Tchaikovsky. Mahler

Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto is one of the most frequently performed works in the genre. The vivid lyricism and melodious expressiveness have made it a favourite with the public, and the richness of the piano score draws performers’ attention. But the concerto did not immediately find favour. In 1875, when Tchaikovsky showed the work to his friend and teacher Nikolai Rubinstein, the latter refused to perform the concerto, considering the score to be insufficiently “piano-like”. The concerto subsequently gained renown with Alexander Siloti’s version, in which the work’s virtuoso qualities were deeply enhanced. Today, both versions enjoy popularity – the now traditional Siloti version and the original version, where the virtuosity doesn’t put the unusual melodious richness and the expressiveness of the score into the shade.
Tchaikovsky dedicated the concerto to the renowned German pianist Hans von Bülow. Von Bülow’s performances in Boston, New York and Philadelphia proved to be tremendous successes, and ever since then Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto has been one of the mot symbolic pieces of Russian music. In Russia, the concerto was first performed by Sergei Taneyev. In a letter, he called it the first Russian piano concerto that corresponded with reality. It was this work that became the first classical example of the piano concerto genre in Russian music.

Speaking of his First Symphony, Mahler said that it “… was born of an episode of love; that is what lies at its core, or rather what preceded it in the life of its creator.”
The first movement, grandiose in terms of scale, “draws the dawn awakening of nature, emerging from silence, from the early morning frozen sounds: birdsong, the fanfares of a hunting horn, calls that blend together in an indistinct, growing rumble…” (Inna Barsova). The appearance of the Hero, like Wagner’s Siegfried, “personifies” this lofty pastorale, decorated from start to finish with songlike flourishes and melodious flights drawn from the Songs of a Wandering Apprentice.
The scherzo is a full-blooded life-affirming version of a folk dance, muscular and rough in the outer sections and a refined and gracious Ländler in the middle.
The third movement – Funeral March in the Manner of Callot – is a grotesque musical interpretation of a cheap popular print well known in Austria – the engraving Die Beerdigung des Jägers by the artist Moritz von Schwindt. The funeral procession of animals burying the hunter is a token of the hypocrisy and lies that reign in life. The finale forms the dramatic heart of the symphony and is a symbol of the integrity of man, drawing his energy and reviving his spirits together with nature. It is to the finale that Mahler’s words most relate concerning the idea of the First Symphony’s depicting “a heroic being filled with energy, his life and sufferings, the struggle and the resistance to fate”. As the composer’s first biographer Paul Stefan said perfectly, in Mahler’s music “life begins on the street and ends in eternity”.

Iosif Raiskin