Mahler’s Voices
Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies
JULIAN JOHNSON
Contents
1 Mahler and the Musical Voice
The Idea of Voice
Songs and Symphonies
Orchestral Voices
2 Calling Forth a Voice
Calling Forth
Horn Calls, Birdsong, and Bells
Calling Back
3 Constructing a Voice
Artifice and Invention
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
The Middle Symphonies
4 Plural Voices
Carnival Humor
Irony and Tone
Borrowed Voices
5 Genre and Voice
Song
Opera
Symphony
6 Ways of Telling
Literary Voices
Idyll, Dream, and Fairy Tale
Narrative Strategies
7 Vienna, Modernism, and Modernity
Critical Voices
Modernist Voices
Political Voices
8 Performing Authenticity
Reception and Performance
Authenticity and Self-Critique
“As If ”
1
Mahler and the Musical Voice
The Idea of Voice
Mahler’s music presents itself as a kind of telling. It addresses us directly, demanding to be heard and intimating that it has disclosures to make: “Listen, I am going to play something such as you have never heard.”
Mahler’s music speaks with many voices, even within the same movement. Music that appears to be solemn or heartfelt one moment is suddenly ironic or brash the next.
Tone comes before word. When we hear a speaking voice it is defined, first and foremost, by its tone, rhythm, volume, contour, source—in other words, by its qualities as sound. (I hear your sympathetic or impatient tone before I hear your words).
We make a serious mistake in thinking that musical meaning lies in the notes. It does, in part, just as what is said lies partly in the words. But much more, it lies in the physicality of the voice and its mode of performance. Mahler’s music can hardly be grasped while this is ignored.
Mahler’s tone moves between the deliberately naive and the sophisticated, the heartfelt and the ironic, the sublime and the banal, the sentimental and the brutal, the catatonic and the loquacious, the sacred and the profane, the collective and the solitary, the epic and the lyric, the rustic and the urban, the mythic and the modern, the grotesque and the paradisial.
Songs and Symphonies
Mahler’s music is marked by an unusual degree of ambivalence between the figurative idea of voice and the actual human voice itself. This persistent interweaving of vocal and instrumental genres is one of the ways in which Mahler foregrounds the idea of musical voice. Often, a vocal quality is invoked by instrumental music, as is underlined by frequent performance directions to instrumental players.
Theodor Adorno refers to the “language-like” (Sprachähnlichkeit) character of Mahler’s music. The songs and symphonies, are bound together by their common “speech gestures.” This makes for a strange paradox—that Mahler’s folksongs are often based on instrumental forms (dances, marches, etc.), whereas the lyrical style of his orchestral music often suggests the tone, gesture, and poetic disclosure of Lieder.
The persistent interweaving of song and symphony is nowhere more evident that in Das Lied von der Erde, “a culminating synthesis of symphony and song.” On the one hand, the Lied moves from the private performance space of the salon to the public concert hall, and the piano and voice combination is expanded to the orchestral Lied. On the other hand, symphonic music develops its own capacity for a songlike voice—both as a “song without words” (as in Schubert, say) or by using lyrical material as the basis of variation movements (as in Beethoven). The combination of orchestral Lieder and the idea of the song cycle leads, in turn, to a multimovement orchestral work that begins to resemble the outward form of the symphony.
Mahler, like Wagner, wrestled with the relationship of text and tone, of human voice and instrument, of drama and autonomous musical process—problems that, to them, Beethoven’s Ninth seemed to pose rather than solve.
→ Wagner insists: ” It does not matter that we do not hear Schiller’s words clearly in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth for truly it is not the sense of the word which engages us at the entry of the human voice but the character of the human voice itself. Schiller’s ideas are subordinated to the melody, a melody that has already been given purely instrumentally before the entry of soloists and chorus.”
Orchestral Voices
Mahler’s deployment of actual singing voices and his orchestral imitations of the sound and gestures of the singing voice are juxtaposed with complex polyphonic textures delivered in a kaleidoscopic variety of orchestral colors that dissolve any sense of individual voice.
Mahler’s achievement is, in part, that he exacerbated to breaking point this symphonic legacy of the nineteenth century. His juxtaposition of an orchestrally expanded collective with the deconstruction of the lyrical individual by fragmentation and dissolution is heard, first and foremost, in the orchestra. This tension is already manifest in the paradox of polyphony itself. Mahler’s polyphony runs from the choric expansion of a hymnlike voice in the Finale of the Third Symphony to the radical dissociation of elements in the Rondo Burlesque of the Ninth. It is this tension between expansion and fragmentation that lies behind Mahler’s self-conscious turn to a more contrapuntal style after 1901, a stylistic shift that necessitated a new approach to orchestration, as Mahler himself later remarked in relation to the Fifth Symphony.
Consider, for example, the opening of the Tenth Symphony, which presents one of the most remarkable of Mahler’s instrumental voices. It draws attention to itself not as specific melodic or musical content, but primarily as voice. In evoking the singing voice, the orchestra implies an absent human presence, an individual voice is presented in fragile form before being absorbed into the rich choric tone of the string section as a whole.
→ Exactly the same pattern (of a solo line absorbed into, and expanded by, a larger collective voice) can be seen in the opening out of Mahler’s other lyrical slow movements for orchestra alone: the Finale of the Third Symphony, the Andante of the Fourth, the Adagietto of the Fifth, the Andante of the Sixth, and both the opening Andante and Adagio Finale of the Ninth. Greater intensity is achieved not so much by greater complexity of harmony, rhythm, or texture, but primarily through the control of tone.
For most of the Eighth Symphony the orchestra serves as a vastly expanded cathedral organ. What is striking about Part 1, as Mahler himself claimed, is the high degree to which it is voice-led. The orchestra’s role is essentially to amplify the voices; the sung lines are almost always doubled in the orchestra. In Part 2, there is far less of the complex counterpoint here. Much of the texture in Part 2 is essentially homophonic and often defined by very simple melodic materials, so here the orchestra often does take on an accompanying role.
While Mahler studied Bach to improve his counterpoint, his orchestration tends frequently toward a divided contrapuntal consciousness that is the inverse of Bach’s integration.
Mahler himself underlined: “If I want to produce a soft, sustained sound, I don’t give it to an instrument which produces it easily, but rather to one which can get it only with effort and under pressure—often only by forcing itself and exceeding its natural range. I often make the basses and bassoon squeak on the highest notes, while my flute huffs and puffs down below.”
2
Calling Forth a Voice
Calling Forth
Schopenhauer: “the composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.”
→ Heidegger’s later formulation: “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
→ Mahler: “I see it more and more: one does not compose, one is composed.”
What is distinctive in Mahler’s case, and which Schoenberg’s comment about the Ninth underlines, is the degree to which this estrangement of the composer from his own work is mediated within the work itself. One of the most important ways in which this is achieved, and one that is foregrounded time and again in Mahler’s music, is the way in which music presents its own voice as being called forth, gradually and mysteriously, from an unknown source.
This calling forth of a voice from mysterious and inarticulate depths is more than an expressive topic of Mahler’s music; it is a defining structural process.
From its opening bars, the First Symphony signals that the calling forth of the musical voice is a structural principle on which the music will be founded. The sense of spatial distance is thus achieved by several factors—harmony, timbre, dynamics, register, tempo, orchestration, and spatial placement. The overlapping of different calling figures blurs the distance between the human world (fanfares) and that of nature (birdcalls). As a paradigmatic pastoral voice, the horn mediates between the world of nature and the world of man: it is presented here as part of the calling forth of the lyrical, human voice, but it is also an anticipation of the arrival of the vocal presence to which the entire introduction points.
Horn Calls, Birdsong, and Bells
Perhaps more than the music of any other composer, Mahler’s resounds with gestures of calling—horn calls, fanfares, the calls of birds and animals, the summoning of bells. Their calling is often heard across a distance.
Drawn into a purely aesthetic world, such calls move between the real and the aesthetic, the direct and the symbolic. They enrich the purely aesthetic with elements of the real at the same time as they question the nature of the aesthetic.
While the fanfare seems unequivocally human in its origin and purpose, and birdsong similarly “of nature,” birdsong is often addressed to a human protagonist and fanfares sound in the animal world. Bells may denote the human world of religion, but Mahler’s use of cowbells, like the call of horns, evokes a pastoral space in which the boundary between the realms of man and nature is blurred.
The second movement of the Seventh is a good example of how the horn call is used to define a separate musical space, with its evocation of spatial distance functioning to demarcate a different temporal space for the music.
Calling Back
To call forth a voice, to invoke or summon a voice, is to call a presence out of absence. But if the power of music is bound up with its origin as a kind of invoking, equally important is its capacity for revoking, calling back, resummoning something that was once present. Mahler’s music often presents a kind of revoking, conceived in terms of temporal or spatial distance. Nowhere is this more pointed than in the musical revocations of death itself.
Consider the case of Das Lied von der Erde. The second song, “Der Einsame im Herbst,” marked ermüdet (weary), seems to start from a kind of lyrical degree zero. As in Klimt’s landscape paintings, nature may continue, though here in muted and autumnal tones, but almost entirely without reference to the human world.
( → The persistent alternation of two sets of performance directions underlines Mahler’s essential duality in this song—between a highly expressive voice (molto espress, mit großem Ausdruck, edel gesungen, mit zärtlichen Ausdruck, innig, mit voller Empfi ndung, leidenschaftlich) and one without any expression (ohne Ausdruck). Mahler uses both voice and instruments in these opposing ways, but there remains something particular about the human presence conferred by the voice in this otherwise empty and uninhabited landscape.)
Tenth Symphony embodies the idea of revocation most single-mindedly, something often seized on as evidence that the sense of terminal valediction at the end of the Ninth was not Mahler’s last word on either life or the symphony. But it is a work that, comes after the Ninth as surely as Kindertotenlieder is predicated on coming after the death of the children it mourns. The coming after, the anterior loss, and the present lack are the basic conditions for the act of revocation. That, in the act of revoking, Mahler’s compositional voice was literally cut off by death itself is only one of the many powerful interrelations of life and art in this work.
In the Finale of the Tenth, the movement does not end with nihilism but, rather, grows out of emptiness. This is a world away from the calling forth of a voice with which the first movement of Mahler’s First Symphony begins. This, the last movement of his last symphony, has far more to do with revoking, with calling back a voice. One would have to look back to late Beethoven to see such a radical revoking of melody and its mythic function.
3
Constructing a Voice
Artifice and Invention
Musical works are, self-evidently, made. To compose is to construct, to invent, to assemble. But the idea that the work of art originates beyond the rational control of the artist persists. And just as artists and their audiences have subscribed to this idea, in varying degrees, so artworks themselves both embody and critique it. Mahler’s music is distinctive for the way it does both at the same time.
The counterpoint, of romantic conceptions of expression and modernist conceptions of construction is evident in the Wunderhorn songs as much as the late works. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Mahler shows greater self-awareness of this tension within his music after about 1901. The Rückert song, “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder” (June 1901), suggests a rather mischievous reflection on the whole question. Hitherto, Mahler had repeatedly underlined that the key to understanding his compositions lay in the travails of his own life. All the evidence suggests that he saw them this way himself and that, whatever the finished product, his music originated in the spiritual journey of his own inner life.
In his magnum opus, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–1902), the linguistic philosopher Fritz Mauthner (a key predecessor of Ludwig Wittgenstein) proposed that “there is no thinking without speaking.” The musical equivalent of this is of course that there is no musical idea that precedes its musical form; rather, the composer thinks “in music” and develops that thought “in music.” The popular conception of Mahler’s music opposes such an idea forcefully; Mahler, after all, is surely a composer who embodies most intensely for our age the idea of a direct and unmediated relationship between experience and expression. And yet, for his contemporaries, he was often considered false precisely because his music was marked by the studied manipulation of borrowed materials. For his contemporaries, Mahler’s music was, by turns, ironic, banal, sentimental, and naive but always constructed and self-conscious about its use of borrowed materials and techniques.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
What should be born in mind here is that Mahler’s “Wunderhorn style” was not his first. From the little we know of Mahler’s juvenilia, it is clear that the Wunderhorn songs and Das klagende Lied demonstrate a deliberate and calculated shift of aesthetic and compositional style.
The strangely anachronistic element of Mahler’s style in the 1890s is evident at once if one compares Mahler’s songs to those of Hugo Wolf, Alexander Zemlinsky, or the young Arnold Schoenberg. In this context, Mahler’s setting of the Wunderhorn poetry might be read as a way of avoiding the perplexed question of a lyrical voice, allowing him instead to approach musical expression obliquely, through a series of character masks.
It begs a question about why the subjective tone is avoided so fiercely in the early music. Why do these songs present such an ironic voice, with almost every musical statement in quotation marks, borrowed from other music, or proposed as the staging of a character? Raymond Monelle suggests that the Wunderhorn poetry offered Mahler “the overcoming of subjectivity through the anonymous voice of nature, speaking through the Volk” and that he seized on these texts because they offered him “stylelessness or subjectlessness.”
Mahler’s music continues to fascinate us, in part, because it is caught between two aesthetics, one that presents musical expression as if it went directly “from the heart to the heart” (as Beethoven hoped for the Missa Solemnis) and one that dwells (playfully or ironically) on its own element of artificiality and fabrication.
Ex. Consider, one of his earliest songs, “Maitanz in Grünen.” As Hans und Grete, where its text is designated simply as “Volkslied.” Its material had already been reused for the purely instrumental second movement of the First Symphony. The folksy text of this song is not a Wunderhorn text but is by Mahler, in the style of a folk song. It is an act of imitation, of historical and cultural artifice, even just as a song text. The song presents something that it is not (a country dance) and evokes performers that are not present (a village band). Only in the most literal sense does this song “say” rustic Ländler. This turns out to be Mahler’s dominant compositional instinct—to use existing materials, genres, styles, voices in order to say something else.
The Middle Symphonies
The Fourth Symphony emphasizes the aspect of his musical language more than most and calls into question the adequacy of the expressive musical voice with which all of his subsequent works wrestled.
→ The first three symphonies are hybrid in character and, as their origins show, overlap with the more obviously programmatic nature of the symphonic poem in both form and content. The Fourth announces its strictly symphonic identity by a deliberate restoration of certain classicist markers.
→ While it displays the plural voices of Mahler’s earlier symphonies and the same heterogeneity of materials, its deliberately classicist elements sit oddly with the first three symphonies and make a closer link to the three instrumental symphonies that follow it. On the other hand, its fairy-tale, childlike qualities, so often remarked upon, have little in common with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and are perhaps recalled only in the two Nachtmusik movements of the Seventh.
Nothing, apparently, could be further from the start of the Fifth Symphony, a work that Deryck Cooke suggested is built upon “two manifest and utterly opposed attitudes.” But this opposition is first and foremost not simply one of joyful versus tragic musical materials, but, once again, of the proposition of an authentic, lyrical voice and its own deconstruction. Nowhere is this opposition more clearly marked than in the contrast between the Adagietto and the Finale.
→ Once again, Mahler revisits the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, and, as in that model, there are several new beginnings here. The opening exchanges of horn and woodwinds presents itself as if it were the unfolding of the composer’s own process of composition, as if the symphony were somehow being invented “live” before the listeners’ ears.
The festive character of the Finale to the Seventh is underlined by a curiously self-conscious reference to Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The affirmative music of the Seventh thus appears as the proposition of a collective festival rather than the realization of one. Or, to put it another way, it stages the performance of a festival.
In general the tendency toward a foregounded constructive element in the Fifth is considerably exaggerated in the Seventh, a symphony in which no movement is immune from the constant presence of artifice. It is not that expressive, lyrical voices are absent, but their presentation makes them ambivalent: they strain at the limits and are exaggerated in such a way that they risk becoming false.
…... It is not that expressive, lyrical voices are absent, but their presentation makes them ambivalent: they strain at the limits and are exaggerated in such a way that they risk becoming false. This is true of the famous “Alma” theme that forms the second subject to the Sixth Symphony’s first movement. It is not that the hyper-lyricism of this passage is insincere or deliberately ironic, but that its very intensity strains at the limits of the language on which it is based in such a way as to reveal its inadequacy, just as shouting reveals the failure of words alone. The predominant orchestral tone of both the Sixth and the Seventh, defined by frequent doublings (often by four of the same wind instrument), makes for something too insistent. In the end one is bowled over by the sheer force of Mahler’s tone.
The two “Serenades” remain odd movements even in the context of Mahler’s music; their significance lies as much in what they are not as in what they are. Neither of them is an expressive, lyrical slow movement, such as the Adagietto of the Fifth or the Andante of the Fourth Symphony. Both Serenades conspicuously avoid such a voice and, in its place, reference a framed and conventional kind of lyricism that places the expressive voice most definitely in quotation marks.
4
Plural Voices
Carnival Humor
At least five Wunderhorn songs imply the performance direction Mit Humor even though Mahler does not use it here. The Humor of the poems is underlined by the qualities of the music; pretension and deception are both exposed by the exaggerated repetitions of simple materials as much as by the unexpected harmonic twists to which Mahler subjects them.
The scherzos of the Second and Third Symphonies amplify some of these elements while at the same time exploring what Humor might be in instrumental music, without the suggestion of a poetic text. Both emphasize the particularity of individual orchestral voices, especially those of the woodwind.
Jean Paul defines Humor as “the inverted sublime” because it makes visible the contrast between the finite, everyday world of individual things and people and the infinitude of the world of spirit and ideas. By exposing the limits of the merely finite world, the humorist reveals its inadequacy and thereby projects a sense of the infinite.
The idea of Humor as “the inverted sublime” is perhaps the key to understanding the recurrent juxtapositions of high and low, of profound and vulgar, metaphysical and worldly that so shocked Mahler’s contemporaries. A comparison of the Scherzo and Adagio Finale from the Third Symphony would illustrate the point at once.
Mahler’s famous statement to Sibelius that, for him, the symphony “must include the whole world” is born out not so much by the sublime and universal voice to which his works aspire, but by the bizarre catalog of diverse voices, characters, and instrumental sonorities embraced by his music.
Raymond Knapp, discussing the third movement of the Third Symphony, comments: “Its ‘voice’ . . . is less a single voice than a multitude of voices... he contrasts the post horn solo with the chattering animal life that surrounds it; a unitary voice (the world of man) thus emerges from and contrasts with the amorphous plurality of nature. He finds the same contrast between the fourth and fifth movements of the symphony: “The contrast between the worlds of these two songs recalls the contrast between poem and novel, thus, from the monologic sensibilities of Nietzsche’s midnight poem, we emerge into the heteroglossia of ‘Es sungen drei Engel.’
Adler is surely correct in that Mahler’s music opens up such acoustic chaos precisely in order to redeem it in a “higher” order; the earthy rawness of the earlier movements of the Third Symphony is, in the end, absorbed into the Adagio Finale, which ends with a gesättigten, edlen Ton (a saturated, noble tone).
Irony and Tone
What is disconcerting in Mahler is not so much the presence of “the sublime, the sentimental, the tragic and the humorously ironic styles in art” (as he himself distinguished them), but the way the last calls into question the other three. Mahler’s term, “the humorously ironic,” implies that he saw Humor and irony as much the same thing.
Mahler uses the term Humor it generally overlaps with a deliberate naïveté that, as it were, speaks for itself. Irony, on the other hand, is the product of authorial intervention, evident in the disparity between the material and its treatment.
Alain Leduc proposes three kinds of irony in Mahler, effectively by dividing the idea of irony as opposition: the parodistic (e.g., “Lob des hohen Verstands” and “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt”); the critical (the scherzos, waltzes, Ländler, and moto perpetuo movements); the tragic (the funeral march of the First Symphony, “Das irdische Leben,” and the first song of the Kindertotenlieder).
If the Third Symphony comes close to Sheinberg’s category of “infinite creation,” manifest in the heteroglossia of its musical characters, the Scherzo of the Seventh unfolds itself through “infinite negation.” The evocation of a Viennese waltz in the style of Johann Strauss [Fig. 118] is presented in order to be negated.
→ Henry-Louis de La Grange relates the Scherzo of the Seventh to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and finds in both a quality of savage caricature that anticipates the Rondo Burlesque of the Ninth Symphony. For all that the latter movement may be “virtuosically sarcastic,” however,it differs from these earlier examples in that its negativity is interrupted by anticipatory premonitions of the theme of the Adagio Finale.
To argue about whether something is or is not sentimental in Mahler therefore is rather to miss the point; his music projects a disturbing ambivalence as an element of its own self-questioning.
In Mahler, Humor, naïveté, irony, and sentimentality become overlapping modalities of the musical voice. As he predicted, they bewildered and even angered his critics while at the same time, as Strauss underlined, pleased the audience.
Borrowed Voices
Mahler’s music was often criticized for its bewildering changes of tone and manner; it was also frequently attacked for its apparently derivative and unoriginal nature. It was not that Mahler used familiar materials as such but that he seemed to do so in a deliberately parodistic and ironic way, relying on outworn gestures one moment and turning high musical materials into burlesque the next.
Mahler appears to have been frustrated when he discovered (after the event) that he had inadvertently strayed too close to another composer’s theme. He acknowledged some of these unintentional reminiscences in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, for example, one from Brahms and one from a Beethoven piano concerto. He was concerned about his inadvertent reference to a Bruckner symphony in his own First Symphony. The closeness of the “Lebwohl” motif of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 81 (Les Adieux), to motifs in both the first and last movements of Mahler’s Ninth is a good example. More surprising, perhaps, are the number of comparisons made between passages of Mahler’s music and that of J. S. Bach. This derives partly from Bach standing as a symbol of contrapuntal construction and of the German tradition more generally, especially in the case of choral music. Echoes of Wagner and Bruckner are common enough in music by composers of Mahler’s generation, and plenty of commentators have pointed out superficial similarities.
→ The question of direct quotation in Mahler’s music is dealt with exhaustively by Henry-Louis de La Grange. In cataloging his examples La Grange distinguishes two main categories: unintentional reminiscences and intentional allusions or quotations, thus simplifying the more numerous categories.
Robert P. Morgan: “Mahler was a composer totally immersed in the European tradition— indeed, one sometimes feels that his music is almost overwhelmed by that tradition.” David Schiff argues it was not that Mahler was overwhelmed by tradition, but rather that he brought that tradition to a crisis precisely by allowing its internal tensions to come to the fore.
While Mahler rarely deploys quotation as a gesture that draws attention to itself, on the other hand, as Adorno and others have remarked, much of his music sounds as if it were, in a more general sense, “in quotation marks.” In other words, stylistic reference is often presented as a clear and deliberate strategy of musical signification, but the quotation of specific works or composers is not.
The borrowing reflects neither shallowness nor laziness but, rather, a sensitive nature caught in the gap between intense experience and its adequate linguistic or cultural expression.
Schubert and Schumann both have a distinct presence in Mahler’s music, not least because they too moved between songs and symphonies and between the evocation of a Volkston and more sophisticated musical voices.
→ The debts of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen to Schubert’s Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin have often been noted. Susan Youens suggests that Mahler’s Gesellen cycle is “at its heart a response to Schubert’s Winterreise,” underlined by clear parallels in poetic topic and structure. The protagonist of Mahler’s cycle recalls the journeyman of Die schöne Müllerin but even more the wanderer of Winterreise, and the linden tree of Mahler’s final song is taken directly from Schubert’s wintry cycle, in which it is the lovers’ meeting place.
But the single most pervasive and substantial romantic musical voice in Mahler’s music must be that of Hector Berlioz, less in terms of a distinct tone (as with Schubert or Schumann) than in terms of aesthetic conception of the symphony as drama.
Henry-Louis de La Grange has drawn attention to the similarities between Berlioz and Mahler, citing their fondness for the same literature (Shakespeare, Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hoffmann) as a common source. Berlioz’s tendency to write in “scenes” gives his work not only an operatic quality, but also the same novelesque element so often noted in Mahler’s work.
De La Grange cites the Symphonie Fantastique as a prime example: “This ‘novel,’ infinitely more complex than an opera libretto, was organized not only by chapters (the movements) but also in the ‘divisions’ by which the Fantastique is split in two. The first part—the first three movements—takes place in the ‘real’ world; the last two movements constitute the imaginary or nightmare world. Mahler divided several of his symphonies in this way.” Indeed, La Grange goes on to suggest that the Finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony is more closely related to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Roméo et Juliette than it is to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
One cannot consider the idea of “borrowed voices” in Mahler’s music, the wealth of reminiscences, echoes, and allusions to preexisting music, without addressing the fact that the most deliberate and arguably the most important of these are instances of self-borrowing. Of the nineteen movements that constitute the first four symphonies, thirteen either involve vocal forces or derive in part from songs. Strictly speaking, Mahler’s symphonic treatment of his own earlier song material does not constitute an act of quotation, since materials are not framed in such a way as to distance them from some normative orchestral narrative voice, which would be required by an act of quotation.
5
Genre and Voice
Mahler’s work assumes a relationship between music and telling. The task of interpretation is surely not to refute this aesthetic “as if ” but, rather, to embrace its fictionality, to understand better what something is through an understanding of how it works. Theodor Adorno suggests that Mahler’s music underlines “that music might narrate without narrative content,” implying that the activity of narration itself is the substance of the music.
Mahler was by no means the first to use plural genres within a work as an expressive device. The symphony, even in its most conventional four-movement plan, was always defined by the juxtaposition of different musical genres (sonata, slow movement, scherzo, finale) and their different ways of telling (discourse, lyric, dance, festival).
Leo Treitler argues that the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is marked by a mixing of instrumental and vocal genres and insists that the final section (m. 763 to the end) “has the gestural identity of an opera finale (say, the finale of Fidelio).” The significance of this reference lies not in some abstract reference to opera, but, rather, its functional role. In the same way, the use of a recitative genre at the beginning of the movement “brings a kind of culture-shock (we might call it ‘genre-shock’). It signals a breakdown in the purely musical means of expression.” Beethoven was already wrestling, a century before Mahler, with the plural genres built into the different movement types of the symphony. These were held together in an uneasy balance between the larger, teleological order of the symphony and the tendency of the unrelated, heterogeneous genres that it comprises to resist such overarching order.
Song
What defines the balladic narration is a third-person, past tense voice, whereas a lyrical, first-person voice, heard in the present tense, defines the Lied proper; or, as Michael Oltmanns puts it: “At the center of the balladic song stands the story; at the center of the lyrical song stands the storyteller.”
Both voices are taken up in Mahler’s symphonies. From the ballad form Mahler drew on the strophic alternation of two different character voices.This alternation of voice would be unremarkable except that Mahler takes it up in a singularly unsymphonic way, allowing dualistic alternation to displace a more classical idea of development, as a comparison of Mahler’s symphonies with those of Brahms instantly makes clear.
The singer as storyteller in these ballads stands in for the two characters but is identified with neither. Adorno expresses it thus: “Mahler puts these songs into the mouth of someone other than the music’s subject. They do not sing of themselves, but narrate, … their flow is a kind of storytelling, and their expression a commentary of the story.” This is the essential difference between a song of lyrical disclosure and one of balladic narration. Mahler draws on both types but with a marked avoidance of the direct lyrical disclosure, one underwritten by the Wunderhorn texts themselves.
Opera
It is a curious aspect of Mahler’s career that he spent his entire professional life as a conductor of opera yet never composed one. Constantin Floros underlines a similar reason, arguing that in Mahler’s aesthetics the symphony stood higher than opera but also that Mahler’s imaginary world, fantastic and eschatological, was simply unrepresentable on the stage.
The incompletion of the operas, may well signal a certain degree of recycling elsewhere. Kurt Blaukopf suggests that Mahler’s interest in fairy tales was simply transmuted into Das klagende Lied, a work that he says shows “the birth of symphonic composition out of song.”
Mahler’s exposure to diverse and hybrid theatrical genres in his early years was thus a significant fund of experience for a composer whose music is caught between theatrical and autonomous forms.
Mahler’s symphonies take up operatic gesture and language but alter their weight and tone, like a skilled organ maker or piano technician might revoice an instrument.
The “scream of terror” that opens the finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony; its parallels to Beethoven’s Ninth are more obvious. A similarly grand, theatrical gesture occurs at the start of the Finale of the Sixth Symphony, which implies a pictorial dimension or dramatic content.
The theatricality of Mahler’s music is underlined by that essentially operatic device, the offstage voice. Such devices are part of a wider theatricalization of the symphony that was achieved in the work of Berlioz. Just as Berlioz, who found an outlet for these in his “dramatic symphonies,” so it is clear that Mahler’s experience as an operatic conductor shaped his own music.
A combination of theatrical characterization and a scenic construction of musical episodes often defines the middle movements of Mahler’s symphonies. In Mahler’s music we have songs without words, theater without actors, and ballet without dancers.
Symphony
The initial presentation of the First Symphony as a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” suggests both a desire to identify with the modernity of the (Straussian) symphonic poem and a corresponding distancing from the classicistic tradition of Brahms. In the end, Mahler acknowledged that he was a composer of symphonies after all, happy to distance himself from the Straussian tone poem and to identify himself with a tradition rooted in Beethoven.
Far more than the First Symphony, the Second presents a bewildering sequence of different voices and different ways of telling. Despite the triumphal affirmation of its ending, the symphony as a whole presents two parallel structural instincts that are never wholly reconciled — one dramatic, developmental, and teleological, the other variational, heterogeneous, and episodic.
The Third Symphony was an attempt “to conceive a symphonic structure of individual narratives in which subjectivity is overtly cast not as a participant, but as a mute listener.”
In the Fifth Symphony, “Mahler opted for a rhetoric that brings to the foreground a constructed musical subjectivity whose task is to control and these viewpoints converge on the idea that Mahler’s symphonies “perform” the idea of subjectivity and in doing so recognize a gap between the narrative act and the (fictional) content of what is told.
The Ninth Symphony is better understood as the foregrounding of a subject-in-process than the narrative adventures of some fixed subjective identity.
→ All three of these viewpoints converge on the idea that Mahler’s symphonies “perform” the idea of subjectivity and in doing so recognize a gap between the narrative act and the (fictional) content of what is told.
The first four of Mahler’s symphonies all relate directly to the model of Beethoven’s Ninth, albeit through a process of “deliberate misreading.” While the Second is the only one of these to use choral voices in the Finale, all four progress toward a transcendental finale in which themes from earlier movements are often recalled.
It becomes clear that the tension between instrumental and texted music, autonomous symphonic music and narrative music drama, is no more reconciled by Wagner’s works (musical and theoretical) than by Mahler’s symphonies. Indeed, Mahler’s interpretation of Wagner turns out to be every bit as contradictory as Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven.
◎ In many ways, Mahler’s relationship to Wagner recalls the metaphor Mahler himself once applied to that between himself and Richard Strauss—of two miners tunneling into the same mountain but from opposite sides.
The first movement of the Sixth engages directly and deliberately with the idea of a sonata form, based moreover on the opposition of two kinds of material (the brutal march that forms and the impassioned lyrical theme). But the two kinds of material remain resolutely separated until the end. The Beethovenian idea, that a second subject marks the point of arrival at a new key, is not fulfilled in Mahler’s form. Instead, the tonal fixity of the march that forms the first subject remains rooted to the spot in A minor — creating the definitive tension of this opening section, of a march that goes nowhere, of a brutal force marching on the spot.
Only in the three late works, the Ninth and Tenth symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde, does Mahler find a way to balance the act of making an expressive ending without a rhetoric that cannot help but draw attention to its own worn and contingent status.
6
Ways of Telling
Literary Voices
The idea that Mahler’s symphonies show a kinship to literature has always
been part of their reception.
Mahler’s symphonies are not novels; neither do they tell stories in any literal way, but they are like novels and are constructed from materials shaped in temporal
structures that appear similar to the presentation of characters and the unfolding
of a plot.
The relationship of Mahler to specific writers offers potentially rich insights into his approach to musical form and process. One of the most productive of such parallels between music and literature is to be found between Mahler’s music and the novels of Dostoyevsky.
As Inna Barssowa has argued, the strongest links between Mahler and Dostoyevsky are in terms of their similar constructive principles—the idea of an unending development of the consciousness of the protagonist, the shaking of the foundation of that consciousness through dramatic turns and catastrophes, to make a narrative structure poised “on the threshold of completion or catastrophe.” Consider, for example, the abrupt reversals common to both Mahler’s symphonies and Dostoyevsky’s novels, where high emotional tension is suddenly discharged into its opposite condition, the juxtaposition of extreme emotional states, scenes of grotesque humor and a bewildering plurality of voices, the narration of stories within the story, or the use of idyllic reminiscence as a distancing device.
It is to Nietzsche’s reworking of Schopenhauer that Mahler’s aesthetic concern with the tragic, the ironic, and the grotesque, specifically in the idea of the “joy in the annihilation of individuation,” which lies at the heart of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s aesthetic response to it.
Mahler’s literary tastes centered very definitely around older literature; Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were the most modern of his literary passions. His preoccupation with early romantic poetry has to do with a re-creation of the poetic vision of a much earlier age. He must surely have become more self-conscious of this after 1901 when he encountered the circle of Viennese modernists related to the Secession. But he showed no interest in those modern poets beloved by Strauss or Schoenberg and his pupils in the early years of the new century.
Idyll, Dream, and Fairy Tale
The idea of the idyll is presented as one of three modes of confrontation between the ideal and the real or between nature and society. In the idyll, nature is not presented as lost (as it is in the elegy) but rather as “real.”
In his (Jean Paul) own novels the idyllic is generally rendered as a heavenly landscape, often also a dream landscape, not so much a pastoral interlude as a recurring, self-parodic, idiosyncratic mini-narrative, but deployed as a mediating term between nature and the lamenting, alienated subject, exactly as it is in Mahler in the Andantes of the Fourth and Sixth symphonies most clearly. The two Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony most certainly stand in this relationship to the main narrative. The idyllic landscape is defined by a certain weightlessness and temporal suspensio
→ In the Fourth Symphony, the idyll presented in the slow movement thus has a mediating and a preparatory function. It mediates between the inauthenticity of the world explored in the first two movements and the unrepresentable, heavenly world of the Finale. It prepares the moment of structural breakthrough and threshold that leads to the (entirely stylized) account of the heavenly in the last movement.
→ The Andante of the Sixth deploys a self-contained, rather gentle lyrical period once again alternates with a more urgently chromatic section that repeatedly forces moments of climax and collapse. The nature of the idyll here, already wistful and nostalgic in the Fourth Symphony, is more deliberately marked by little chromatic twists as bordering on the sentimental, and therefore is self-consciously a “lost” idyll.
Mahler’s foregrounding of the landscape recalls the landscape paintings of Gustav Klimt. The music approaches the quality, found in these paintings, of a self-contained nature in which a profusion of organic forms coexists in a state of peaceful and static containment. In this self-containment, however, of a nature without the presence of any human figure, they project an element of emptiness or lack — even of alienation.
Where the idyll is a special kind of musical space in Mahler’s music, the dream is a special kind of telling. Both present material distanced from the principal symphonic narrative but which, at moments of maximum intensity, appear to realize a presence that is initially construed as unreal … Wagner has much to say of “the dream organ” in his Beethoven essay of 1870, describing the act of musical creation as being like the lighter allegorical dream that mediates between deepest dream and waking.
Mahler often linked the first movement of his Third Symphony to the figures of Pan and Dionysus and to the idea of a dream vision.
The opening of the Wunderhorn song “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” is marked with the direction “Geheimnisvoll zart, verträumt.” The song tells of a lovers’ union achieved only in the realm of dream, since “he” is already dead and buried. The music thus realizes something that is, strictly speaking, unreal. Its dream dimension is underlined by a third voice (in G flat major) quite distinct to “his” bare D minor military voice or “her” D major hope for his return.
Where dreams are usually presented as interludes in Mahler’s music, as sidesteps into some alternative reality, his predilection for fairy tales as a way of telling often shapes a whole movement or even an entire work … as he himself acknowledged to Max Marschalk in 1896: “The first work in which I really came into my own as ‘Mahler’ was a fairy-tale for choir, soloists and orchestra: ‘Das klagende Lied.’ ”
Mozart’s fairy-tale “way of telling” is often found in Mahler, and many of the elements of Die Zauberflöte recur in Mahler’s music. The juxtaposition of character voices of high and low social status, recurs in Mahler’s mixing of high and low musical voices. The opera’s structure, of the quest toward self-knowledge, is arguably taken up in each and every Mahler symphony whose sequence of movements is far closer to the convoluted paths and episodic digressions of the fairy tale than to the single-minded trajectory of the Beethovenian symphonies.
→ This episodic quality recurs in many of the inner movements of Mahler’s symphonies. The second movement of the Second, for example, is constructed by a clear alternation of two voices, a slow Ländler and a much lighter, faster fairy-tale music. Raymond Monelle has argued that even the Ländler reveals itself as unreal, as a dream vision of nature, or as reminiscence of an earlier time, rather than as a piece of realistic folk evocation.
Adorno’s famous comment about the Fourth Symphony, that it opens with a gesture equivalent to the “once upon a time” of a fairy tale, might apply to several passages in Mahler’s music. The sleigh bells that open the Fourth evoke the same childlike world as the triangle and glockenspiel. The celesta combines acoustically a symbolism central to Mahler’s world — the world of children and fairy-tale make-believe and the construction of a heavenly luminosity.
Narrative Strategies
The central categories identified by Adorno as part of his material theory of musical meaning all relate to this idea: collapse, breakthrough, suspension, and fulfillment. The calling forth of a voice is often associated with the gradual coalescence of musical materials, just as the drawn-out process of withdrawal associated with the idea of a farewell is given through a gradual dissolution of the same elements. The dramatic structural moment of breakthrough often leads to a suspension of the forward motion of the musical narrative; as such, it often functions as a kind of threshold to the next section of the work — itself often associated with the idea of fulfillment.
Mahler himself recognized the category of narrative as key to his own music, as is clear from the music irrespective of any programs they acquired and then lost. Das klagende Lied was a problematic work for a would-be symphonic composer precisely because it was too narrative, and its frequent mixing of voices in the telling of the story reflects a certain degree of self-conscious experiment.
Mahler’s gestures of anticipation are balanced by the tendency of his music to look back, to present musical events and voices as if recalled by memory. The idea of reminiscence is a matter of both tone and structural device. The post horn episode, from the third movement of the Third Symphony, has often been discussed in such terms, as memory and recollection.
Thomas Peattie, discussing the idea of “broken pastoral” … One of the most striking is the altväterisch (old-fashioned) section that interrupts the Scherzo of the Sixth Symphony [Fig. 56]. It is perplexing, heard in a rustic, deliberately clumsy manner, suggesting the composer as a modernist showman manipulating the eccentric old character onstage.
Mahler’s ways of telling often involves such an idea of intercutting between different voices, different tenses, and different scenic spaces. The most obvious musical consequence is a formal tendency toward an episodic structure. One of the most striking examples is the so-called pastoral interlude that occurs in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. The defining tones of cowbells, celesta, and high strings (tremolando) are allied to a tonal suspension and rhythmic “flattening” that produces a spatialized music which elsewhere functions as a threshold. It’s a good example of how in Mahler’s symphonic tales what is presented tangentially, in parenthesis as it were, often turns out to be more significant than the principal material in which the episode is contained.
It is not insignificant that one of Mahler’s recurrent ways of telling is not a narrative form at all and indeed might be considered as an antinarrative form—the march. It is a way of telling that implies an external viewpoint, something that “passes by” only for a spectator with a fixed viewpoint. The march exerts a powerfully attractive force because it binds disparate elements into an otherwise elusive unity. It fulfils the aspiration of the symphony, to bind together its heterogeneous elements.
7
Vienna, Modernism, and Modernity
Critical Voices
Nothing marks this difference more acutely than the absence of an erotic dimension in Mahler’s work. The preoccupation of Viennese modernism with a specifically sexual content (Klimt, Gerstl, Schiele, Kokoschka, Schnitzler, Altenberg, Wedekind, Wolf, Strauss, Zemlinsky, Schreker, Schoenberg) is entirely bypassed by Mahler.
Mahler’s literary preferences were almost entirely shaped around classicism and early romanticism and he appeared to have studiously avoided modern poetry. But his reactivation of German Romanticism, through the use of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and his interest in writers of the early nineteenth century, and his musical debts to Schumann, Weber, and Mendelssohn, functioned critically by mounting an opposition to the prevailing taste for naturalism in literature and verismo in opera. Mahler’s preference for myth and fairy tale was a continuation of the German Romantic sensibility that opposed an essentially metaphysical worldview to the increasing materialism of the age.
Oskar Kokoschka once commented that the art of the Expressionists was concerned not with the representation of its society, but, rather, its analysis. In this sense, bordering on the idea of psychoanalysis, Mahler’s music is also analytical rather than representational. Its proximity to Viennese modernism has less to do with the imagery of contemporary visual art or literature and far more to do with the self-critique of language central to his age.
Mahler’s plural musical voices are no different, and his attempt to “knit together” their disparate elements shapes all of his symphonies. It was a task that is continued directly, though very differently, in the music of the Second Viennese School, whose preoccupation with building a “world of relations” eventually found a very particular form, in 1923, in Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Method.
Mauthner insisted that language was the medium in which thought took place rather than something separable from thought. “We can only think what we can express in language, and we can express only what we have thought.” “To get to know things as they really are we should be able to transcend the limitations of our language and this is impossible. The impossibility is like that of lifting the chair on which we are sitting.”
→ Mahler’s music acknowledges this self-consciousness in the way it treats its own musical language. The repeated returns in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony are perhaps Mahler’s equivalent to Mauthner’s metaphor of trying to lift up the chair on which one is sitting.
Mahler, like Schoenberg, was caught up in straining (musical) language to its limits, in exposing those limits in order to project what cannot be said, to use the breaking of the voice and the failure of language as itself an expressive act.
The 1902 “Beethoven” exhibition of the Secession movement headed by Klimt marks the most obvious point of convergence between two contemporaries who “in their attitudes to the world and to culture . . . were worlds apart”—one hedonistic and erotic, the other intellectual and idealistic. Perhaps Klimt himself recognized this when he conferred Mahler’s features on the knight in golden armor, the key figure in the “Longing for Happiness” panel of his Beethoven frieze.
Klimt’s frieze not only works toward a similar conclusion to that of Mahler’s Third and Fourth Symphonies, but it does so by means of a passage through radical negativity and the longing for happiness in the midst of suffering — Mahler’s basic narrative plot, one might say.
There is no evidence of any direct influence of Mahler on Klimt or vice versa. What brings their work into close contact is a shared opposition to the prevailing materialism of the age. The anger provoked by Mahler’s symphonies, which critics heard as some kind of attack on the hallowed form of the symphony and the society which it tacitly represented, recalls that occasioned by Klimt’s University paintings, which so publicly declined to celebrate the idea of rational knowledge and social progress. The irrational, mysterious, and often mythic dimensions of both men’s work runs counter to their high-profile public personas.
What Klimt’s landscapes make visible, in beautiful but subtly disturbing ways, is the incommunicability of nature, its silence, and, for all its familiarity, its utter distance from the human. The absence of human figures and the lack of any “action” finds a parallel in those movements of Mahler in which directed motion is largely abandoned; the tendency toward a two-dimensional surface in Klimt may be compared to Mahler’s increasing use of a bare, two-part contrapuntal texture without chordal “padding.” Klimt and Mahler stand in a border territory between idyllic vision and the false consolation of nature, between a critical deconstruction of society’s idea of nature and an aesthetic apoliticism that was political in spite of itself.
Modernist Voices
There are passages in Mahler’s music that are reminiscent of Weber or Schubert or Mendelssohn. Yet at other points Mahler deploys the modern orchestral apparatus of Richard Strauss. In retrospect, one can hear in Mahler pre-echoes of Shostakovitch, Britten, or Henze.
Mahler’s music is like an acoustic prism placed at the end of one century and the beginning of another, refracting musical voices from both historical directions, from Viennese classicism and early romanticism to the stylistic eclecticism and polyvocality of the twentieth century. Mahler’s music interrogates the labels: it forces us to reexamine the sense of this three-part division of romantic, modern and postmodern when one composer’s music seems to bring all three together.
To grasp Mahler’s music fully one has, perhaps, to grasp it in this quality of ambivalence rather than attempt to reconcile its obvious tensions in either direction—toward absolute music, on the one hand, and programaticism, on the other. The key to this question is Mahler’s own insistence on “inner program.” Mahler once declared: “There is no modern music, from Beethoven onwards, that does not have an inner program.”
The real problem, which the critics were mistaken in believing might be solved by the restoration of the program, is that Mahler’s music presents itself as if it followed a program where in fact there is none.
“Music itself does not wish to narrate,” as Adorno says, “but the composer wishes to make music as if it narrated something.” This should really be the last word on the matter; everything is contained in the central aesthetic category of “as if.”
Hermann Danuser compares Mahler and Stravinsky, arguing that while both employ an essentially broken musical voice, Stravinsky is satirical whereas Mahler is epic. Stravinsky cites formal and stylistic models but makes a clear distinction between the model and his own distanced version, whereas Mahler reworks materials to make them his own: “It is the achievement of his tone to integrate diverse materials into a musico-linguistic unity without thereby separating them completely from their origin.”
Political Voices
As the son of Jewish parents, raised in a German-speaking enclave of Bohemia, Mahler experienced from an early age the discrepancy between the net of Habsburg administration and the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural plurality over which it was thrown but to which it remained unreconciled. Mahler’s famous remark that he was “thrice homeless: as a Czech among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world” thus needs to be treated with caution as an explication of his music.
For all of Mahler’s early identification with political pan-Germanism, his music is no simple embodiment of its ideals. More often than not they derive from the folk and street music that recall Mahler’s own accounts of Iglau.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Mahler’s irony derives its specific form from German romanticism, but many commentators have related it also to Jewish culture. Mahler was too German for the Austrians; he was typical of Jews of his generation in upholding the ideals of German culture more forcefully than many non-Jews.
Whatever stories one tells about Mahler’s own psychology and identity, his cultural roots and his biography, the plural cultural and aesthetic politics of his working life and the society in which he lived, the historical tensions of the musical tradition which he reproduced and critiqued as both performer and composer — all of these ultimately come back to the music, without which Gustav Mahler (born in Kalis˘te˘ in 1860, died in Vienna in 1911) is of no more interest to us than many forgotten figures of the past. It is the plural voices of the music that are the beginning and end of our inquiry.
8
Performing Authenticity
Reception and Performance
Mahler’s music is not unusual in framing its voices (the operatic aria has an instrumental introduction, and the orchestra prepares the first entry of the soloist in the concerto), but one of its distinctive aspects is its self-conscious exaggeration of the frames.
→ The second of the two Serenades in the Seventh Symphony provides a good example. The clichéd vocal opening of the solo violin acts as a rhetorical frame—the equivalent, perhaps, of the traveling performer walking onto the makeshift stage with a placard announcing “4th Movement: Serenade!”
Mahler’s music is achieved by “a certain kind of exaggeration, slightly overstressing topic features; a failure of technique, either in development or in texture; a grotesque inappropriateness of setting.” The ambivalent nature of Mahler reception is thus a corollary of the music itself.
Mahler’s music is caught between its continuing fascination for us lies partly in its refusal to give up the romantic identification while insisting on the modernist self-analysis.
Mahler’s music sets a question mark on all artistic expression, and, in that, it is of our age as much as of its own.
Authenticity and Self-Critique
Mahler’s music does not allow itself to fall into a mere assertion of authentic subjectivity, which would be either sentimental or hollow; indeed, the sentimental is deliberately foregrounded in Mahler in order for it to be distinguished as such. Neither does this music propose a transcendental statement, as if the limits of language had been superseded. Rather, its self-critique consists in this: that by repeated acknowledgment of those limits it projects a consciousness that knows it is not coterminous with an inauthentic language.
For all the moments of parody, irony, and stylistic play, in the end, Mahler’s “Adagio voice” speaks with an intense, committed and authentic expression. It is the most concentrated and uninterrupted statement of an expressive, lyrical voice and thereby the model of a coherent, unified, transcendent subject for which it speaks.
Analyzing what constitutes the “Adagio voice” may thus bring us closer to the heart of the defining ambivalence of Mahler’s music:
The semantic force of its tone and gait derives, in significant part, from its provenance in the slow movements of Beethoven. The high status of the adagio in the later nineteenth century had to do with “a later generation’s idealization of an earlier time, coupled with a perception of its own shortcomings.”
The Adagio was typically understood as the musical vehicle of sublime sentiment, as a signifier of an otherworldly or transcendent content.
The much disputed relation between Bruckner and Mahler is located more firmly here than in any other aspect of their very different approaches to the symphony. The specific echoes of Bruckner’s Adagio music are perhaps less important than the generic model Mahler inherited.
The link back to Beethoven’s slow movements can be laid bare by a little excavation in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, whose opening is a kind of postromantic composing out of a classical Adagio.
It is not that Beethoven forms a direct model for Mahler, but that a certain type of Beethovenian movement stands behind a certain type of Mahlerian one. What is significant in Mahler, however, is precisely the departure from the Beethovenian model, the deformations of the known gestures.
The effect of playing Mahler’s opening on the piano (with too much pedal) may well suggest a half-recollected, half-improvised reconstruction of the Beethoven model. But Mahler’s evocation of this voice is neither direct quotation nor unconscious modeling; through subtle deformations it signals not only distance, but also regret: it invokes these qualities as anterior, belonging to a classical age now problematic to the point of unsustainability. This distancing is a key device by which Mahler’s “Adagio voice” attains its particular expressive quality—of something recalled because already lost.
Arguably, in his Ninth, Mahler thus engages more profoundly with the “problem” of Beethoven’s Ninth than he had done in the early symphonies. Whereas, in the first four symphonies, Mahler had forged statements of collective affirmation apparently in keeping with Beethoven, in the Ninth the self-conscious, self-reflective critique of the musical voice persists right through to the closing bars. It is perhaps this self-questioning of musical voice, rather than any more surface features, that defines the essential modernity of Mahler’s late works.
“As If”
Adorno and others who see Mahler’s music as mounting a negative critique, it has the “embarrassing” tendency to sound out affirmations with a force and insistence like almost no other music.
If we accept that Mahler’s music demonstrates a remarkable quality of selfcritique, an awareness of the limits of its own language, an acknowledgment of its own boundaries even as it attempts to cross them, we also have to make room for the most basic instinct of all artworks, that they proceed “as if.”
Mahler exacerbates a problem at the heart of romantic music. On the one hand, it exposes the limits of representation through a self-critique of its own language. On the other hand, it makes the essentially metaphysical proposition that what lies beyond the limits of representation might yet still be imaged or even momentarily realized within the work.
The mundane and real, drawn into Mahler’s work through a host of particular references and topical allusions, become material for a musical critique of representation. This is what binds Mahler to both the romantic and the modern and the modern to the postmodern — its simultaneous presentation of the limits of representation and its fictional enactment of a content that should not be possible.
It is no accident that Mahler concentrated his creative effort on symphonic composition; his work was a self-conscious but impossible project to reconfigure Beethoven’s affirmation of the transcendent logic of Idealism.
Mahler’s musical voice is strained because it is caught in the tension between expression and construction, between a romantic aesthetic of representation and a modernist awareness of the gap between signifiers and signifieds. Mahler was a romantic who wrestled with the loss of innocence that comes with such awareness. At times, the effect is humorous or ironic, in a playful sense; at others, it urges the listener to believe even while acknowledging that its terms should no longer be believable. The central category of all art — its illusory “as if ”— is thus brought to a heightened state of self-reflection in Mahler’s music.
What distinguishes Mahler’s music above all is the intensity with which acts of expression continue in the face of their own deconstruction. Mahler’s music shares with the irony of early romanticism and the irony of modernism a radical self-critique of its own musical language and all its inherited expressive rhetoric.
Mahler’s music is not, in the end, postmodern; it does not defer to the conventionality of language. It comes closer to an essentially existential conundrum, to attempt to speak while knowing the inadequacy of speech. This, rather than any soft-focus view of Mahler as romantic, accounts for our continuing fascination.
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