Vienna Philharmonic
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor

Why might Salomon have chosen the name of the thunderbolt-hurling chief of the Roman gods for this work? Certainly it is the loftiest and most magisterial of Mozart’s symphonies, with a formal and ceremonial quality in keeping with its key of C major. Although today we think of that designation as the plainest and most basic of keys—all white notes on the piano—in the late 18th century it was usually associated with court and high church pomp since it was well suited to the valve-less trumpets of the period. And we find two of them adding brilliance to this work, along with the timpani that invariably accompanied them.

The Jupiter’s ceremonial quality, however, extends far beyond key and scoring. Throughout this work, there is a majesty of conception we find in no other Mozart symphony. Its melodic themes are more formal and less personal than those he created for its two companions, Symphonies Nos. 39 and 40. Donald Francis Tovey, the dean of annotators, called them not only formal but formulas: stock musical gestures used over and over by composers in the late 18th century. The originality and greatness of the Jupiter are not to be found in the materials Mozart used but in how he used them. Above all, the finale with its spectacular fugal deployment of themes shows Mozart’s genius at its zenith. In its stately progression to this greatest of all Mozart movements, the Jupiter becomes a grand summation of the splendors of 18th-century music, incorporating the aesthetics of both its Baroque first half and its Classical conclusion.

The dramatic intensity of the sonata-form first movement reflects Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which had received its Viennese premiere just three months earlier. And, indeed, in the three major theme groups of this movement we experience the emotional versatility that made Mozart an operatic composer without peer. First, the bold, masculine opening music: imperial and full of courtly flourishes, with overtones of bombast and militarism ironically recalling the ongoing Austrian-Turkish hostilities that were then curtailing Mozart’s concert activities. Next, music of feminine lyricism and tenderness for the violins and woodwinds. Finally, a sassy little melody, also launched by the violins; this is taken from a comic aria “Il bacio di mano” (“A Kiss of the Hand”) that Mozart had recently written. Interestingly, it is this impudent tune that generates one of Mozart’s most exciting development sections, in which we hear the first stirrings of the contrapuntal excitement he will unleash in the finale.

In the slow movements of his last three symphonies, Mozart sent innocent-sounding melodies on dangerous journeys. Here, a gently melancholy theme in F major soon enters a dark and agitated world in C minor. The development section travels farther into this thicket, full of painfully dissonant thorns. When the opening music finally returns, the innocent melody has taken on new dimensions of maturity and wisdom. A lovely coda, apparently added by Mozart as an afterthought, closes this movement.

The third-movement minuet provides the Jupiter’s most conventional music: a formal dance for an imperial ballroom. Notice the Mozartean touch of beautiful, slip-sliding music for the woodwinds near the end of the minuet. In the middle trio section, Mozart slyly puts the cart before the horse by beginning most phrases with a closing cadence in the woodwinds to which the violins must provide a suitable opening. And here, too, listen for a loud preview of the famous four-note theme that will spark the finale.

Mozart leaves the best for last. Throughout the 1780s, he had studied counterpoint—the art of weaving together many independent musical lines—with passionate interest and had poured over the scores of J. S. Bach. But rather than a ponderous display of contrapuntal erudition, he uses the intricate interplay of his instrumental lines here to create an overwhelming sense of richness, splendor, and excitement. Mozart weaves his magic with a half-dozen pithy themes, beginning with the sturdy opening four-note motive. Derived from Gregorian chant, this theme was a musical cliché of the period, used frequently by other composers as well as Mozart himself in earlier works. But again the artistry is not in the “what” but in the “how.” The apotheosis comes in the closing moments of the symphony when Mozart sets five of his themes spinning together in a double fugue, revealing, in Elaine Sisman’s words, “vistas of contrapuntal infinity.” Even if Mozart had thought this might be his final symphony—and at age 32 surely he did not—he could not have contrived a more glorious finish to his symphonic career.

Symphony No. 1 in D major
Gustav Mahler
When Gustav Mahler, age 29, premiered his First Symphony in Budapest on November 20, 1889, the audience responded with tepid applause and scattered boos. At subsequent performances in Berlin and in Vienna, the reaction was even more negative.

Before we start feeling smug about our superiority to those benighted audiences 136 years ago, consider what kind of music they were used to hearing. Works contemporary with Mahler’s First included Brahms’ Fourth Symphony (1885), Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony (1886), and Tchaikovsky’s super-romantic Fifth (1888). Now forget about all the modern music you’ve heard, time travel back to 1889, and consider how you might have reacted to Mahler’s musical mood swings, daring orchestral sounds, searing dissonances, and shocking mixture of popular and classical idioms if these were the symphonic works you were accustomed to. For in what was probably the most remarkable and daring first symphony ever written (only Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique can match its shock value), Mahler revealed himself as fully and radically himself.

Strangely, Mahler had expected an easy success. As he later told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner: “Naively, I imagined it would be child’s play for performers and listeners, and would have such immediate appeal that I should be able to live on the profits and go on composing.” Yet he was also aware of the originality of his artistic vision. Of his first two symphonies he wrote: “My whole life is contained in them: I have set down in them my experience and suffering…to anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life will become clear, for my creative works and my existence are so closely interwoven that, if my life flowed as peacefully as a stream through a meadow, I believe I would no longer be able to compose anything.”

When Mahler was creating this work, he would have dearly loved to have been able “to live on the profits,” for he was leading a rather precarious existence. There were no summers off or peaceful cottages in the woods for him then, and any composing he accomplished had to be done in odd hours, often late at night. He jumped rapidly from one opera house to another, as assistant and eventually conductor. But, despite his unquestioned talent, he found keeping a job difficult. Obstinate and uncompromising, he made a bad subordinate. The Symphony No. 1 was composed during the winter of 1887–88 in moments stolen from his work as co-conductor of the Leipzig Stadttheater; by May, he had been forced to resign. By September, he had signed a contract with the Royal Opera House in Budapest, but that too lasted little more than a year.

The symphony the Budapest audience heard was different from the one we hear today. An innovator in matters of symphonic form, Mahler originally created a five-movement work divided into two sections. He called it a “Symphonic Poem” and gave it the subtitle Titan. Unsatisfied, he returned many times to revise it: reducing it to the conventional four movements and refining its orchestration. The version we hear now is his last word from 1906.

Mahler admitted to a friend Max Marschalk that the work was inspired by a passionate love: “The symphony begins where the love affair ends; it is based on the affair which preceded the symphony in the emotional life of the composer.” The lady may have been Marion von Weber, the wife of a prominent Leipzig citizen; this scandal probably hastened Mahler’s departure from that city.

Mahler marked the slow introduction to the first movement as “Wie ein Naturlaut”—“like a sound of nature.” He compared it to life awakening on a beautiful spring morning. A quiet pedal on A, stretched from highest violins to lowest basses, hovers expectantly. Gradually, little motives come to life: a pattern of descending fourths in various woodwinds (the interval of the fourth is central to this work), a military fanfare on the clarinets (Mahler grew up in a army garrison town), woodwind bird calls. Then the tempo accelerates, the key solidifies into D major, and we hear the cellos sing the jaunty walking theme of the second song of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer cycle, in which the disappointed lover strides out into the countryside to drown his grief in nature’s beauty. Later, the walking song returns and gradually builds to a big climax, the only loud moment in this subtle movement. On route to this climax, listen for a series of heavily accented, downward swoops in the violins; this anguished music will return much later in the symphony’s finale.

The second movement is a robust peasant ländler dance based on the composer’s 1880 song, “Hans und Grethe,” and likely inspired by his rural Bohemian childhood. The clattering sounds are the violas and cellos striking the strings with the wooden part of their bows. The trio section is very sentimental, even a little boozy, with lurching glissandos for the strings and some tipsy dissonant harmonies for the woodwinds.

The funeral-march third movement in D minor is what really outraged Mahler’s first audiences, for it mixes tragedy and levity, “vulgar” music with “serious” symphonic themes in a schizophrenic manner unique to this composer. The stifled sound of a muted solo bass lugubriously introduces the German children’s song “Brüder Martin” (better known to us as “Frère Jacques”) as a funeral dirge, which spreads solemnly in canon through the orchestra. Then Mahler abruptly launches an incongruous episode of up-tempo popular music mingling traces of klezmer with the schmaltz of a Hungarian gypsy cafe. And then amid all this craziness, he offers up a lyrical section in G major of great peace and loveliness, using the melody of the last of the Wayfarer songs, in which the unhappy lover finds solace under a linden tree.

“The cry of a wounded heart” (Mahler’s description) assaults us in the screaming, violently dissonant opening of the finale. Hysteria reigns for many moments, only to yield unexpectedly to peace: one of Mahler’s most beautiful spun-out melodies shared between the cellos and violins. The frenzy returns, but trumpet fanfares hint of triumph to come. But first we return to the slow morning music with which the symphony began. In a final struggle, the heavy downward-swooping violin motive from that movement finds resolution in the trumpet victory theme. Following Mahler’s instructions, the seven horn players rise to their feet and play “as if to drown out the entire orchestra” in one of the most thrilling endings in the symphonic repertoire.
—Janet E. Bedell © 2025

Janet E. Bedell is a program annotator and feature writer who writes for Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Caramoor Festival of the Arts, and other musical organizations.