Symphony No. 1 (Mahler)

The Symphony No. 1 in D major by Gustav Mahler was mainly composed between late 1887 and March 1888, though it incorporates music Mahler had composed for previous works. It was composed while Mahler was second conductor at the Leipzig Opera, Germany. Although in his letters Mahler almost always referred to the work as a symphony, the first two performances described it as a symphonic poem or tone poem. The work was premièred at the Vigadó Concert Hall, Budapest, in 1889, but was not well received. Mahler made some major revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg in October 1893; further alterations were made in the years prior to the first publication, in late 1898. Some modern performances and recordings give the work the title Titan, despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for two early performances, and never after the work had reached its definitive four-movement form in 1896.

The symphony is scored for a large orchestra consisting of approximately 100 musicians. Unlike his later symphonies, Mahler does not use the entire forces in every movement. Several instruments are used in the last movement only, especially in the woodwinds and brass.

In its final form, the symphony has four movements:

The movements are arranged in a fairly typical four-movement setup. Normally, the Minuet–Trio is the third movement and the slow movement the second, but Mahler has them switched, which was also sometimes done by Beethoven. The keys are D major for the first movement, A major for the second, D minor for the third, and F minor for the last, with a grand finale at the end in D major. The usage of F minor for the last movement was a dramatic break from conventional usage.

For the first three performances (Budapest, Hamburg and Weimar), there was an additional movement, Blumine (flower piece), between the first and second movements of the piece as it now stands. This movement was originally written in June 1884 as the opening number – "Ein Ständchen am Rhein" – in Mahler's incidental music for a series of seven tableaux vivants based on Joseph Victor von Scheffel's poem Der Trompeter von Säckingen, which, Blumine aside, has since been lost. The addition of this movement appears to have been an afterthought, and Mahler discarded it after the Weimar performance in 1894, and it was not discovered again until 1966 when Donald Mitchell unearthed it. The following year, Benjamin Britten conducted the first performance of it since Mahler's time at the Aldeburgh Festival. The symphony is almost never played with this movement included today, although it is sometimes heard separately. In the 1970s, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra made the first recording of the symphony by a major orchestra to include Blumine. Currently some 20 recordings exist that include Blumine; however, most of them combine it with the revised edition of the other movements, thus making a "blended" version of the symphony that was at no time authorised by Mahler.

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