Mahler: Symphony No. 1 (Titan)

The work recorded here is, of course, known everywhere as Mahler’s First Symphony. That is not, however, what Mahler thought he was writing at the time, and it took him several years to decide quite what he had wrought (and, in the process, to drop one of the movements). Was this a symphony, or did it belong rather to that alternative, more modern category, the symphonic poem? It was as an example of this latter type that the work was performed for the first time, on November 20, 1889, in Budapest, where Mahler had a post as opera conductor—though it was at the city’s main concert hall, the Vigadó, that he conducted his “Symphonic Poem.” At the next performance, in Hamburg four years later, the composition was billed as “Titan, a tone poem in symphony form,” becoming “Titan, symphony” the following year in Weimar, then finally and fully, reduced from five movements to the standard four, “Symphony in D major” in Berlin in 1896. By that time, Mahler had completed his Second Symphony and most of his Third; he knew what he was about.