Gustav Mahler’s Puzzling Symphony No. 1, “Titan”

If only Gustav Mahler could have told a tale as well as Richard Strauss.

Strauss, undisputed master of programmatic music, famously believed that he could depict a knife and fork in music if so motivated. He sought the ability to “depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.”

Strauss had written four of his vividly expressive programmatic tone poems by 1889, the same year his close friend and near contemporary Gustav Mahler premiered his first symphony. At the time, Mahler called his work a “Symphonic Poem in Two Sections,” but Mahler didn’t have quite the gift for storytelling that Strauss did, and he wrestled with the symphony’s title and meaning for the better part of the following decade.

In compositional terms, writing the symphony took Mahler no time at all: a little more than six weeks. The bulk of the work was done in Leipzig in early 1888, and incorporated musical ideas from several pre-existing pieces including his own “Songs of a Wayfarer,” Liszt’s Dante symphony, Wagner’s Parsifal, and the folk song “Frère Jacques.”

While Mahler wrote like a man possessed and had every reason to expect success (“It became so overpowering as it flowed out of me like a mountain river!” he said), the premiere, in Budapest, was by all accounts a failure.

A chief reason for this was audience expectations. While Strauss provided a framework for his stories—Macbeth, Don Quixote and other well-known tales with familiar plots—Mahler had presented a musical poem without any guidance for the audience. No program notes, no explanation at all. The dramatic shifts in tone seemed to be telling some kind of story, but what kind of narrative would include a pastoral interlude, a violent storm, and a mocking funeral dirge based on a children’s song?

The symphony’s first audiences were left disoriented and angry. The critics called it “noise.” Nasty caricatures appeared in the press mocking the composer and the work, and even today rumors persist that the orchestra itself sabotaged the premiere—an inauspicious start for someone who became one of history’s masters of the symphonic form.

Of the experience, Mahler wrote, “In Pest, where I performed it for the first time, my friends bashfully avoided me afterward; nobody dared talk to me about the performance and my work, and I went around like a sick person or an outcast.”

It was three full years before the composer would look at the score again.

When he did, in Hamburg between January and August 1893, he took a lesson from Budapest. In addition to musical revisions, he added descriptives for the movements, and gave the work a new and more informative title: “Titan,” a Tone Poem in Symphonic Form.

The name “Titan” refers to a novel by the German writer Jean Paul, whom Mahler greatly admired. While there aren’t direct parallels between the symphony and the novel plot, the work was a source of personal inspiration for Mahler. His close friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner described it this way: “What he had in mind was simply a strong, heroic person, living and suffering, struggling with and succumbing to destiny.”

As for the movements, the descriptions promise us an emotional roller coaster: Spring, flowers, a funeral march, Dante’s inferno, and “a sudden outburst of despair from a deeply wounded heart.”

And it was with this added nudge given to the listeners that the 1893 Hamburg premiere of the revised version proved a success.

But not enough of a success for Mahler just yet. Still not happy with the work, he revised it twice more: Once for a performance in Weimar in 1894, where it was titled Symphony, “Titan,” and included the program descriptions; and again for a performance in Berlin in 1896, titled simply Symphony in D major, with tempo markings only. No frills. By then, the work itself had been well established and Mahler had given up on the idea of a program.

“Originally, my friends persuaded me to supply a kind of program, in order to facilitate the understanding of the D major [Symphony],” he said. “Thus, I had subsequently invented this title and explanations. That I omitted them this time was caused not only by the fact that I consider them inadequate, but also because I found out how the public has been misled by them.”

In short, said Mahler’s wife Alma, he’d grown tired of being asked how “various situations from the novel were interpreted in the music.”

“The need to express myself musically in symphonic terms – begins only on the plane of obscure feelings at the gate that opens into the other world, the world in which things no longer fall apart in time and space,” he said. “Just as I find it banal to compose program music, I regard it as unsatisfactory and unfruitful to try to make program notes for a piece of music.”

Mahler never used the name “Titan” once the symphony was in its final form. Modern audiences wondering who “Titan” refers to will look in vain.

Fast Facts

• Mahler was very superstitious regarding the “Curse of the Ninth,” a belief that composers die after finishing their ninth symphony (Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, and Bruckner either died after completing their ninth symphony or never made it through a tenth). He was so superstitious that he named his Das Lied von der Erde a song cycle, though it is a symphony in everything but name. He then finished a “9th” symphony. Believing he dodged fate, he began work on his 10th symphony and died midway through composing it.
• Mahler died before hearing performances of either Das Lied von der Erde or his 9th symphony.
• The composer was extremely noise sensitive, demanding complete silence when composing. It’s been written that the bells on a cow would drive him into a frenzy.
• A perfectionist as a conductor, he once stopped a rehearsal because the orchestra had played a note that, in his mind, “destroyed the universe.”
• Mahler frequently composed in a small hut he’d built for the purpose, gathering inspiration from walks in nature then running back to the hut to write ideas down before he forgot them. Mahler had rules for hut visitors: no conversation, no laughter, and don’t even look at him.
• Mahler frequently composed in a small hut he’d built for the purpose, gathering inspiration from walks in nature then running back to the hut to write ideas down before he forgot them. Mahler had rules for hut visitors: no conversation, no laughter, and don’t even look at him.
• For a composer, he had an unusual request for his funeral: no music.

See Pacific Symphony perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 February 26-28, 2026. Get tickets.