The Leading Classical Music Label Direct To You

Read reviews, listen to the music, and purchase the COMPACT DISC Mahler, G.: Symphony No. 1, "Titan"

Customer Service Toll Free 866.489.4152

Flash 9 required. Click to download.

Narrow your search
with our Music Browser

Classical Music

        Ballet
        Chamber Music
        Choral
        Concertos
        Film Music
        Folk Legends
        Instrumental
        Musicals
        Opera / Operetta
        Orchestral
        Vocal

Jazz

Jazz Contemporary
Jazz Icons

New Age

Wind Band

World

        Ballad
        Bhuddist
        Chinese Music
        Classical (World)
        Early Music (World)
        Folk
        Gamelan
        Gypsy
        Hindustani
        Jazz (World)
        Klezmer
        Sufi
        Vocal (World)
        World

Special Offers:

Sale on select Chandos titles

Sale on select BBC Legends Items

Naxos Classics Clearance Sale

Sale on select Naxos American Classics

Sale on Charles Dickens DVD Box Set

Sale on select box sets

Clearance on Complete Beethoven Edition

Sale on the Jazz Icons Series

Clearance

Penguin Guide

200 Essential Recordings

Recently Released

Upcoming Releases

SACD

DVD

        Ballet DVD
        Classical Concert
        Classical Documentary
        Dance Documentary
        Opera DVD

Audio Books

        Anthologies / Collections
        Arts
        Biographies
        Children's Classics
        Classic Fiction
        Great Epics and Tales
        History
        Junior Classic Fiction
        Junior History
        Literature
        Music Biographies
        Music Education
        Non-Fiction
        Philosophy
        Plays - Others
        Plays - Shakespeare
        Poetry
        Religion
        Samplers
        Sports
        Wine Guide

NaxosDirect Podcasts

Video Librarian Reviews

Labels

Naxos Label

        Naxos American Classics
        Naxos Best Of...
        Naxos Box Sets
        Naxos Cinema Classics
        Naxos Classics
        Naxos DVD
        Naxos DVD-Audio
        Naxos International
        Naxos Jazz
        Naxos Limited Edition
        Naxos Milken Archives
        Naxos Night Music
        Naxos Opera
        Naxos Orchestral
        Naxos Special Release
        Naxos Wind Band Classics
        Naxos World

Composers

Conductors

Ensembles

Orchestras

Choirs

Artists

Instruments

Producers

Mahler, G.: Symphony No. 1, "Titan"

Home

Classical Music

Orchestral

View large image

$9.99 (COMPACT DISC)

In Stock - Usually ships within 24 hours.

Link to this COMPACT DISC Link to this page

Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911 ) Symphony No.1 in D Major "Titan" Langsam, schleppend Kraftig bewegt Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen...

Read more about this recording

Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911 )

Symphony No.1 in D Major "Titan"

Langsam, schleppend

Kraftig bewegt

Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

St�rmisch bewegt

Blumine (original 2nd movement)

The great Viennese symphonic tradition found worthy successors in two composers of very different temperament and background, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. The latter, indeed, extended the form in an extraordinary way that has had a far-reaching effect on the course of Western music.

Mahler was to express succinctly enough his position in the world. He saw himself as three times homeless, a native of Bohemia in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the whole world. The second child, and the first of fourteen to survive, he was born in Kaliste in Bohemia. Soon after his birth his family moved to Jihlava, where his father, by his own very considerable efforts, had raised himself from being little more than a pedlar, with a desire for intellectual self-improvement, to the running of a tavern and distillery. Mahler's musical abilities were developed first in Jihlava, before a brief period of schooling in Prague, which ended unhappily, and a later course of study at the Conservatory in Vienna, where he turned from the piano to composition and, as a necessary corollary, conducting.

It was as a conductor that Mahler made his career, at first at a series of provincial opera-houses, and later in the position of the highest distinction of all, when, in 1897, he became Kapellmeister of the Vienna Hofoper, two months after his baptism as a Catholic, a necessary preliminary. In Vienna he made significant reforms in the Court Opera, but made enough enemies, particularly represented in the anti-semitic press, to lead to his resignation in 1907, followed by a final period conducting in America and elsewhere, in a vain attempt to secure his family's future before his own imminent death, which took place on 18th May, 1911.

Although his career as a conductor involved him most closely with opera, Mahler attempted little composition in this field. His work as a composer consists chiefly of his songs and of his ten symphonies, the last left unfinished at his death, and his monumental setting of poems from the Chinese in Das Lied von der Erde.

Mahler's Symphony No.1 in D

Major was completed, in its first version, in 1888, incredibly enough five years before Dvorak's Symphony From the New World and only five years after the last symphony of Brahms. It was first performed the following year in Budapest, where Mahler had been appointed director of the Hungarian opera, before an audience that became increasingly restive as the work proceeded.

For the symphony Mahler had drawn up a programme, although he strongly believed that, whatever literary programme might lie behind a composition, the music should be able to stand on its own, without verbal explanation. No narrative element was given to the first audience in Budapest, but later performances were at first helped by a sketched description of the work:

Part I

From the days of youth - Flower, Fruit and Thorn-pieces

(Blumen, Fr�chte und Dornenst�cke)

1. Spring and no end to it.

The introduction describes the awakening of nature and earliest dawn.

2. Bluminenkapitel (Andante)

3. In full sail (Scherzo)

Part II

Commedia umana

4. Shipwrecked. A dead march in the manner of Callot. The following explanation may be given, if required: The composer found the external inspiration for this piece in a satirical picture well known to all children in South Germany, The Huntsman's Funeral, from an old book of children's stories. The animals of the forest escort the body of the dead forester to the grave. Hares carry a little flag, with a band of Bohemian village musicians in front, accompanied by cats, toads, crows, and so on, playing, and by stags, does, foxes and other four-footed and feathered denizens of the forest, in comic guise. Here the music is intended to express ironic jesting alternating with mysterious brooding. This is followed immediately by:

5. Dall'inferno al Paradiso (Allegro furioso), the sudden expression of the feelings of a deeply wounded heart.

The symphony, originally a symphonic poem, although without title, has a more explicit literary source in the work of Jean Paul, an early Romantic writer whose Flegeljahre had had a strong influence on the young Schumann. The programmatic titles of the first two movements are taken from Jean Paul, whose connection with the seventeenth century French artist Jacques Callot is seen in his preface to E. T.

A. Hoffmann's Phantasiest�cke in Callots Manier. In short the symphony, in common with Mahler's early songs, has its literary inspiration in writing of the earliest romantics, in the curiously grotesque ironical world of Jean Paul and in the evocative Des Knaben Wunderhorn of Brentano and von Arnim. The later title of the work, Titan, refers not to the struggle between the ancient gods of Greece so much as to the novel of that name by Jean Paul, in which two "titans" or Himmelsst�rmer, struggle for their aims of intellectual freedom or pleasure.

The first movement opens with a slow section in which fanfares pierce the summer morning mists, suggesting pictorially the ideas of Mahler's earlier song “Ging heut' Morgen �ber's Feld”, the melody of which provides the first subject. The slower music returns, but nothing is done to dispel the mood of happy serenity, although, as the movement hurries forward again, we may be aware of more tragic implications, Dornenst�cke. A scherzo follows, with a Schubertian trio, completing the first section.

After a pause the second part of the symphony opens with a solemn funeral march, making satirical use of a minor version of the children's song Frere Jacques, and easily intelligible in terms of the composer's explanation. Use is also made of Mahler's song “Die zwei blaue Augen” in music of bitter contrast and heartfelt anguish.

The last movement, to which the Italian explanatory title was later added, is one of great dramatic intensity. Audiences unfamiliar with the work might well be warned by the example of the first performance in Budapest, when a woman jumped out of her seat in alarm as the movement began, an incident that caused the composer some amusement. A march leads to a more lyrical melody, before a renewed storm of sound, in music that is, as Mahler was to claim, a world in itself.

For the first three performances of his first symphony Mahler included a second movement Andante, later to be discarded. The modern re-discovery of this Blumine movement in 1966 by the Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell led to a performance the following year at Aldeburgh under the direction of Benjamin Britten. For various reasons Donald Mitchell was able to identify this lyrical and romantic movement with its extended trumpet melody with music that Mahler had written in 1884 as part of his now lost incidental music for performances at Cassel of Joseph Scheffel's popular Der Trompeter von Sakkingen, a work that in its metre must suggest the verse of Longfellow to an English-speaking reader. The hero blows the trumpet, the sound of which is heard through the night, heard by the Rhine and the spirits of the river, carried by the wind to the castle of his master.

The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice (PNRSO)

The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice (PNRSO) was founded in 1935 in Warsaw through the initiative of well-known Polish conductor and composer Grzegorz Fitelberg. Under his direction the ensemble worked till the outbreak of the World War II. Soon after the war, in March 1945, the orchestra was resurrected in Katowice by the eminent Polish conductor Witold Rowicki. In 1947 Grzegorz Fitelberg returned to Poland and became artistic director of the PNRSO. He was followed by a series of distinguished Polish conductors - Jan Krenz, Bohdan Wodiezko, Kazimierz Kord, Tadeusz Strugala, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Stanislaw Wislocki and, since 1983, Antoni Wit. The orchestra has appeared with conductors and soloists of the greatest distinction and has recorded for Polskie Nagrania and many international record labels. For Naxos, the PNRSO will record the complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Mahler.

Michael Halasz

Michael Halasz's first engagement as a conductor was at the Munich Gartnerplatz Theater, where, from 1972 to 1975, he directed all operetta productions. In 1975 he moved to Frankfurt as principal Kapellmeister under Christoph von Dohnanyi, working with the most distinguished singers and conducting the most important works of the operatic repertoire. Engagements as a guest-conductor followed, and in 1977 Dohnanyi took him to the Staatsoper in Hamburg as principal Kapellmeister. From 1978to 1991 hewasGeneral Musical Director of the Hagen opera house and in 1991 he took up the post of Resident Conductor of the Vienna State Opera.

Disc 1

Symphony No. 1 in D major, "Titan"

(more info)

Performed by: Berlin Deutsches Symphony Orchestra Chicago Symphony Orchestra Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra London Philharmonic Orchestra Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Gustav Mahler
Conducted by: Rafael Kubelik Klaus Tennstedt Michael Halasz Zdenek Kosler Michael Gielen Roger Norrington Bernard Haitink Gerard Schwarz Gabriel Chmura Christoph Eschenbach

I. Langsam, schleppend - 16:19
II. Kraftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell - 7:32
III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen - 10:02
IV. Sturmisch bewegt - 19:30
Blumine (original second movement) - 7:16

Reviews

Be the first to review this title

FREE SHIPPING on orders
of 5 items or more!

Earn Naxos Rewards Points by opening an account and buying your favorite music today! Create your account here.

See all of our great site features here.

Composer(s):
Mahler, Gustav

Conductor(s):
Halasz, Michael

Orchestra(s):
Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra

Label: Naxos Classics
UPC: 730099552226
Item Number: 8550522
Release Date: Oct 24, 1994