GUSTAV MAHLER‘s first symphony, The Titan, was completed in March 1888 and premiered on November 20th , 1889 in Budapest, where Mahler was now director of the Royal Opera. Originally the work had five movements, the second of which, called Andante or Blumine, resembles a serenade. This movement was heavily criticised and later removed from the symphony after its third performance in Vienna, and was also removed from the first edition in 1899. Mahler’s first symphony has been played as a work of four movements since the symphony’s fourth performance at the Berlin premiere which took place on March 16th 1896.
“Blumine”, which translates as “colourful” or “flower”, was originally composed as one of seven pieces of inter-act music composed by Mahler “in two days” in June 1884, for the performance of Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s play The Trumpeter of Säckingen. The movement with the above title, included in Mahler’s first symphony, hardly differs from the original version, including the orchestration, which is for the small section of the symphony orchestra used in full in the other movements of the symphony. The Andante begins and ends with a lyrical cantilena for trumpet. In an interview published the day after the premiere, August Beer described it as a heartfelt, exuberant trumpet melody that alternates with a melancholy oboe song. It is not difficult to recognize the lovers exchanging their tender feelings in the stillness of the night.
While Mahler was working at the Theatre Royal in Kassel in 1883, he fell in love with the attractive blonde soprano Johanna Richter. It was probably Richter who inspired him to write Blumine. In conversation with the violinist Bauer-Lechner, the composer described the movement as a “sentimentally passionate… love episode”. His attitude to ‘Blumine’ is, however, quite controversial. In an 1884 letter written to his friend Fritz Lohr, he stated, “I finished this opus in two days and I must say that I am very pleased with it”. Two years later, in a conversation with the conductor Max Steinitzer, he expressed a very different opinion – he was annoyed that the work was too sentimental and made Steinitzer promise him that he would destroy the clavier score he had composed. Still, apparently by 1888 Mahler had liked the music enough to include it as a movement in his first symphony, although after the third performance of the symphony he abandoned the movement altogether. The composer pointed to ‘too strong a similarity of tonalities in the adjacent movements’ as the main reason for its abolition. This statement is misleading, however, given that in its Hamburg version the Blumine is in C major, a tonality that does not persist in any of the other movements. There are a number of other reasons that may have led Mahler to drop the Blumine from his symphony: the negative opinion expressed in the press (“trivial” as certain critic dismissed the movement), the rather noticeable similarity between the first six notes of the melody, which begins in trumpet, and the first six notes with which the finale of Brahms’s Symphony No 1, which had appeared a full decade earlier, in 1876, and was also written in C major – a convenient occasion for speculation and slander. Whatever the motives for the removal of the Blumine, however, most conductors apparently approved of Mahler’s decision, as is evident from the fact that since the publication of the movement in 1968 it has been relatively rarely included in concert programmes. Mahler’s most eminent biographer, the Frenchman Henri Louis de la Grange, describes the movement as follows: ‘There can be no doubt about the authorship of Blumine, and yet few other arguments can be advanced in its favour. This is music like that of Mendelssohn at the end of the nineteenth century: beautiful, charming, light, urban and repetitive – exactly what Mahler’s music never was’.
The Blumine part was rediscovered by the biographer Donald Mitchell in 1966 while he was doing research at Yale University for his forthcoming biography of Mahler. A year later, on June 18, 1967, Benjamin Britten premiered the movement as part of the Aldeburgh Festival, the first time the music had been heard since 1894. Blumine was first published in 1968 by the American company Theodore Presser (Malvern, Pennsylvania). Since then, the music has been performed in many different concert formats: as a stand-alone work, isolated from the symphony, before or after the symphony, or as the second movement in its Hamburg, five-movement version. However, many notable conductors have never performed Blumine as part of Mahler’s Symphony No 1. These include Leonard Bernstein, John Barbirolli, Jascha Horenstein, Otto Klemperer, György Solti, Rafael Kubelík and Bernard Haitink. Perhaps these conductors share the opinion expressed by Henry-Louis de La Grange: ” In my opinion, with such an amazingly clear and intelligent composer, it is sacrilege to play anything but the final version of the works: Mahler knew better than anyone how his music should sound, and he never stopped perfecting his scores “.