MAHLER's FIRST SYMPHONY has come to be associated with a littleknown novel by the German author Johann Paul Friedrich Richter — commonly known as Jean Paul — entitled Titan, which was first published in four volumes between 1800 and 1803. This association between symphony and literary text is intriguing but quite problematic. The assumption that the two works are somehow connected is based on a handful of rather contradictory references. In spite of the fact that the works are mentioned in relation to each other frequently, and that “Titan” has become the First's unofficial title, the exact connections between novel and symphony are only rarely explored. Today Jean Paul's novel is largely forgotten, and even among specialists very few have read its more than 1,000 pages.

Mahler himself did not exactly help things with his conflicting statements about the symphony's (nonexistent) program. In a letter of 20 March 1896 to the critic Max Marschalk Mahler comments that he had added the references to Jean Paul to the notes accompanying performances of the First in an attempt to satisfy audiences’ request for programmatic explanations of his symphony (Br, 169). He did not address the issue of whether Jean Paul's novel had in fact been important for its genesis. Indeed, the program notes accompanying the symphony's first performance in Budapest in 1889 do not contain any references to Jean Paul's novel or to any other literary or philosophical framework. This may, however, be explained by the fact that this performance was for an audience whose primary linguistic and cultural environment was not German. Mahler may, in other words, have avoided references to the novel because he could not assume that his audience had any knowledge of Jean Paul's works, which were not part of the German literary canon.

Natalie Bauer-Lechner writes in her memoirs on Mahler that he did not intend his symphony to be associated with Jean Paul's Titan, but that others were responsible for this association: