Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in the Centre and on the Periphery

Abstract

Following the end of his tenure with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1901, Gustav Mahler conducted more concerts than ever outside the imperial capital, including two performances of his Symphony No. 1 as part of the Philharmonic Society of Lemberg’s first season in 1903. In Lemberg, today the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, the symphony received an overall favourable and, perhaps unknowingly, perceptive critical reception, in contrast to the notoriously harsh reviews penned by critics in Vienna three years earlier. As a means of exploring such different responses in the centre and on the periphery of the Habsburg empire, I suggest that a common language of pluralities, which Mahler shared with the region of Galicia’s quotidian heterogeneity and emerging modernist movements, allowed the Leopolitan public to be ahead of Vienna in their openness to the early modernist modes of expression that would soon dominate European culture.