Blumine

On its first three performances – in Budapest in 1889, in Hamburg in 1893 and in Weimar in 1894 – the work we now know as Mahler’s First Symphony consisted of five movements. Whatever title Mahler attached to it on those occasions – “Symphonic Poem in two parts” in Budapest, “Titan, a tone poem in symphonic form” in Hamburg and Weimar – it included an Andante in C major as its second movement. This Blumine (or “Flower Piece”), as it was called in the programmes of the Hamburg and Weimar performances, was dropped before the work was first published in 1899 and was lost to view until the manuscript of the 1893 version of the score emerged at Sotheby’s in 1959. Blumine was given its first modern performance under the direction of Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1967.

The legitimacy of including Blumine in a performance of the First Symphony, which does happen from time to time, is inevitably a matter of some controversy. Once the composer had discarded it in his 1896 revision of the score – having concluded, after conducting it three times, that the work was better off without it – there was no doubt in his mind that it should be suppressed and that it should remain that way. On the other hand, it is a magically scored little inspiration and, in spite of a thematic relationship with the last movement of the symphony, has a legitimate existence in its own right. After all, as the sole survivor of seven orchestral pieces designed to accompany a series of tableaux vivants on Viktor von Scheffel’s poem, Der Trompeter von Säkkingen in Kassel in 1884, Blumine was actually written before the symphony was even sketched. Basically a highly melodious trumpet serenade with an extended and expressive middle section based on a variant of the trumpet theme, it is a delightfully youthful anticipation of the “post-horn” episode in the Third Symphony.

Gerald Larner ©2007