Asuka Kakitani (b. 1976): The Shifting Sky

Notes by the composer

The Shifting Sky marks my first venture into orchestral writing. The work was inspired by the ever-changing Minnesota sky, which I never get tired of watching. I used to drive through the cornfields to take my child to school every morning, and each day, the sky seemed to take on a different face, shifting through an endless variety of colors and cloud patterns. It is an ordinary scene, yet somehow extraordinary.

Gustav Mahler:  Symphony no. 1, 1889 version:

 Symphonic Poem in Two Parts: “Aus dem Leben eines Einsamen” (From the Life of a Lonely Person)

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Notes by Maestro Warren Cohen

Mahler had a strange and distinctive relationship with his compositions. His music was an extraordinary technical exercise on one hand and a kind of personal therapy on the other.

He believed “a symphony had to contain the world” and explored an expansive and eclectic mix of ideas and styles. But his music, to an extent few major composers approached, was also confessional. Every symphony (except the Eighth) is firmly rooted in his experiences, and the works are saturated with personal references not easily apparent to the listener.

Perhaps for this reason he described all versions of the First Symphony as “perfect in their own way” but also “never finished.” He conducted this work more often than his other compositions, and his scores contain markings and small revisions for every performance. 

Because he understood every iteration of the symphony to be “perfect in its own way,” we should feel free to explore all the versions and see how they reflect Mahler's reality. The first version, with a  smaller orchestra than the final version, was a reflection of the forces he could command in 1889. He was an up-and-coming conductor working with a provincial  orchestra. By the time he conducted the final version, he was an international figure who could demand any orchestral resources he wanted.

Public sentiment contributed enormously to the revisions. Mahler had little success as a composer until the premiere of the Eighth Symphony. His works were considered bizarre. The eclecticism, and the fact they did not easily fit into either the more conservative styles of composition or the more progressive world, made his music difficult to categorize.

The response to the First Symphony was usually tepid at best. Unenthusiastic applause for the 1889 performance was interrupted by booing. Responses to the later versions were somewhat better, but Mahler never believed the public understood his intentions. The piece was played infrequently after his death, with the first recording not occurring until the 1940s. Leonard Bernstein began a 1960 television broadcast marking the centenary of Mahler's birth by saying he was doing a program about a composer “you probably have never heard of.” Mahler's First Symphony became a staple of the repertoire only in the 1970s. Today it is played by every youth orchestra in the world and is among the most commonly performed works in the repertoire.

One of the fascinating things about the different versions of this symphony is that the musical content did not change much, but his way of describing the music did. The first version includes the subtitle “Aus dem Leben eines Einsamen” (from the life of a lonely person). Mahler provided brief descriptions of the musical character in each movement, and he explicitly divided the music into two parts. He expect a long pause between the third-movement Scherzo and the fourth-movement Funeral March. The last two movements represent a different aesthetic -- more concerned with struggle and overcoming, more psychological and less existential -- than the first three movements.

The second version, created for a performance four years later, has the subtitle “Titan” after an early 19th century novel by Jean Paul about a virtuous young man who navigates a world of unsavory characters. Mahler removed the subtitle about the life of the lonely person. This reflected his life at the time, as he was navigating the political quagmire of German and Austrian musical life.

For the final version, he removed all subtitles, suppressed the descriptions of the music, and cut out the second movement. He was intent that the music be considered on its own terms, without reference to autobiography that could confuse the listener. I suspect he was trying, desperately, to discover why this work was not connecting with the public. He later called it his “Symphony of Sorrows,” not because the music is tragic but because he never felt it was understood.

Mahler’s revisions reflect his belief that the symphony's failure to connect merely required tweaking. Each version became more extreme with a bigger orchestra and effects that drew attention to details in the music. To take a simple example: the opening, depicting the joy of nature and birdsong, was originally scored with a simple soft presentation of the note A in all the strings. By the final version he had strings divided in various ways, playing harmonics and moving in and out of the texture. It is a wonderful effect, but there is also something wonderful about the simple presentation in the first version, startling as it is to someone familiar with the later work. One imagines Mahler in his revisions shouting “listen to this! I will not let you ignore this beautiful detail!”

The basic musical material was lost. In listening to the earlier version your ear is drawn to nuances that are hidden under the effects in the later versions. Mahler also altered the relationship of his songs to the Symphony. In the first movement, Mahler quotes his song “Ging Heute Morgen Uber's Feld.” The song describes the joy of walking in nature and a conversation with a finch. The much simpler introduction in the 1889 version sounds like the beginning of the journey, while the complexity of the later versions makes the opening itself sound more important.

Mahler quoted from his songs because the symphony was a reflection of the story behind the song cycle. The title of the cycle is usually translated as “Songs of the Wayfarer” but a more accurate translation would be “Songs of a Traveling Journeyman.” Mahler wrote the cycle -- to his own words- -- just when he began his career as a conductor, when he was traveling from one gig to another. He was the traveling journeyman of the title. In writing his first symphony, he was displaying his graduation from an apprentice composer to a journeyman composer, and the quotes were a recognition of the relationship between the songs and his role as conductor and composer. 

The second song quoted, “Die Zwei Blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” (The two blue eyes of my beloved), comes in the Funeral March. He uses the gorgeous last verse of the song, which in the context of the parodistic and grotesque march is beautifully ironic. It is a moment when Mahler has come to accept his lot: “All is good, life and sorrow and the world and dreams.” The choice of songs underscores the sense of the symphony as a whole; although there is struggle, it is a song of acceptance, of delight in life and of an understanding of the journey of life.

The beginning of the last movement underscores the notions of conflict and struggle. In the later versions, the angst of the Finale’s opening seems central to a tragic message that culminates in an ending with a sense of great triumph. But what is lost is the understanding of the process of discovery. The ending still seems wonderful and heroic in the early version, but more simply joyful.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing is the realization that  the same music, through a few well- placed changes, created as a result of circumstance, can lead to such distinctive and equally wonderful works of art.

A note on the three versions of Mahler’s First Symphony

The various versions of the First Symphony are often confused. IMSLP, a repository of classical music scores, confuses it by calling the three extant movements of the 1889 version “sketches” while terming the 1892 version “the first version.” Recordings of the 1895 version that include the “Blumine” movement are often called “the original version,” which they definitely are not.

There are no commercial recordings of the 1889 version. The few recordings of the 1892 version are advertised as “the first version.” To add to the confusion, we do not have the source material for the Blumine movement and Funeral March from the 1889 version. Evidence suggests that Mahler lifted the Blumine directly from incidental music for a play without changing anything, and that he kept it the same through the 1892 revision. As for the Funeral March, the score material of the 1892 version appears to be an altered copy of the 1889 version, and musicologists can see clearly what he revised and the original material under the revision. This makes it fairly easy to reconstruct the 1889 version from the 1892 version. There is some speculation here, but it is minimal.