Mahler’s therapy session, staged first and then played flawlessly from memory
A cuckoo call, and a timpanist who fluffed his cue in front of several thousand people – Aurora Orchestra’s Mahler’s First By Heart had all the ingredients of a soap opera. Now in its twelfth year at the Proms, Aurora’s memorised-performance format has become an institution. This outing, again under Nicholas Collon, applied the format to a symphony and creative process for which theatrical treatment seems like an obvious choice. Mahler wrote his First at twenty-something, revised it obsessively for the next decade, and left behind a symphony that can’t decide whether it’s a tone poem or a funeral – Aurora let it be both.
The first half staged the piece’s making, drawing on letters and accounts from Mahler and those around him, including his wife Alma, whose later reflections on his process and on how he was misunderstood shaped the framing. This part unfolded as though recounted from a therapy session, Mahler talking Freud through his own past while the orchestra conjured it up around them. Jack Bardoe played Mahler with a nervy and overcorrecting energy that suited a composer forever explaining himself. Sara Twomey took on both Sigmund Freud, whom Mahler consulted decades later while writing his Tenth, and Ferdinand Pfohl, the friend who described Mahler after the symphony’s disastrous premiere as looking sick, ghostly and abandoned by everyone he knew. Natalie Lewis appeared as the mezzo-soprano, a quieter presence amid all the diagnosing and unravelling.
The Freud material earned some of the biggest laughs of the night – what about your mother, indeed. Mahler cancelling sessions, then turning up anyway to talk about pop songs from his childhood that apparently still had their hooks in him, made for good comic timing without undercutting the point being made – which is that this symphony is stuffed with the ordinary and half-remembered. A soldier’s march and that cuckoo call in the clarinet, which Mahler didn’t invent but which he pushed further than anyone, letting the interval widen across the piece from a minor third to a major third to a fourth to a fifth, spring easing into summer whether the composer noticed the pattern or not. The cellos, we were shown, share that fourth with the cuckoo. The funeral march got particular attention as previous audiences never quite knew what to do with this movement as it includes a nursery rhyme, Frère Jacques, dragged into a minor key, first sung in a dream by Mahler’s dead brother Ernst, into a dirge.
By the second half, mostly on their feet, the orchestra gave the symphony in full. The finale’s opening scream was all the more powerful for having just heard, an hour earlier, about the walk Mahler took with a friend when the movement’s ideas first came to him. One piece of trivia from the first half stayed with me through the full recital, Mahler once lost patience with a timpanist who couldn’t nail a passage and simply took the part over himself, mid-rehearsal, while the rest of the orchestra watched. This was a composer who couldn’t leave anything alone, not a timpani part, not his symphony’s title and not his own reputation once Budapest turned on him.
It’s worth remembering how badly this symphony was received on its first outing in Budapest, Mahler conducting, his friends staying away from him afterwards for the better part of four years. He tried titles, dropped them, tried again three years later in Berlin with yet another rebrand. Early advocates suggested handing the audience a programme, since the piece had started life as a symphonic poem in two parts before being pressed into symphony form, spring without end, then full sail, then the funeral march nobody understood, then out of the inferno into paradise. Given the Proms exists to make this repertoire welcoming rather than forbidding, and given how much of that backstory won’t have been common knowledge in the hall, staging the first half as narration did the job Mahler’s programme notes used to do.
What Aurora’s format does best is remove the mystique without removing the strangeness. By the time the full symphony arrived, its oddities, the folk tunes, the funeral march, the cuckoo call felt less like puzzles to solve and more like old friends turning up where expected. Mahler spent thirty years revising this piece and never quite settled on what to call it. Sunday morning, at least, it settled into itself.
BBC Proms: Mahler’s First By Heart’s run at The Royal Albert Hall, London, has now concluded.