Orchestra La Scala Milan under Riccardo Chailly in Alicante's ADDA

 A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nineteenth century German Romantic tradition, then that comparison must include considerations of what happened to the style, if indeed it ever existed as an identifiable entity.

The orchestra, La Scala, Milan under its conductor Riccardo Chailly, has a tradition with Mahler symphonies, and this is very much the tradition of its conductor. Ricardo Chailly, the program noted, has over 150 recordings to his name and he also has recorded a complete Mahler symphony cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. ADDA’s audience thus expected a lot from the evening. There was no disappointment.

Beethoven’s First Symphony was premiered in 1800. Stylistically, it is rooted in the tradition that Haydn and Mozart had created in the previous century, but from its opening, Beethoven’s first is different. While we now label the earlier era as classical, Beethoven’s first surely heralded the era of Romanticism, where the expression of individual emotions rather than structural integrity was to be the focus of artistic intentions.

The structure is there from the previous classical era. Sonata form is evident in the first movement and elsewhere. The fast, slow, minuet and finale format is preserved, but the principal keys, which still dominate the work, arrive more by suggestion than by statement and the minuet is barely danceable because its character is that of the modern scherzo. The very word implies a musical joke, perhaps a piece of trivia included to express personal feelings and reflections.

This is thus a work that represents a revolution of symphonic thinking, but this revolution was not a break with the past, more its extension and amplification into new territory. And though Beethoven’s orchestra was large for its era, it still comprised only double winds and no trombones or tuba. What characterizes the music, however, as so often in Beethoven, is the possibility that the inspiration came from the composer’s memory of dance tunes and popular music, reworked and remodelled into “serious” form.

And so to the link. At the end of that nineteenth century, Gustav Mahler announced another stylistic revolution with his first symphony, whose most noticeable difference from the Beethoven was immediately the size of the orchestra employed. There are four movements again. But now the movements pay only lip service to the formal structures of sonata form, which, like Beethoven’s introduction of the tonic, is via suggestion rather than statement. The placing of the slow movement third rather than second began with Beethoven, so this was nothing new.

But what Mahler did that was revolutionary was to incorporate folk-like melodies into the symphonic argument and render that argument largely textural. Here, the composer seems to want to explore the range of sonorities that these large forces could generate. But despite the composer’s reputation for deploying large forces, these sonorities are only rarely loud or brash. These contrasts are textural and coloristic, clearly intended to convey to the listener the quality of an experience, rather than its narrative.

A contemporary listener can only imagine what an audience in central Europe made of a slow movement that juxtaposed a funeral march based on a French children’s song with passages that derived from Jewish Klezmer dance music.

Perhaps the finale is a little too meandering and perhaps its triumphal end is overblown. But who cares? And this performance, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Chailly, was wonderfully detailed. Here we heard all the sonorities and all the dynamic changes in intricate and vivid detail. Everything seemed to make sense, even those passages where the composer seemed to delight in the tangential. The use of rubato was obvious, but never overdone. Everything made musical sense to the extent that during the first movement this listener heard the progress as a walk through scenic countryside! It is a work I have heard many times before but with Riccardo Chailly’s vision and supremely masterful reading, I now can’t wait for the next performance.

And what about the comparison, Beethoven to Mahler, mentioned at the start? Beethoven arguably invented the individual’s experiential centrality in the symphony. No longer was the form a rigid frame that had to contain certain elements. In his first symphony, Beethoven had not yet fully divested himself of the need to conform, but the innovations he introduced were well developed in Mahler’s time. By the end of that nineteenth century, the individual’s emotions and feelings had become the point of the exercise, not mere suggestion and in Mahler’s first, we meet the composer, not the structure. In fact, the whim of the composer’s intention was about to prompt others, following the current extension of harmonic complexity, to call again for the imposition of structure. There was a tradition, but perhaps by the century’s end, there was nowhere else for the style to go. And, if we were to accept popular tunes into the symphony, why not make folk culture central to the argument? A new era dawned.