Todtenfeier

    I called the first movement 'Todtenfeier'. It may interest you to
    know that it is the hero of my D major symphony who is being
    borne to his grave, his life being reflected, as in a clear mirror,
    from a vantage point.

    Mahler.

    I only drew up the programme as a crutch for a cripple (you know
    who I mean)...it leads directly to a flattening and coarsening...

    Mahler, in a letter to Alma.

    Mahler created real problems for himself by casting his first
    movement in the form of an epic funeral rite. It is in a sense
    putting last things first - always a risky business.

    Donald Mitchell.

No sooner had he finished his First Symphony than Mahler began work on its
successor. The first movement was completed fairly quickly - in fact the
autograph is dated "Prague: September 10, 1888" little more than six months
after the completion of the earlier work.

However, after this things did not go so well, and it was not until five years
later that Mahler completed the next two movements. Part of the reason is
undoubtedly his traumatic experience with the great conductor Hans von
B劒ow, director of the Hamburg Philharmonic, a renowned supporter of new
music (he had been one of the very few to champion the symphonies of
Bruckner).

In 1891 Mahler took the score of Todtenfeier - at that point still the intended
opening movement of his new symphony - to von B劒ow.

    When B劒ow saw how complicated the score was, he urged me to
    play it for him instead: "At least I will gear it in an authentic
    concept..."
    I played. It occurred to me to glance at B劒ow, and I see that he
    is holding both hands over his ears. I stop playing. B劒ow, who is
    standing at the window, notices at once and urges me to continue.

    I play. After a little while I turn around again. B劒ow is sitting at
    the table holding his ears. The whole scene is repeated: I stop
    playing, again he urges me to continue. I go ahead, and all kinds
    of thoughts pass through my mind: perhaps B劒ow, who is a
    piano virtuoso [he gave the premiere of Tchaikovsky's First
    Concerto in Boston on October 25, 1875] does not like my playing
    style or my touch, perhaps my forte is too passionate or too
    heavy-handed. I remember that B棊ow is extremely nervous and
    often complains of headaches. But I play on without interruption,
    without paying attention to anything else; I may even have
    forgotten that B劒ow was present.
    When I had finished, I awaited the verdict silently. But my older
    listener remained long at the table, silent and motionless Suddenly
    he made an energetic gesture of rejection and said: "If that is still
    music, then I do not understand a single thing about music."
    We parted from, each other in complete friendship. I, however,
    with the conviction that B劒ow considers me an able conductor
    but absolutely hopeless as a composer.

In other letters Mahler's description of the encounter is even more dramatic:
"B劒ow became quite hysterical with horror, declaring that, compared with my
music, Tristan was a Haydn symphony, and went on like a madman. So you
see I am myself beginning to believe: Either my stuff is abstruse nonsense - or
- well! You can work it out and decide for yourself! I am getting tired of it!"

And to Richard Strauss - four years Mahler's junior, and by this time already
highly successful composers - "A week ago B劒ow almost gave up the ghost
while I was playing... You have not gone through anything like that and cannot
understand that one begins to lose faith. Good heavens, world history will go
on without my compositions."

In 1894, then, in the hopes of publication, Mahler crossed out the words "First
Movement, Symphony in C minor" from the score and inscribed it
"Todtenfeier". He was to revise the movement for its eventual incorporation
into what was to become the Resurrection Symphony, and the differences
between the two versions - "large in number but small in scale" as Richard
Osborne has put it - are sufficient for the International Gustav Mahler Society
to have conferred the status of an independent composition to Todtenfeier,
which is, to quote Donald Mitchell, "remarkably self-sufficient and dramatically
self-contained."

There have not been many separate recordings of Todtenfeier; I have two in
my collection, and there are two further listed in Schwann - or whatever it's
calling itself these days.

The version on Virgin Classics conducted by Karl Anton Rickenbacker serves
well enough, and is neither badly played nor conducted, but is hardly inspiring.

The recording by Leif Segerstam on Chandos, on the other hand, is quite
special. Segerstam adopts a very slow tempo indeed: his timing for the
movement is 28:33 - compare most recordings of the first movement of the
Resurrection and you can see just how slow this really is (Todtenfeier is not
significantly longer in terms of the number of bars).

Segerstam, a composer himself, is more than capable of sustaining the
listener's interest, though, and there is an undeniable sense of massive
foreboding about the performance, whose shimmering strings and pastoral feel
relate back to the opening of the First Symphony.

Segerstam seems to me to have radically rethought this movement in order
that, rather than merely presenting it as simply the opening movement of the
Resurrection with slightly odd orchestration and some strange extra episodes,
he can let it stand on its own as a self-contained drama (and Segerstam's
performance is very dramatic).

This great performance is the filler for a superb Sixth Symphony (see below);
the recording is excellent.