| San Francisco Symphony Keeping Score

Rustic Instruments

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VIDEO:Mahler's evocation of a folk instrument

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Mahler introduces the funeral march of the third movement with a bass solo whose sound evokes a more primitive folk instrument, the bass fiddle. The town of Iglau was renowned for the famous fiddles made there. Moreover, Mahler would have witnessed an interesting local custom at the end of Fastnacht (Fasching), the dances and parties that precede Lent. At the stroke of midnight, the bass fiddle was dressed up in old women’s clothes, and buried, to the sound of a funeral march.

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VIDEO:MTT on the meaning of this movement

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This movement was inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot, a collection of supernatural stories that was also to influence Carl Jung’s theory of the “collective unconscious.” It was also partly inspired by a famous engraving, “The Huntsman’s Funeral,” that depicts a procession of forest animals bearing the dead body of their enemy, the hunter.

Mahler's Methods

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VIDEO:SFS principal bass Scott Pingel on his approach to playing the bass solo in Mahler’s First Symphony

Dressed as Strangers

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Mahler underscored the importance of tone color to aesthetic impact when he wrote about the Funeral March of his First Symphony: “In the March movement the instruments are disguised and go round dressed as strangers. Everything has to sound deadened and muffled, as if ghosts were parading past us. Making sure that each new entry of the canon theme comes over distinctly, with a surprising tone color that attracts attention, caused me a real headache! Eventually I got the instrumentation right, resulting in that weird, otherworldly effect you noticed today. And I don’t think anyone has yet managed to work out how I achieve it.”

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Funeral Rites

Both Mahler’s First and Second Symphonies raise the question of whether Mahler intended his music to have particular extra-musical meanings. Throughout his life, Mahler struggled with whether and how to explain his music to the public. He originally named his First Symphony the Titan, and gave the movements the following titles:
—Spring without end
—A chapter of flowers
—With full sails
—Stranded! A funeral march in the manner of Callot
—From hell to heaven, as the sudden expression of a deeply wounded heart.
By the time of the music’s publication in 1898, he had withdrawn the second movement as well as these titles. Yet he returned to explanation in the Second Symphony, expounding his concept that the hero of the First Symphony is borne to his grave in the funeral music of the Second and that “the real, the climactic dénouement [of the First] comes only in the Second.”

Fairy Tales

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Scary and spooky folk tales were an important thread in Mahler”s childhood experience. His first large-scale work, Song of Sorrow (Das Klagende Lied), is based on a story of a man who kills his brother, only to be confronted at his own wedding by the accusing voice of the dead man sounding from a flute made of bone: "A miracle, what now began, what strange and sorrowful singing! It sounds so sad and yet so beautiful. Whoever hears it wants to lose himself in sorrow! Oh sorrow, sorrow!"

Rustic Sentimentality

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VIDEO:SFS playing the trio from the Scherzo of Mahler’s First Symphony

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In the Scherzo (the second movement) of Mahler’s First Symphony, the rustic dance gives way to a much more sentimental style in the trio. The contrast between the two reminds us of Mahler's own experience of an intimate family life above a noisy tavern.

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“Everyone avoided me.”

Mahler was bothered by negative public reaction to his first symphony and the “inappropriate”use of folk and popular devices, especially the folksong and dance music in the third movement): “I naively imagined that it was childishly simple, that it would please immediately and that I was going to be able to live comfortably on the royalties it would earn… Afterwards everyone avoided me; no one dared to talk to me about my work.”

Intensity

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VIDEO:MTT on Mahler’s experiences in his family's tavern

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In the third movement of Mahler’s first symphony the opening funeral march is suddenly interrupted by two “folk bands” playing music that has variously been described as klezmer, or gypsy or, simply, “eastern European.” To many of Mahler’s contemporaries, the sounds of these “outsiders” challenged the artistic integrity of the “serious” German symphony.

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VIDEO:A traumatic childhood incident

The juxtaposition of emotional extremes goes back to a childhood experience often referred to by Mahler: during one particularly bitter fight between his parents, in panic Gustav ran out of the house into the street and nearly collided with an organ grinder who was playing “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” Later, the nineteen-year-old wrote to a friend: “The greatest intensity of the most joyful vitality and the most consuming yearning for death dominate my heart in turn, very often alternate hour by hour.”

Mahler's Methods

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VIDEO:SFS principal clarinet Carey Bell on the “sassy” clarinet

Sassy Winds

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Mahler’s non-traditional approach to traditional instruments gives them new roles. He takes the squeaky E-flat clarinet, so familiar to him from military bands of his childhood, and makes it the cheeky leader of a dance band — in the slow movement of a symphony!

The Outsiders

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Two musics collide in the slow movement of the First Symphony, when the jaunty music of the dance band (orange notes) violently jolts the funeral march (purple notes) into a quicker tempo.