckoo clock) and music, the icon of the cuckoo has come to represent the heart of the folk in central Europe.​

In his First Symphony, Mahler deploys the clarinet-as-cuckoo as a means of evoking the joys of a bucolic existence, yet he’s also aware of the overly folksy or even kitsch quality of the sound.

Cuckoos in the Score
When the cuckoo appears in the First Symphony, it is a bird perched in the forest of Mahler’s dreams. We get shaken out of dreaminess when the cuckoo’s tune becomes the head of the main theme. What was a bird call now leads us into a lovely musical walk — perhaps Mahler’s morning in the Austrian countryside.​

Mahler: Symphony No. 1. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Columbia Records, 1967.

The funeral march in the score
The brilliant weirdness of this movement is that Mahler recast Frère Jacques in a minor key as a funeral march. Mahler said that it was a musical representation of Jacques Callot’s sardonic painting The Woodsman’s Funeral, familiar to German children of the time, in which animals carry the body through a forest. It is likely that Mahler knew Frère Jacques as Bruder Martin, a German college tune sung in rounds by students.

Using folk song in symphonic music was part of a deliberate return to simplicity and an imagined idyllic life by artists at the end of the 19th century. In this case, however, Mahler’s use of folk song – a musical objet trouvé – is sophisticated and unsettling.

Folk Music in the First Symphony​
Conductor Bruno Walter said of Mahler and the folk song tradition: "an important part of Mahler's themes, not only in his songs but also in his symphonies, has its origin in the folksong — nay, it is folksong." The opening movement of Mahler’s First Symphony radiates the freshness of youth, exuberance, and a deliberately un-intellectual refrain – all from his own song Ging heut uber morgen’s. The composer wove material from the second and fourth songs of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gellesen into the first and third movements of the First Symphony.​

In the example shown here we see that Bernstein has copied the special changes in orchestration that Mahler amended for the US Premiere by the New York Philharmonic in 1909. These changes boost the wind power over the brasses in the famous recap.​

In the accompanying audio clip, Bernstein conducts the Philharmonic with Mahler's changes to the score — setting the woodwinds up an octave to really cut the fff brass.

From New York Philharmonic Special Editions, 1998

Barbiroli finds Mahler late in life
Barbirolli discussed the First Symphony with producer Ronald Kinloch Anderson after a recording session with the Hallé Orchestra in 1964.​ Barbirolli, who was the New York Philharmonic's Music Director from 1936-41, claimed credit for the Mahler revival in Great Britain.​

Barbirolli's Interpretation
Barbirolli began to conduct Mahler’s music after the age of 50, and he brought to it a grounding in the Romantic tradition that reflects the coloring of an earlier era. This is most strongly felt in the Czech folk song of the third movement. To gain a painterly Romantic haze, he has the violins play sul tasto, bowing their instruments closely over the fingerboard, not in the normal position.

More on Mahler's New York

Mahler in New York

Mahler as Interpreter

Mahler and Women

Mahler and Musicians

Walking Mahler's New York: A Digital Walking Tour

Mahler's New York: A Digital Festival from the New York Philharmonic