‘A nice sub-acid feeling’: the First Symphony

Before beginning a hermeneutic interpretation of the First Symphony, it will be useful to be reminded, briefly, of its structural outline.

In the first movement, an Ideal Call in a confident but rather unconvincing immuring A♭ is challenged by the sudden entrance of a tonally unstable but A-minor-inflected Sub-Acid Theme, the first of the primary exposition materials. The exposition's trajectory to an immured A minor, and an essential expositional closure in that key at 17:8 with the Amfortas Tune, hinges on a pivotal F major, which acts as a dual agent: VI/A♭ and VI/a. With the full arrival of the immured tonic, the Kopfton is punned on and its structural function called into question. The rhetorical ESC (essential structural closure) at 44:8 is into the F minor of the Amfortas Tune's recapitulatory guise (NB this is the ‘pivot’ key in the minor mode): it is a ‘crisis’ in the movement, a non-resolution. The coda attempts unsuccessfully to re-establish the immuring A♭ as the movement's final tonic: the final recall of the Amfortas Tune in the closing bars, during which the stasis of the Kopfton is re-emphasized, undoes the coda's work.

The second and third movements are directed teleologically towards the D major ‘Heaven Tune’ of the latter's coda, the theme which establishes the immured tonic as the stronger of the symphony's two tonalities by a considerable margin. On the way to this final telos there are other important events.