Text by Andrea Estero

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An A overtone to the strings, grazed and held for many bars. Resting on other A's in the middle and lower register. A band of iridescent texture that creates the effect of a dusting or morning brunette. It is the attack, revolutionary, of Mahler's First Symphony. In this motionless sound environment, worthy of Ligeti's visions, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures (what Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht calls "vocabularies") arise and float: a mysterious descending fourth motif to the woodwinds, later recognizable as the cry of a cuckoo, a quick flicker to the clarinets, a fanfare heard "from far away" to the trumpets, the nostalgic call of the horns, a plaintive voice to the cellos.

Wanderings of life or Naturlaute (sounds of nature): the "world" - a central word in Mahler's aesthetics - awakens from its winter torpor. And the opener of his Symphony No. 1 (1885-88, the definitive edition is 1906) describes a composer who does not suffer from academicism, who is irreducible to his time, and who to 25 years has found himself and his style. to what was Mahler looking at?

The years of the writing of his first opera properly symphonic and early Lieder cycles saw an author projected on the tradition and sources of early Romanticism. The anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Child's Magic Horn), edited from Armin and Brentano, from which Mahler drew on for the Lieder cycle of the same name - but also for other earlier collections including the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen - testifies to that attention to the "popular" typical of the generations of German literati who lived in the first decades of the 19th century. Das klagende Lied, opera juvenile for soloists, choir and orchestra, is a romantic ballad with a fairy-tale setting: a return to that Middle Ages mythologized by the Schlegel generation. But this inspiration does not, as the attack of the First Symphony teaches, translate into a naive, "Nazarene" musical language. On the contrary, the Mahler tone-already evident in the early Symphonies and Lieder cycles-is given by the coexistence of folk intonation and experimental language. Mahler looked to the past and to the future, always unactual.

If the Second to Fourth Symphonies are referred to as " Wunderhorn-Symphonien" because of their links to the Lieder collection of the Magic Child's Horn; if the Fifth to Seventh, "symphonies without singing," the relationship to the world of Rückert-Lieder and Kindertoten-Lieder (Songs of Dead Children) predominates in the slow tempos, the First Symphony is closely linked to the Lieder beginnings culminating in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. The second Lied of the cycle becomes the main idea of the first half; the coda of the fourth song forms the central part of the third half; the theme of the second movement, a popular Ländler, quotes the youthful Hans und Grethe. The attack of "Ging heut' morgen übers Feld" (This morning I was goin' through the meadows) in the first half marks the transition from introduction to exposition: the sunny and enchanting theme sweeps away all fog and informs the development of the entire movement with its "long" and cantabile morphology, which is polyphonically interwoven with other motifs and fragments, including the descending fourth that recalls the cuckoo's cry. The ability to accommodate so many Lieder references is related to the form of "symphonic poem in two parts" in which it was presented at its first performance (Budapest, 1889). It would be too long to go through the various revisions and stages of its transformation into a simple "Symphony in D major" here. Yet what is important about this metamorphosis is its origin in an unorthodox succession, in 5 movements (the second, Blumine, was expunged in 1896) grouped into 2 parts (after the Scherzo Mahler had envisioned a pause); more than the title, later dropped, of "Titan" - referred to a novel by Jean Paul difficult from to trace in the musical narrative - all those programmatic references are valuable, which, first expanded and later expunged altogether, leave tracks of a precise "inner program." That is how Mahler defined it.

The first part, then, was marked by the motto "'From the days of youth,' a little flowers, fruits and thorns"; and the first movement from "Endless springtime": continuity and full "diffusivity" is indeed the hallmark of the Allegro comodo, where the Lied theme is not contrasted with any alternative idea, but is joined by the "vocabularies" presented in the introduction, just as it is, in a more fragmentary way, in the development. Here the dialectic, rather than between two themes, is between the Lied that spreads out in all directions and a fanfare that clamorously bursts in: it is the same fanfare that was heard in the introduction in the remote distance and that now instead is the protagonist of a lacerating sonorous irruption. Adorno, who in his Mahlerian book titled the chapter devoted to the First "Curtain and Fanfare" (where the curtain is the sonic veil that envelops the introduction torn by the fanfare), emphasized the nature of tampering from the outside of this sonic epiphany: it is one of the first manifestations of the narrating self "against" the symphonic logic, for which Adorno himself spoke of an analogy with the novel. After this formal laceration, even the reprise cannot be the same as the exposition: it contracts and quickly flows into the concluding coda.

The second movement is tripartite, following the ABA pattern dear to the Schubertian and Brucknerian musical tradition, and has a "dialectal" character. Indeed, the first part is a strongly accented Ländler (a typical Austrian dance with ternary meter), more folkish than popular; the middle section, before the repetition of the Ländler, recalls the movements of the Viennese waltz.

A new vertigo comes with the attack of the third tempo, a funeral march "in the style of Callot" (a reference to the seventeenth-century French engraver Jacques Callot, but also to E.T.to Hoffmann's Fantasiestücke im Callots Manier ), with which the second part, "Commedia humana," was begun. Here Mahler reveals that he found inspiration in a popular print depicting a paradoxical hunter's funeral celebrated by forest animals. The sarcastic tone, the black humor, manifests itself in the nursery rhyme theme Bruder Martin (Fra Martino campanaro) intoned in a minor mode by the double bass solo (and then to canon by the other instruments), as well as by the resentful sneers of the oboe and then by the languid movements of what would seem to be an orchestral ensemble of Yiddish tradition drawn from the instrumental texture. Before the repetition of the same funeral, violently accentuated and parodied, the divided violins intone the leave-taking theme from the fourth of the Gesellenlieder: the poignant leave-taking of the wayfarer who comes to rest by slumping under the linden tree.

The last tempo, "From Hell to Heaven" according to Mahler's original directions, begins with "the sudden burst of despair of a heart wounded to the core." And it is indeed a lacerating gash that awakens us from the dreams and nightmares that have just passed. Here the alternation of sections describes a path per aspera ad astra, toward the triumphant achievement of the Titan. Is this the same hero we shall see struck to dead and felled in the Sixth Symphony? The stormy first theme, the lyrical and passionate second theme, the development, the reprise and the jubilant coda come one after the other, distancing themselves from each other (also thanks to the surprising return of the introduction of the first movement, with its mysterious load of expectation), without an iron symphonic and dramatic logic: as if they were broad chapters of a novel.

On March 16, 1896 Mahler conducted to Berlin, along with the First Symphony, the first performance of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which he had composed in 1884-85, in an orchestral version. The original destination for orchestra, not piano, is a sign of an objective and "epic," rather than purely lyrical, vocation that will be accentuated in the later Wunderhornlieder. It is not for nothing that the texts, written from Mahler on the cast of folk poems (in the first Lied the filiation from a song from the Wunderhorn has been traced), figured as anonymous. The wayfarer of the Romantic tradition, fixed in the Schubertian Winterreise , here becomes any fahrender Geseller: "one on the way," as in the proposed translation from Quirino Principe. The four Lieder alternate different expressive situations and formal archetypes: the first ("When my love will go to wedding to, make merry, then I will live my bitter day!") is in ternary ABA form; the second, only seemingly more graceful ("This morning I was going through the meadows; the dew was still puddling the grass"), is in strophic form and "lends" its melody to the first movement of the First Symphony; the third is the most dramatic ("I have a searing knife stuck in my breast. Oh, what a heartbreak, what a heartbreak!") and has a tendency toward durchkomponiert declamation, adhering to the sung word; the fourth, the most nostalgic and resigned ("The two eyes of my treasure far away in the world have sent me"), has a from march (funereal) progression and ends with the topos of the wayfarer finding rest under the linden tree, a symbol of death and oblivion, also mentioned in the First Symphony.