Parlando Breakdown #4: Mahler Symphony No. 1 -- III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

Why does Mahler start the third movement of his first symphony with Frere Jacques in a minor key?

There’s something morbidly ironic about using this tune for a funeral march — after all, the words “Frere Jacque, dormez vous?” “Brother Jacques, are you sleeping?” form a very morbid question for a funeral march. This is only the surface to a deeply ironic, thoroughly prescient movement.

The inspiration for this movement derives from this 1850 wood cutting, “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession.” It depicts animals conducting a funeral march for a fallen hunter. A strange scene, but it makes sense in conjunction with “Freres Jacques.” If you were an animal at the funeral of a hunter, you’d want to make sure he wasn’t just sleeping too. But even so, is there a deeper meaning behind these characters?

To answer that, let’s look at Vienna in the 1880s. In 1887, the year before Mahler wrote his first symphony, Karl Lueger, a populist councilman and eventual mayor of Vienna, advocated and passed a bill restricting the immigration and rights of Russian and Romanian Jews. Lueger discovered that by raising “the Jewish Question,” he gained enormous popularity which allowed him to undertake his massive public works projects. He was antisemitic to the point that Hitler, who lived in Vienna during Lueger’s tenure as mayor, saw him as an inspiration for his own antisemitic beliefs.

With that in mind, let’s listen to this next section.

This section is heavily influenced by klezmer music, a musical tradition of Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. Mahler was raised Jewish, so he was undoubtedly exposed to this music growing up. However, Mahler’s dream was to become music director of the Vienna State Opera, and by law, Jews were forbidden from holding that post.

While we’re on the topic of wanting what you can’t have, let’s focus on these ending bars of the funeral march. This is a quote from Mahler’s earlier “Songs of a Wayfarer.”

The song, titled “The Two Blue Eyes of my Beloved,” is a lament over how much grief two blue eyes can cause. Let’s listen to Thomas Hampson and the Vienna Philharmonic.

“O blue eyes, why did you look on me? Grief and sorrow shall now be mine forever!”

Lamenting over the blue eyes of someone who wants nothing to do with you. Almost like animals lamenting the death of a hunter.

Mahler was eventually allowed to become music director of the Vienna State Opera on the condition that he convert to Catholicism. He converted, and held the position for 10 years before being forced out by anti - semitism.

Mahler’s Vienna wasn’t Nazi Vienna, but the underlying current of hate was there. Karl Lueger tapped into it for political gain, and Mahler briefly avoided it by converting, but it soon came back and showed him the door.

For Jews in Vienna, even when they were at the funeral of the hunter, the question had to be, and still is, “are you sleeping?” “Dormez vous?”