I've been flabbergasted over the beauty of two M1's lately...these are old, historic recordings: the F. Charles Adler account on Tahra and the first Horenstein on Vox. I love the slower performances, which really do justice to the radiant introduction in the 1st movement. I can't but help to wax a little philosophical upon the atmoshere in these recordings.
The opening of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, a seven octave A played by the strings, evokes a vision of early spring, perhaps the month of April at its brightest. I don’t know exactly why, but when listening, I remember the poetry of Emily Dickinson:
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period --
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell writes:
The introduction, as it finally emerged in the published score, presents a kind of architectural impressionism, an original concept of acoustic space in which there is even an idea of directional sound involved…It would be superfluous to go through the introduction bar by bar but one cannot help but remark on Mahler’s unconventional assignment of the first fanfare to a clarinet trio, which falls on the ear so unexpectedly…and thereafter his strict alternation of the pure colors of unmixed brass groups, with the horns, however, kept in reserve for their romantic song in bar 32…and removed from any obligations in the sphere of fanfares whatsoever.In his original program notes for his Symphony, Mahler wrote this music was a “spring without end.” However, I don’t think of spring when I hear this introduction. I imagine it is high summer, perhaps in August. I tend to have a particular Dickinson poem on my mind when I hear those strings sing that endless seven octave A:
Further in Summer than the birds-
Pathetic from the Grass-
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass.
No Ordinance be seen-
So Gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes-
Enlarging loneliness-
Antiquest felt at Noon-
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify-
Remit as yet no Grace-
No furrow on the Glow,
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now-Inspired by Miss Dickenson’s poem, I have created my own fanciful interpretation of the first movement. My little fanciful interpretation strays a little from the usual commentary attached to this great work, but I just can’t help bending the story somewhat.
Further in Summer than the birds-
Pathetic from the Grass-
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass. Critics Robert H. Elias and Helen L Elias offer one interpretation of this stanza, which, for me fits the mood of the beginning of Mahler’s Symphony:
The first stanza defines the situation that concerns the poet. A ‘minor Nation’--doubtless insects…is celebrating a mass. The character of the mass is suggested by the complementary ambiguities of the first line: the insects are both farther along in life than the birds in theirs. The insects complete a cycle before the birds do; their career is a concentration and intensification of that of other living things. We note in addition that this minor nation is ‘pathetic’ and that this mass is ‘unobtrusive’; the insect ritual, nearly concealed in the grass as it is, serves to create the pathetic effect.In this sound world Mahler has created, I have the impression of hearing the insects first, arising within that haze of strings, which at the same time sounds like eternity itself. With the chirping woodwinds the birds arrive…after the insects. The crickets are most likely near death, completing their life cycle in late summer.
In my fanciful interpetation, the introduction to the 1st Symphony is actually a foreshadowing of the Hero’s death and the eternal bliss that lies beyond conditional existence (as heard in the strings alone). Perhaps not a literal death, but a death in the psyche—or the death of the hero’s childhood, brought on from a doomed love affair as heard in the funeral march of the third movement. We hear signs of the Hero through the developing fanfares throughout this introduction, first played by a trio of clarinets.
Here is an excerpt from the novel
Titan by Jean Paul...it really does read like Mahler's music in this Symphony:
A second world twilight-world, such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon lingers now only on the gores and triumphal gates, and on the silverdust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands of our present world—wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage, and all is one lovely, magic confusion.I hear a kind of loneliness in the introduction to this Symphony, but not a sad loneliness. It is a kind of eternal pulse, larger than the separate conditional “self” or individual. The individual may feel alone amidst the universal everything, yet the pulse of the ‘druids’ (as in Ives’s Unanswered Question) drones on…prior to birth and death.
Topic: Crazy about the intro in M1... (Read 5009 times)