Eduard Hanslick’s Amusing Review of Mahler’s First Symphony
One of my frustration when compiling the reviews of Gustav Mahler from the Neue Freie Presse was the lack of a review of his First Symphony. I hunted and failed to find anything and concluded that it must have been considered a youthful sin and disregarded by the army of Mahler admirers who wrote for the paper. One thing was clear, there was no detailed review of the work by Julius Korngold, but then performances pre-dated his arrival at the paper. I found a review of the work written by August Beer in Pester Lloyd, the German language paper in Budapest, but my project with Routledge meant focusing on the Neue Freie Presse and more specifically on the reviews written by Mahler’s friend Julius Korngold.
I was mistaken and a humorous and telling review of the work was written by Eduard Hanslick on November 20. 1900. It was hidden deep in the paper on pages 7 and 8 along with reviews of other musical events. As it wasn’t included in my collection of translated reviews by Julius Korngold and several other critics at the paper (including Hanslick) I offer it here on my blog.
Hanslick (and indeed Julius Korngold) has a bad reputation and specifically for getting a lot of things wrong when writing about composers who make up the canon. Thank goodness, we can ignore their views on Tchaikovsky or Debussy. Hanslick isn’t even so universally adverse to Wagner as my review of Mahler’s un-cut performance of Die Meistersinger shows. But that review is now part of the Routledge publication.
Hanslick’s review of Mahler’s First Symphony tells us more about Hanslick than it does about the work. This is something that Hanslick himself acknowledges.
Eduard Hanslick on Mahler’s First Symphony Nov. 20, 1900
“One of us must be mad — and it’s not me!” So concluded one of two stubborn scholars at the end of a long dispute. “It’s probably me,” I thought, with honest humility, after recovering from the terrifying finale of Mahler’s Symphony in D major. As a sincere admirer of Director Mahler — to whom both our opera and the Philharmonic concerts owe so much — I hesitate to rush to judgment on his peculiar and grandiose symphony. On the other hand, I owe my readers honesty, and so I must admit, regretfully, that this new symphony belongs to that species of music which, to me, is simply not music. Perhaps I might have formed some closer relation to it (though surely not a love affair) had we not been denied the knowledge of its origins and meaning. At its first performance in Weimar, the symphony bore the title “Titan” and came with a detailed program. The critics found it “preposterous,” and so the composer erased both title and explanation. In general, poetic instruction manuals for music are often either a nuisance or a red flag. Our great symphonic masters — from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Dvořák — usher us into their celestial realms without requiring such an entrée ticket. Even so, I doubt Mahler’s symphony would have delighted us more with a program than it did without. But we were not indifferent to what a clever man like Mahler might have imagined with each movement. In this darkness, we lacked a guide to show us the path. What, for instance, are we to make of this apocalyptic finale crashing in out of nowhere? What is the funeral march with the old student canon Bruder Martin [Frère Jacques] doing there — and what’s with the so-called “parody” section interrupting it? The music itself would have gained neither charm nor depth from a program — that’s certain — but the composer’s intent might have become clearer, and the work more comprehensible. As it was, we had to make do with the occasional flashes of wit and Mahler’s dazzling orchestral craftsmanship.
The performance of this fiendishly difficult novelty was admirable, and the applause — at least from the youth, packed into the standing room and the galleries — was nothing short of feverish. They could not stop calling Mahler back again and again.
I hope to write more — and perhaps more generously — if I hear this symphony again. For now, what I lack in offering a full appreciation of it is what sometimes deserts even the most inspired composers: “the grace of God.”
