{ Program Notes
and classical idioms if these were the
symphonies you were accustomed to. For
in what was probably the most remarkable
and daring first symphony ever written
(only Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique can
match its shock value), Mahler revealed
himself as fully and radically himself.
Strangely, Mahler had expected an
easy success. As he later told his friend
Natalie Bauer-Lechner: “Naively, I
imagined it would be child’s play for
performers and listeners, and would have
such immediate appeal that I should
be able to live on the profits and go on
composing.” Yet he was also fully aware
of the originality of his artistic vision. Of
his first two symphonies he wrote: “My
whole life is contained in them: I have
set down in them my experience and
suffering … to anyone who knows how
to listen, my whole life will become clear,
for my creative works and my existence
are so closely interwoven that, if my life
flowed as peacefully as a stream through
a meadow, I believe I would no longer be
able to compose anything.”
When Mahler was composing this
work, he would have dearly loved to have
been able “to live on the profits,” for he
was leading a rather precarious existence.
There were no summers off or peaceful
cottages deep in the woods for him then,
and any composing he accomplished
had to be done in odd hours, often late
at night. He jumped rapidly from one
opera house to another, as assistant and
eventually conductor