Mahler - Titan

The Guardian 80

Les Siècles/Roth
(Harmonia Mundi)
Before Mahler’s First Symphony reached its final form, it was a ‘tone poem’, well revived here on German and Viennese instruments

In 1889 in Budapest, the 29-year-old Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of his first orchestral score. He called it a “symphonic poem in two parts”, without any more explicit title, even though it quoted from a number of his earlier pieces, including the Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen. But when he revised the work, four years later, it became a five-movement “tone poem in symphonic form”, depicting the life, suffering and final defeat at the hands of fate of a powerfully heroic individual, and acquired the title of Titan, borrowed from a novel by one of Mahler’s favourite writers, Jean Paul. Then in 1896, it reached its final form as his First Symphony; one movement had been discarded and all the titles and programmatic associations dropped from the score.