Totenfeier

The music we now know as the first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony was for five years a separate work – complete, the composer initially believed, in itself. It was only over the course of time that he realised that the orchestral piece he had written in 1888 and called Totenfeier (Funeral Rites) was actually the first movement of a symphony, the “Resurrection” Symphony as it became when he completed it in 1894.

The two scores are not exactly the same. Before he incorporated Totenfeier into the symphony Mahler not only revised many details of orchestration but also made a substantial cut in the middle. They are the same, however, in that they contrast the grim, funereal material with which they begin and which becomes the main theme in both versions, with a vision of yearning ecstasy. This new melody – first heard rising very quietly on violins against a background of four horns, then on violins with horn again, and perhaps most memorably of all on a solo flute accompanied by harps – reappears in the last movement of the symphony as the “Recurrection” theme. It seems as if in Totenfeier, remarkably enough, Mahler had sensed how his as yet unwritten symphony would take shape and had supplied himself with the essential materials to complete it.