Mahler's Symphony No. 1

What are you going to listen to?

Both Schulhoff and Mahler were born in the Czech Republic. Both were also of Jewish descent. But while Mahler only occasionally encountered anti-Semitic elements in Vienna, where he lived and worked, Schulhoff paid for his Jewish roots and his sympathies for communism with his life under the Nazis.

War misery

It was Antonín Dvořák who helped his fellow countryman Erwin Schulhoff take his first steps on the musical path. He studied with Debussy and Reger, among others. A brilliant career lay ahead of him, until he was called up to serve in the Austrian army during the First World War. He witnessed indescribable misery, was wounded in the hand, and spent some time as a prisoner of war. After the war, he lived in Germany for several years, but found it difficult to let go of the horrors of war. Dancing was a way for him to calm his mind, and he visited numerous, sometimes obscure, dance venues. "I love dancing in nightclubs so much that I spent whole nights there dancing, with the pure happiness of the rhythm and my subconscious full of sensual pleasure," he wrote to Alban Berg. His Suite for Chamber Orchestra bears witness to this. It consists of six dances in which jazz plays an important role with ragtime and shimmy, but also Boston waltz and tango. Schulhoff does not simply imitate the dances. He takes their characteristic rhythms as a basis, but uses them to create his own music in a classical style. A beautiful mix of ballroom and Concert Hall.

Humanity

During these years, Schulhoff sought out extremes, flirting with anarchism and Dadaism. But could this help him process all his memories of his life as a soldier? Two years before his Suite , he composed Menschheit( ), a ‘Symphony for alto voice and orchestra’, as he himself called it. These are five songs based on texts by Theodor Däubler, in which Schulhoff clearly listened carefully to Mahler's orchestral songs. In the same way as his predecessor, he creates songs that easily rival Mahler's, with colorful orchestral sounds and an organic approach to vocal treatment. But Schulhoff, in keeping with Däubler's texts, is much more sombre than Mahler. No matter how lyrical the words may be, an undertone of sadness and unfulfilled longing lingers. This is most poignant in the Last . It is a warning to Mary that even her little Jesus cannot save her and that she must seek comfort in life herself.

From sunrise and funeral march to hell and heaven

It is almost impossible to determine exactly what Gustav Mahler meant with his Symphony No. 1. When he composed it around 1887-1888, he was already somewhat well-known as an opera conductor, but as a composer he still had a long way to go. At the premiere in Budapest in 1889, he presented it as a 'symphonic poem in two episodes', consisting of five separate movements, without further explanation. The music was unheard of and enigmatic to the audience and therefore received little acclaim. At a subsequent performance in Hamburg four years later, Mahler wrote an extensive program note in which he gave each movement a title and detailed commentary and gave the symphony the nickname 'Titan', after the book of the same name by Jean Paul. In later performances, however, Mahler radically removed all extra-musical references, including the title Titan, even removing one movement from and presenting it as a neutral four-movement symphony of purely absolute music.

Yet it is Mahler's detailed description that gives this symphony its deeper meaning. For then you experience how the work opens with a beautiful sunrise in spring, where we see a cheerful young man walking through the fields. He is a sturdy young man who dances in the prime of his life, as the second movement shows. The subsequent funeral march is ironic, even sarcastic. It is the animals of the forest who carry the hunter to his grave, complete with 'Father Jacob' in minor key and a mournful Bohemian folk song. And then the finale, 'dal inferno al paradiso' (from hell to heaven) in Mahler's experience. It begins as a hellish 'sudden outburst of despair, coming from a deeply wounded heart', as he himself described it, but gradually turns to luminous sounds, culminating in a heavenly chorale.

Kees Wisse