Czech Philharmonic • Velvet Revolution Concert

At the end of June 1894 during a stay at Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) wrote to his friend Fritz Löhr, a philosopher and archaeologist in Vienna: “I hereby report the happy birth of a healthy, strong final movement for my second symphony. The father and the child are doing well given the circumstances, but the latter still is not yet entirely out of danger.” He had begun writing his Symphony No. 2 in 1888, immediately after finishing his First Symphony (although he reworked the First Symphony several times later on; the final version was premiered in 1896). He had just become the Kapellmeister of the German opera company in Budapest, and the problems with the theatre’s management and the doubts that constantly accompanied Mahler’s creative process led to a delay. He did not return to the work in progress until three years later, when he took his position at the Municipal Theatre in Hamburg. By that time, he had sketched out the first movement, which he gave the title Totenfeier (Funeral Rites). He played it at the piano for the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who admired Mahler’s artistry as a conductor and had enthusiastically welcomed his arrival in Hamburg. However, Bülow showed little comprehension of Mahler as a composer, and now his doubts were further deepened. At the time, Mahler confided to Fritz Löhr that Bülow “was seized by a nervous terror and declared that Tristan is a Haydn symphony compared to my composition. [...] I’m starting to believe it myself: either my things are a lot of confused nonsense, or—fill it in yourself! It is tiring me out...” Once again, he put the symphony aside, but probably not because of Bülov’s criticism; once again he had to devote most of his time and energy to work at the opera and to conducting concerts. After a rather long interruption, in the summer of 1893 he composed the songs Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fish) and Urlicht (Primal Light) from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), and both found a place in the symphony. Hans von Bülow died on 12 February 1894 in Cairo, where he had gone for treatment. And it was he who now—posthumously—helped Mahler find the key to the last movement. Mahler was present at Bülow’s funeral at St Michael’s Church in Hamburg, and he recorded his feelings: “The atmosphere in which I had been sitting there thinking about the departed corresponded to the spirit of the work I was carrying within myself. Then the choir, accompanied by an organ, began singing Klopstock’s Resurrection! It struck me like lightning, and it suddenly all became clear in my mind! A creative artist waits for just such a flash, something like a ‘holy annunciation’ to him!” After initial hesitation, being worried that he would be seen as an imitator of Beethoven, he dared to use choir in the final movement.

The first movement of the symphony (the movement’s title Totenfeier had not yet appeared in a printed edition) is a funeral march in sonata form. It opens with a deep string tremolo, then the winds join in, and the heroic main them gradually emerges. Another theme, solemn in character, also appears in a fugue in the finale, framing the whole composition. The second movement is in the character of a slow Ländler. A transformation of rondo form, it is meant to be a remembrance of “a joyous moment in the life of the dear departed one”. In the third movement, Mahler employed musical material from Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fish), and the song Urlicht (Primal Light) is sung by the alto soloist as the fourth movement, which follows without a pause. According to the composer, the song was to express “the struggle of a soul and questioning of God and of divine existence following life on earth”. For the fifth movement, which also follows attacca, Mahler adapted verses by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). He characterised the finale as follows: “The end of every living thing has come, the last judgment is at hand...”. Yet what prevails over the image of the apocalypse is the image of God’s love, which “illuminates us with blessed knowledge and being”. In the finale of his Second Symphony, Mahler employs spatial effects with offstage French horns, trumpets, and timpani. For the concluding instrumental effect, he sought bells with the specific sound he imagined. He found them at a bell foundry in a village near Hamburg.

The Second Symphony was first performed under Mahler’s baton on 4 March 1895 in Berlin, but without the vocal movements. The critics called the fragmentary performance inappropriate because the public was entitled to get to know the work as a whole. This opinion documents a shift from the days of Beethoven in how symphonic works had come to be viewed as coherent structural wholes. That, however, did not make Mahler’s music easier to understand: “Mr Mahler introduced himself as a composer and a conductor. Although he does not really please the eye as a conductor, he conducts far better than he composes.” Reviewers complained that the work lacked form and accused Mahler of a fondness for dissonances that grate on the ears and of tortuous modulations. There was even a suggestion that he would do better to refrain from writing symphonies.

The premiere of the complete work took place that same year on 13 December, again in Berlin, and again with the composer conducting. Singing the soprano part was Josephine von Artner, a soloist with the Hamburg Opera who came from Prague; Mahler had met her while working in Leipzig. The performer of the alto part was the 21-year-old singer Hedwig Felden, also a native of Bohemia (born in Teplice), who had made her debut in Hamburg a year earlier under Mahler’s baton. Once again, some reviewers wrote that the composer lacked the first, most basic prerequisite for a symphonist: mastery of form. However, the critics received the vocal component with comprehension, calling the concluding chorus “the best part of the whole work”, which “definitely represents a impressive, conciliatory conclusion after a symphony lasting an hour and a half”. The conductor Bruno Walter later declared that “from that day, Mahler’s ascent began.”

Oskar Nedbal led the Czech Philharmonic in the Prague premiere of Mahler’s Second Symphony on 18 December 1903. The orchestra was augmented by players from the orchestra of the New German Theatre, joined by the choirs of the Prague vocal music society Hlahol and of Vinohrady Hlahol. The soloists were Božena Durasová (1886–1961, later known for performing in operettas) and Gabriela Horváthová (1877–1967). A critic described the symphony as a work “of profound spiritual depth, which, through the courage of its conception, the grandeur of its ideas, and often the astonishing power of its expression, both shakes and uplifts the listener. There are few musical poems in which the number of instrumental and vocal means is calculated so little for mere effect; here, everything is artistically justified and organically necessary.”