Mahler’s “Totenfeier”: a symphonic poem?

The basis for what now seems to be a misunderstanding about Mahler’s conception of the movement was the autobiography of J.B. Foerster which asserted that that the first movement of the Second Symphony ‘was originally conceived as a symphonic poem, not as a component of a cyclical work’.³ Much of my original article was devoted to a critique of this assertion on the basis that it runs counter to most of the other (scarce) evidence. One document that had previously been cited as supporting Foerster’s memory was a letter from Mahler to Dr Ludwig Strecker, the head of Schott & Söhne, written in mid-October 1891 (GMBsV, 80):

The editors of this letter offered what on the face of it were plausible identifications of these works – what we now know as the First Symphony, Das klagende Lied, Totenfeier, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Lieder und Gesänge. One of the more speculative aspects of my critique was the suggestion that the ‘symphony’ was actually the as yet incomplete Symphony in C minor (eventually no. 2) and the ‘symphonic poem’ was the already performed five-movement work that had publicly been described as a ‘Symphonic Poem in Two Parts’⁴ and was two years later a ‘Tone Poem in Symphonic Form’,⁵ the work we now know as the First Symphony. This alternative reading of the October letter to Strecker was supported by a re-reading of a later letter from Mahler to the publisher. On 19 November 1891 he admitted (GMBsV, 85):

It seems clear that Mahler was not only trying to persuade Schott’s to publish a  symphonic poem, but also G.F. Kogel (1849–1921, conductor of the Museumskonzerte at Frankfurt am Main) to perform the work, the interpretation offered by the original editors of the letter, Knud Martner and Robert Becqué.⁷ My own, more specific reading was that again the five-movement symphonic poem was the work in question, and this was subsequently confirmed by the brief public appearance of Mahler’s letter to Kogel. This was offered for sale as lot 226 at Sotheby’s (London) on 1 December 1995 and the catalogue description summarizes its contents as ‘discussing a work he has composed, a symphonic poem in two parts entitled “Aus dem Leben eines Einsamen”, enquiring whether Kogel would wish to perform it, [and] revealing that the work is to be published by Schott...’.

This title is one that is otherwise unknown in the Mahler literature, but there was no work in Mahler’s limited oeuvre to which at that date (1891) the designation ‘symphonic poem in two parts’ could have referred other than what became the First Symphony. Thus, much of what was necessarily hypothetical in the 1988 article is now confirmed – the Strecker correspondence does not support Foerster’s memories – and the notion that Mahler ever conceived the first movement of the Second Symphony as a single-movement symphonic poem seems very doubtful.⁸ Moreover, the letter to Kogel adds evidence of a previously unknown stage in the tortuous evolution of Mahler’s programmatic statements about his First Symphony.