Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, like his Fifth and Sixth, is considered to be a symphony without a program. While denying that this work is programmatic, Alma Mahler gives us several important clues to the contrary; for instance, the fact that Mahler had Eichendorff’s poetry and German Romanticism in mind while composing this symphony.1 Interestingly, Bruno Walter also mentions Romanticism in relation to it. In his monograph on Mahler he characterizes the symphony’s three middle movements as a return to the kind of Romanticism that he had assumed Mahler had overcome.2 It is not clear whether he means Romanticism in German cultural history or in Mahler’s creative development, but his statement does make the point that Mahler is interested in a particular view of Romanticism in his Seventh Symphony. In speaking about the piece, Mahler employed a very specific nocturnal idiom, not only, for instance, by using the term “Nachtmusik” for the second and fourth movements, but also by comparing the last movement to night-ending daybreak during rehearsals for the symphony’s premiere in Prague in 1908.3
The starting point for my deliberations on the Seventh Symphony, which argue that it does indeed have an (anti-programmatic) program, is these nocturnal references and the importance of the imagery of light and darkness. Night is a leitmotif in German cultural history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There exists an entire musical tradition that takes night as its theme. This tradition includes works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Wagner — to name only a few of the more prominent examples. Mahler explicitly referred to this tradition through his use of the title “Nachtmusik” for two of the symphony’s slow movements. There is also a literary tradition represented, for instance, by the poetry cycle Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) by Novalis (the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg) or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke (Night Pieces, 1817). Both authors were important figures in the German Romantic movement, and Mahler was certainly familiar with them. Attempts have been made to match, in particular, the second movement with a specific text by the German Romantic author Eichendorff.4 In the following, I will not further pursue the assumed Eichendorff reference but will rather pick up on the second part of Alma’s assertion, that Mahler’s symphony has something to do with a rereading of German Romanticism. In the Wunderhorn songs Mahler was primarily interested in identifying the contradictions underlying these texts. His aim was to show that Romanticism was a far more complex and contradictory phenomenon than some of the attempts of his contemporaries to read a normative framework into its texts in the service of a nationalist and conservative political agenda would suggest. Mahler was interested in these songs as documents of crisis — psychological, political, and aesthetic. In the Seventh Symphony, Mahler rereads Romanticism in the light of the post-Nietzschean, modernist discourses of his contemporaries as a vehicle to find alterity within German culture. But here he embraces a very specific version of Romanticism, very different from the mainstream view; he embraces Romanticism as a means of identifying what has been discarded, marginalized, and left in the dark. It is this revisiting of Romanticism in the Seventh Symphony, I will argue, that led to a critical rethinking of German cultural history and ultimately to constructing that history in a fundamentally different way from predominant discourses.
In 1904, when Mahler started work on his Seventh Symphony, Theodor Gomperz (1832–1912) wrote an essay entitled “Über die Grenzen der jüdischen intellectuellen Begabung” (On the Limits of Jewish Intellectual Aptitude).5 Gomperz belonged to a prominent Jewish family in Vienna. From 1873 to 1903 he worked as a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. He was a prolific writer of books, essays, and critical contributions who also frequently published on the “Jewish question.” Gomperz’s 1904 essay is relevant in this context because it picks up on the light/dark imagery in German cultural history and explicitly links it to the Jewish contribution to this history. The question that interested Gomperz is why, in spite of the Jews’ great gifts for intellectual and scholarly accomplishment, very few of them, in his opinion, reached the absolute pinnacle of achievement in their respective fields. Gomperz does much to nuance his insights. He argues that many Jews do demonstrate great talents; he points to the difficult socioeconomic situation affecting Jews throughout much of modern Western history and clearly states that generalizations, especially those based on national or racial stereotypes, are always questionable. Nevertheless, Gomperz does wonder about the dearth of what he calls Jewish “poet-philosophers.” Jews, according to Gomperz, are highly capable of critical reasoning, have a sharp judgment, and they are full of wit and esprit. They are, in other words, disciples of the Enlightenment. A name that would come to mind here is Moses Mendelssohn. Gomperz, however, is primarily thinking of Heine in this context, whom he mentions once in his essay. However, the opposite of these gifts seems to be lacking among Jews; they lack, in Gomperz’s analysis, an affinity with the dark side of German culture: “what is unconscious, dusky, dreamlike, full of premonition. One would almost be inclined to say that for certain types of products it is too bright in Jewish heads” (das Unbewußte, Dämmerige, Traumhafte, Ahnungsvolle. Fast möchte man sagen: für gewisse Arten von Hervorbringungen ist es in jüdischen Köpfen zu hell; 387). Jews, in other words, have no gift for darkness. Gomperz offers a number of explanations: Jews were city-dwellers, not rooted in their local environment; they never developed their own mythology.
It is remarkable how many ideas that we would now label as blatant prejudices and would associate with a conservative or nationalistic political agenda were accepted by the general public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gomperz was not the only one who viewed Jews as being overly oriented toward rationality: “To most Germans [around 1900], Jews now represented the antithesis of the neo-Romanticist ideals of the time: they were mainly urbanized, not tied to the soil, and they lacked genuine folk traditions. Judaism once attacked for its superstition, was now criticized for being a Verstandesreligion (religion of reason).”6 It is part of the popular image of Jews around 1900 that they are overly rational. To a degree, this is the legacy of the efforts made by nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals against the stereotype that Judaism was a primitive, superstitious, and irrational religion.7 But the examples just quoted from Gomperz’s text can also yield a different conclusion. They show that even progressive Jews like Gomperz were still highly influenced by a way of thinking that emphasized environmental factors and biological determinism.8 To be fair, Gomperz also attempts to question generalizations about Jewish intellectual life and he mentions one notable exception — Spinoza, of course — not only because he is a leading Jewish philosopher but also because of a tendency toward pantheism and mysticism in his work (389).
While it is unlikely that Mahler knew of Gomperz’s text, the logic behind it may very well have been familiar to Mahler, since Gomperz clearly addresses cultural stereotypes that were circulating widely at the time. One prominent musical critic praised Mahler’s technical achievements in the Sixth Symphony while simultaneously suggesting that it lacked emotional content, thereby drawing on the stereotype of the “assimilated Jew as intellectual and unemotional.”9 These reproaches were quite common in reviews of Mahler’s music. One could conceive of the Seventh Symphony as a response to such criticism. But where did Mahler get the idea of writing a symphony about the night? In the following, I will argue that Mahler’s visits to the Netherlands in 1903, 1904, 1906, and 1909 led his artistic interests into new directions and in particular got him interested in what could be called the “cultural history of the night.”
Much has been said about Mahler’s visits to the Netherlands. The consensus seems to be that Mahler was enchanted with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, founded in 1888, and its young conductor Willem Mengelberg (1871–1951). Indeed, Mengelberg and his orchestra offered Mahler the chance to present his works to players and audiences who were by no means unequivocal in their praise but were generally supportive. Jens Malte Fischer goes so far as to suggest that Mahler considered living permanently in the Netherlands.10 But was Mahler’s motivation purely logistical; was he only interested in the performance opportunities that the Netherlands offered him? It is remarkable how quickly, after his first visit in 1903, Mahler developed close friendships with Willem Mengelberg and with the composer Alphons Diepenbrock (1862–1921), both of whom were Dutch citizens of German descent and had an intense interest in German cultural history.
Unquestionably, Mahler respected Willem Mengelberg as a congenial conductor. They worked closely together to develop a performance practice not just for Mahler’s symphonic works but also for works of the symphonic canon in general. It is clearly under the influence of Mahler that Mengelberg, who in his student days had written some minor compositions, began composing again. For the 300th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birthday, Mengelberg composed a series of Rembrandt variations. He was one of a group of four Dutch composers asked to compose something for that occasion.11 Mahler’s friend Alphons Diepenbrock was also among them. All indications are that during his visits to the Netherlands Mahler quickly developed a remarkably close intellectual relationship with the composer Alphons Diepenbrock.12 It is not clear how much Mahler knew about Diepenbrock’s music. There is some evidence that he attempted to organize a Vienna performance of Diepenbrock’s Te deum, but nothing came of it. What is clear, however, is that Diepenbrock appealed to Mahler as an intellectual companion. They shared an interest in Wagner and the German Romantics. Both were Catholic and yet were also staunch humanists who felt indebted to the legacy of modernity.
What was Diepenbrock working on when he and Mahler first met? Diepenbrock’s compositions can be organized into three periods.13 Initially, Diepenbrock predominantly wrote music for choir (often religious but sometimes secular) and works for voice and piano. A second period in Diepenbrock’s creative development started in 1898 and is characterized by an interest in the symphonic poem — the genre with which Diepenbrock’s name is now associated. The most famous of these compositions are the adaptations from 1899 of two poems from the collection that the German early Romantic poet Novalis had published as Hymnen an die Nacht. In 1905–6 Diepenbrock composed a symphonic aphorism based on the fragment “Im großen Schweigen” (In Great Silence) from Nietzsche’s Morgenröthe (Daybreak), and in 1911 he completed a symphonic poem based on another German Romantic’s text, Hölderlin’s poem “Die Nacht” (The Night). I mention these specific compositions because they work with German texts and therefore with a cultural tradition shared by Diepenbrock and Mahler. Diepenbrock simultaneously worked with Latin, French, and Dutch materials, and in fact after 1910 he concentrated mainly on French materials; the music of Debussy clearly had a major impact on him, and the First World War, during which the Netherlands remained neutral, led to his break with Wagner and the German cultural tradition as a whole, with one notable exception: in 1918 he wrote incidental music for Goethe’s Faust (with a few songs).
One can say that for Diepenbrock, as for Mengelberg, Mahler’s visits to Amsterdam had a catalytic function. Interestingly, in 1906 Diepenbrock composed music to “Veni Creator Spiritus,” the same Latin hymn that Mahler used for the first movement of his Eighth Symphony, on which he was working during the summer of that same year. A committee of members of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in charge of approving religious music for use in the church, to which Diepenbrock had submitted his piece, rejected it because the committee believed it heard a resemblance with Wagner’s Tannhäuser.14 There is, however, another piece of music by Diepenbrock that offers itself for comparison with Mahler’s work. One of Diepenbrock’s most interesting compositions is the above-mentioned symphonic aphorism “Im großen Schweigen,” composed in 1905–6, after Mahler’s initial visits. This is a symphonic poem about the night — one of Diepenbrock’s favorite topics, as is clear from the works mentioned above, but also from many of his other compositions (often also for voice and piano). It is no exaggeration to say that night was an obsession for him. To understand his interest in “night” as a musical and cultural topic, it is productive to look at his essay “Schemeringen” (Twilights), first published in the Dutch literary-cultural journal De Nieuwe Gids in 1893. Diepenbrock was heavily influenced by the theoretical writings of Wagner and in particular of Nietzsche. Echoing the cultural pessimism of these two thinkers, Diepenbrock sees Western civilization approaching its end: “The old occidental, the old Latin world, the wreckage of the old Holy Roman Empire will fade away in the immeasurable cleft of infinite times.”15 Twilight is what characterizes the transition from this old world into something new. Diepenbrock regrets this loss of old certainties. Not unlike Nietzsche, however, he sees it as something to be desired rather than something that is simply inevitable. With great ambiguity, Diepenbrock writes of the “blissful destruction of the consciousness of life” (449).
In one of his earlier works, the Third Symphony, Mahler had used nocturnal imagery to describe man’s existential dilemmas in postmetaphysical times (see chapter 3). In this context it is interesting to note that Mengelberg and Mahler had first met in June 1902 in the German city Krefeld, where Mengelberg attended the world premiere of Mahler’s Third. This led to Mahler’s receiving an invitation to conduct this symphony in Amsterdam in October 190316 — the beginning of Mahler’s close relationship with Mengelberg, Diepenbrock, and the Concertgebouw orchestra. It is possible to read Nietzsche’s “Mitternachtslied” from Also sprach Zarathustra, the text that Mahler had used for the fourth movement of the Third Symphony, as an illustration of Diepenbrock’s ideas (which, as I mentioned earlier, were influenced by Nietzsche’s thinking). Zarathustra is a figure straddling old and new times; the “night” in “Mitternachtslied” is associated with profoundly ambivalent feelings, as I have shown (see chapter 3).
Nietzsche’s fragment “Im großen Schweigen,” which Diepenbrock used for his symphonic aphorism, offers an apt illustration of his ideas presented in “Twilights.” Nietzsche’s “Im großen Schweigen”17 describes twilight at the seashore, with a city nearby. Church bells ring “Ave Maria” — clearly symbolizing an old order of things that, according to Nietzsche, is no longer valid. After the bells fade away, all is silent. The aphorism focuses on this moment of transition; the silence of the night inaugurates a new way of experiencing reality, a new time and new order of things. This silence is both “beautiful and uncanny” (schön und grausenhaft) and underlies a profoundly ambivalent experience. More precisely, it is nature that is silent. This silence is expressive of its evil side (“Bosheit”). Man is the object of this evil side of nature; his heart fears a new truth (“neue Wahrheit”) of which the silence is a premonition. Man’s heart cannot speak; language and thought turn into the objects of hatred. Knowledge is nothing but error, imagination, and delusion (“Irrthum,” “Einbildung,” and “Wahngeist”). The sea and the evening teach man to stop being human. “Im großen Schweigen” ends with a fundamental dilemma: should man give in to the new order of things or, as is implied, should he return to his old view of the world? Diepenbrock links the fragment to an autobiographical experience in Genoa that Nietzsche describes in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human), as the autograph score of the work makes clear.18
It is very tempting to read Nietzsche’s fragment “Im großen Schweigen” as a model for the first movement of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. In addition to the nocturnal images that Mahler’s Seventh and Nietzsche’s fragment share — Diepenbrock writes of the nocturnal atmosphere of the first four movements19 — both also contain references to water. The first movement is one of Mahler’s many compositions that are closely associated with nature. It was inspired by the sound of the oars of a rowing boat touching the water, as he reported to Alma in a letter20 (not unlike how Nietzsche’s stay in Genoa led him to write “Im großen Schweigen”). Few will disagree with the statement that this movement offers its listeners “beautiful,” but also “uncanny” music — “schön und grausenhaft,” to quote Nietzsche’s fragment. The same ambiguity is expressed in Mengelberg’s comments about it; he understands the first movement to be an expression of “night, a tragic night” or “the reign of the power of darkness” in the form of a “violent force,” but at times we also “hear the unshakeable hope of humanity,” its longing “for light and love.”21 It is tempting to see the dissolution of musical structure in the first movement22 — radical by Mahler’s standards — in connection with the insight in Nietzsche’s fragment that all human knowledge is error. With its recurrent polyphonies, this symphony articulates the breakdown of Western tradition that Nietzsche had diagnosed (more successfully, indeed, than Diepenbrock’s composition, which is far more conventional). There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence linking Nietzsche’s aphoristic fragment, Diepenbrock’s adaptation, and Mahler’s symphony. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s “Im großen Schweigen” (but also Hölderlin’s “Die Nacht” or Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht) are exemplary in their thematization of the night side of German culture and can help us understand what Mahler’s thinking may have been when he composed this work.
Diepenbrock’s obsession with nocturnal imagery makes a connection between the Seventh Symphony and Dutch culture plausible. There is another link connecting this symphony to its composer’s visits to the Netherlands. Mengelberg’s score of the second movement contains an allusion to Rembrandt’s “Nachtwacht” (Night Watch).23 It is assumed that Mahler himself was the source of this allusion. Mengelberg is also known to have referred to the “Nachtwacht” during rehearsals. As is the case for all “programmatic” statements by Mahler, this one is controversial. Diepenbrock questions the reference to the “Nachtwacht”: “It is not true that he [Mahler] wanted to paint the Nachtwacht here. He only mentioned the painting as an analogy” (Es ist nicht wahr, daß er hier die “Nachtwache” hat schildern wollen. Er hat das Gemälde nur vergleichsweise genannt).24 Clearly Diepenbrock is familiar with Mahler’s thoughts on programmatic music. He therefore seeks to articulate a relationship between music and painting that is not referential; both try to do a similar thing, but in different ways, each bound by the rules of its own medium. Diepenbrock’s skepticism is echoed elsewhere. In his diaries, the Austrian author Robert Musil, who visited Mengelberg’s rehearsals of this symphony at the 1920 Mahler festival in Amsterdam, also mentions Mengelberg’s reference to the “Nachtwacht” as a model. Musil disapproves; he cannot imagine Mahler would have imagined something so banal.25 For Musil it is a misconception to assume that Mahler’s art is referential or descriptive in the way that Mengelberg had suggested (or seemed to suggest). Clearly, Musil sees Mahler as a congenial modernist artist. But if Mahler’s intentions were not descriptive, then what purpose did the references to Rembrandt serve? How are we to understand the importance of Rembrandt for Mahler’s Seventh Symphony?
We know that Mahler, while studying at the University of Vienna, took a class on Dutch painting from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.26 Also, Mahler’s close friend Lipiner is known to have had a strong interest in Rembrandt.27 Mahler’s curiosity regarding Rembrandt is documented in connection to his visits to Amsterdam. We know that he saw the “Nachtwacht” and other paintings by Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum during his first visit to Amsterdam.28 During a later visit he saw the Rembrandt house, which at the time was inhabited by a number of Jewish families and not open to the public. This suggests that Mahler was aware of the fact that Rembrandt’s house was situated in Amsterdam’s Jewish neighborhood. Can Mahler’s attraction to Rembrandt be at least partially explained by that painter’s interest in the Jewish life that surrounded him?29 “Through these windows Rembrandt must have looked” (Durch diese Fenster soll Rembrandt also geguckt haben), he is said to have observed on that occasion, and according to the same source Mahler added that he would rather die than fail to grow as an artist.30 All of this is testimony to Mahler’s respect for this painter and perhaps to feelings of artistic affinity.
Within the context of Rembrandt’s work and seventeenth-century portrait painting in general, the “Nachtwacht” enjoys a unique status. Rembrandt breaks in the most radical way possible with the rather strict and unimaginative cultural codes that existed for such group portraits31 in order to produce something chaotic highlighting the individuality of all of the figures involved. As Simon Schama points out, “Nachtwacht” is “a picture threatening to disintegrate into incoherence” (495). A similar break with convention is an important aspect of the Seventh Symphony. One could describe the second movement, about which the “Nachtwacht” reference was made, as a march in which everyone walks out of order but that nevertheless moves forward. Rembrandt’s citizens’ militia moves from darkness into the light (not, however, into the light of day; 497). Diepenbrock has characterized the second movement as an example of a “march with a fantastic chiaroscuro” (ein Marsch . . . mit einem phantastischen clair obscur),32 using a term often used to characterize Rembrandt’s style. To understand Mahler’s interest in the “Nachtwacht,” it may also be significant to know that Rembrandt’s contemporaries associated citizens’ militias with a drive toward independence. They not only fought against the Spanish and would help the Dutch Republic gain its formal independence from Spain (1648), but they were also known as opponents of the House of Orange, the de facto rulers of the Republic.33 While nightwatchmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth century generally were treated with contempt, Rembrandt in contrast depicts them as respectable citizens.34 All of these diverse strands may help to explain Mahler’s interest in Rembrandt from an art history perspective, at least partially.
There is however another reason why Rembrandt engaged intellectuals like Mahler, Lipiner, and Diepenbrock. In 1890 the previously unknown scholar Julius Langbehn (1851–1907) published a book on Rembrandt with the Nietzsche-inspired title Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator). This work would soon become the intellectual bestseller of the early 1890s; within its first two years it went through more than forty editions.35 Its impact has been compared by some to that of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) immediately after the First World War.36 Before publishing Rembrandt als Erzieher, Langbehn’s only claim to fame had been that he had served briefly as a caretaker for Friedrich Nietzsche, who shortly before had become insane.37 This piece of information about Langbehn may have intrigued Nietzsche admirers such as Lipiner and Mahler; in a sense, Rembrandt als Erzieher could be read as the latest report on Nietzsche’s thinking — through a not-exactly-reliable mediator, that is. Its reception history is complicated by the fact that Langbehn kept updating and expanding the text. No comprehensive study on these revisions and the critical response to the text has been published to date. After his inimitable success with Rembrandt als Erzieher, Langbehn soon disappeared from the public spotlight. And after 1892 interest in Rembrandt als Erzieher faded, although the book was reprinted occasionally until well into the Third Reich. To some extent, Langbehn managed to live off the reputation of Rembrandt als Erzieher, although he did much to destroy his newfound reputation by publishing a series of poems, some of which were perceived to be pornographic.38
To understand the attraction of Rembrandt als Erzieher, it is important to know that the book claims to document a societal crisis that is simultaneously a cultural crisis. While Germany is doing very well economically, it has, according to Langbehn, lost touch with its spiritual roots. His criticism, like that of many conservative cultural critics of his time, seeks to revive some of the ideas underlying German Romanticism. Langbehn attacks a world dominated by the sciences, mechanistic thinking, and over-specialization (103). In particular, he criticizes the lack of individualism among his German contemporaries, even though this is part of the essence of Germanness (3–5). It is this crisis of modern society that interests Langbehn and that leads him to invoke a new role for culture as a medium through which Germany can redeem itself. Only art will be able to save Germany (99). Art has the power to reassemble a fragmented society. It will enable a new synthesis, and the personification of this synthesis is Rembrandt. Rembrandt is, for Langbehn, in spite of his Dutch background, the most individual of all German artists: “a high degree of irregularity, displacement, peculiarity” (ein hoher Grad von Unregelmäßigkeit Verschobenheit Eigenartigkeit) characterizes his work (9 and 12). Yet Langbehn also expects what he calls “the creation of new spiritual values” (die Schaffung neuer geistiger Werte) by reorienting German culture toward Rembrandt and the tradition he stands for (268). More specifically, he is hoping for a deepening of German national consciousness beyond everyday politics: the old cosmopolitan attitudes should be replaced by an aesthetic politics that would counter “the often trivial interests of everyday politics” (die oft so trivialen Interessen der jeweiligen Tagespolitik; 269). In addition to Rembrandt, Langbehn also frequently mentions Shakespeare, Dürer, Goethe, and Beethoven. His preferences are extremely eclectic.
The model of cultural renewal that Langbehn promotes is, in many respects, reminiscent of that of the early Nietzsche, in particular as proposed in Die Geburt der Tragödie, the text that was so influential for Mahler’s circle of friends during his student days (see chapter 3). Metaphors of light and darkness also play an important role in this work; Apollo is associated with light, Dionysos with darkness. Rembrandt als Erzieher, however, also clearly moves beyond Nietzsche’s text. In the book, Langbehn proposes something very radical: he wants to rethink German cultural history by looking at its margins and what was discarded. Rembrandt symbolizes an alternative path that German culture could have taken (and potentially could still take). The choice of Rembrandt seems rather arbitrary. It has been suggested that Langbehn considered making Shakespeare the core of his argument;39 like Rembrandt, Shakespeare’s Hamlet clearly fascinates Langbehn as an intriguing, ambiguous, and important figure situated at the margins of Germanic culture. Surprisingly, Rembrandt als Erzieher did not contain a single concrete or detailed analysis of a painting by Rembrandt (the editions from the 1890s did not contain any reproductions of Rembrandt’s paintings either). What “Rembrandt” exactly stands for remains equally unclear; the terms that Langbehn uses to characterize this alternative route are rather vague. His penchant for the dark side of German culture is an attempt to revive the Romantic tradition in German cultural history.
Such a revival is meant as a counter move to the Enlightenment — its name already associated with “light” — but also against the classical period in German literary history. Men like Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller were highly indebted to the Enlightenment, but also focused on the “light” world of ancient Greece (that had also been attacked by Friedrich Nietzsche). It is literally the dark side of German culture, represented by Rembrandt’s paintings, that for Langbehn is a desirable alternative to the German fixation on the light of Greece (44). However, even though images of “light” and “darkness” are ubiquitous in Rembrandt als Erzieher, Langbehn’s text does not explain how exactly “light” and “darkness” represent different modes of viewing life, different normative models. What is clear is that, for Langbehn, Rembrandt somehow represents a different trajectory for German culture. The fact that Rembrandt was Dutch and not German does not bother Langbehn. As a Dutchman, Rembrandt preserved an alternative route for German culture from which the Germans themselves had long since strayed. Langbehn, by the way, is intrigued by such geographical margins (as his interest in Hamlet shows). He was born in Hadersleben (Haderslev), a small town that was Danish when Langbehn was born, later became Prussian and then became part of the German Reich, and since 1920 has been part of Denmark again, but with a significant German-speaking population. It is precisely Langbehn’s decentering of German culture and its subsequent recentering (in support of its margins) that makes his book relevant for Mahler’s cultural cosmos.
Interestingly, in the context of his considerations about Rembrandt Langbehn not only addresses Dutch culture as a margin of German cultural history but also closely examines Rembrandt’s views on Jews and their (marginalized) position in the Dutch-German tradition. Langbehn’s statements about Jews in Rembrandt als Erzieher are complicated and problematic, if not downright confusing. Many of the anti-Semitic statements found in later editions did not appear in the initial 1890 edition. Perhaps Langbehn did not want to alienate potential Jewish audiences.40 But even in the work’s later editions, Langbehn does have positive, while highly ambiguous things to say about Jews:
Strangely enough, Rembrandt’s nobility shows itself, in the end, in — his love for the Jews; here his local and noble attitude, his view of what is close and what is high, meet. He saw this species of mankind every day, because he lived in the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam; the kernel of such artistic and intellectual particularities is often closer at hand than one would expect. . . . A real and religious Jew in the old sense has unmistakably something noble about him; he belongs to that centuries-old moral and spiritual aristocracy from which most modern Jews have strayed; in this respect, Lord Beaconsfield was half-right when he declared them the oldest aristocracy on earth. Rembrandt’s Jews were real Jews who wanted to be nothing but Jews, and who also had character. For almost all Jews today, one has to say the opposite; they want to be Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen etc., and because of that merely lose their character. . . . Jews as they are today he would have loathed or never understood.
[Eigenthümlich genug zeigt sich endlich die Vornehmheit Rembrandt’s in — seiner Vorliebe für die Juden; hier begegnen sich seine lokale und seine vornehme Gesinnung, sein Blick in die Nähe und sein Blick in die Höhe. Er hatte diese M[e]nschengattung täglich vor Augen; denn er wohnte in der Judenbreitstraße zu Amsterdam; die Keime solcher künstlerischen und geistigen Besonderheiten liegen oft näher zur Hand, als man meint. . . . Ein echter und altgläubiger Jude hat unverkennbar etwas Vornehmes an sich; er gehört zu jener uralten sittlichen und geistigen Aristokratie, von der die meisten modernen Juden abgewichen sind; in dieser Hinsicht fühlte Lord Beaconsfield also halbwegs richtig, als er sie für den ältesten Adel der Welt erklärte. Rembrandt’s Juden waren echte Juden; die nichts Anderes sein wollten als Juden; und die also Charakter hatten. Von fast allen heutigen Juden gilt das Gegentheil; sie wollen Deutsche Engländer Franzosen u.s.w. sein; und werden dadurch nur charakterlos. . . . diese, wie sie heute sind, würde er verabscheut oder nie begriffen haben.]41
Bearing in mind Langbehn’s anti-Jewish remarks in the later editions of Rembrandt als Erzieher, this passage articulates something quite unexpected. In contrast to Germans, the text suggests, at least some Jews have remained in touch with their tradition. While living among non-Jews and in cultures very different from their own, they have managed to protect their own cultural memory (in contrast, it is strongly implied, to Germans who have lost touch with their cultural memory). This Langbehn describes as the “aristocratic” and “noble” character of Rembrandt’s Jews. What is in essence a very conservative impulse leads Langbehn to respect Rembrandt’s Jews. Precisely for this reason it is therefore possible that these Jews, for Langbehn, represent the pinnacle of Rembrandt’s art. For at least a moment in the course of his argument, Langbehn makes Rembrandt’s Jews into the ultimate representatives of an ideal German culture.
There are more positive attributes that Langbehn associates with Jewishness. It is not Rembrandt’s “archaic” Jews alone who represent some sort of ideal for Langbehn; his opinion of Rembrandt’s Jewish contemporary Baruch de Spinoza is remarkably positive as well. Spinoza, too, exemplifies the “original aristocratic Judaism” (uraristokratisches Judenthum)42 that Langbehn seeks. His personality is comparable to Rembrandt’s; both men are heretics and unorthodox thinkers; both are interested primarily in individuality and the world;43 both are characters with depth, they are goal-oriented workers and thinkers, and are ultimately free human beings. Not entirely convincingly perhaps, Langbehn also attempts to read into Spinoza’s work a play of darkness and light; more specifically, Spinoza attempts to bring (some) light into the darkness that constitutes human existence. The fact that Rembrandt and Spinoza can be compared in such an affirmative way is highly significant in view of the great symbolic value given to Rembrandt in Rembrandt als Erzieher. Rembrandt and Spinoza are both described by Langbehn as being open to their environments in a cultural sense. Langbehn associates Spinoza’s aristocracy of the mind, on the one hand, with an embeddedness in tradition, but on the other hand with an inquisitiveness about the cultures surrounding him, and a lack of orthodoxy not to be confused with a slavish copying of other cultures. Langbehn speaks of the “higher and truly spiritual world view” (höhere und wahrhaftig seelische Weltauffassung) in Spinoza’s thinking that ultimately moves beyond individualism and bears some similarities to ascetic philosophies in the Christian and Indian world (43). Such an observation may be based more on Spinoza’s biography than on his texts, but it does bear witness to a cosmopolitan impulse in Spinoza’s philosophy that I will discuss at greater length in the next chapter.
In spite of Langbehn’s positive portrayal of Jewish culture there is, however, both in the above quote and in Langbehn’s text in general, a counterargument to the positive depiction of Jews. Rembrandt als Erzieher is, in this respect, emblematic for a line of thinking about Jews in German cultural history since the late eighteenth century. The text emphasizes the positive characteristics of the “old” Hebrews at the expense of modern, assimilated Jews. Jews who have stayed in touch with their own tradition distinguish themselves positively in comparison with Jews who have adapted to their new (European) environments without ever really becoming part of it. In Langbehn’s eyes, these assimilated Jews are profiteers and parasites; they are the object of his scorn. While Langbehn primarily addresses his criticisms to the Jews of his time, he finds the same antagonism in Rembrandt’s time as well. Rembrandt, in Langbehn’s words, “mingled with aristocratic, not with plebeian Jews” (hielt es mit den aristokratischen, nicht mit den plebejischen Juden; 43). In a paradigmatic way, this distinction between “old” and “new” Jews can be found in the work of Herder.44 In spite of the occasionally positive things Langbehn has to say about Jews, I by no means wish to trivialize the intolerant, racist, and anti-Semitic agenda underlying Langbehn’s book, especially its later editions. He not only falls back on the anti-Semitic stereotypes of his time; he actively helps to create these stereotypes.45
And yet, there is, I will argue in the following, a deep affinity between the cultural reforms that Langbehn proposed and the ideas underlying Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
The Seventh Symphony introduces a new phase in Mahler’s creative thinking. It displays a number of features typical in his later symphonic compositions (the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth symphonies and the Lied von der Erde). The Seventh Symphony is intended, I hope to have shown thus far, as a return to the cultural issues explicitly addressed in some of the (anti-programmatic) programmatic statements accompanying Mahler’s first four symphonies and the Wunderhorn songs. Mahler’s intention is to provide a rereading of the German cultural tradition that represents a new way of looking at German Romanticism, but also looks further back (as does the Eighth). Mahler is interested in forms of alterity that are marginalized by, but nevertheless present in, German cultural history. At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned Bruno Walter’s remark that this symphony refers to a form of Romanticism that he assumed had outlived its usefulness. Here Mahler is interested in unearthing forgotten cultural and intellectual history, and Dutch culture seems to have played the role of a catalyst. Mahler, I believe, was intrigued by Dutch culture as a symbol of what was marginalized and discarded within German cultural history. This framework of a search for alterity within the German tradition is also highly relevant for the Eighth Symphony, as I will show in the following chapter.
One of the innovations of the Seventh Symphony is that slow movements play a very prominent role (as they do in the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth and the Lied von der Erde). One could say that from the Seventh on, Adagios start to play a more prominent role in Mahler’s symphonic landscape. They are no longer part of the organic structure of the symphony, understood in a more conventional way, as they were in some of Mahler’s earlier symphonies (the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth) that had one slow movement (usually one of the middle movements). Starting with the Seventh, the first and last movements of Mahler’s symphonies in particular tend to develop as slow movements.
This structural development is paralleled by something else: the three middle movements of this work evoke an intimacy associated with chamber-music settings; in fact, the symphony orchestra functions as a chamber orchestra in these middle movements, whereas we are confronted with a full-scale symphony orchestra in its first and last movements. These contrasts are intentional, I would argue. Mahler’s interest in a chamber-music atmosphere was first seen in the Kindertotenlieder46 but can also be found in the Eight and Ninth symphonies and the Lied von der Erde. While working on these compositions, Mahler simultaneously, in his correspondence with Strauss, emphasizes that the Wunderhorn-Lieder should be performed in the chamber-music style.47 In particular Schoenberg and Webern would, in their compositions, pick up on the preference for smaller orchestral settings seen in Mahler’s later works. Contrasting with this interest in a chamber-music style in his later works, Mahler is also increasingly interested in writing music for mass audiences. One could say that his symphonies display an interest in the dynamic between the individual and the masses. In the last movement of the Seventh Symphony the idea of music for the masses is seen as something negative. But Mahler’s interest in music for the masses is not just negative; in particular, the Eighth Symphony struggles with the question as to how mass and individual can be reconciled.
In order to understand these innovative aspects of Mahler’s later works, it is productive to look at passages in Rembrandt als Erzieher that deal with music in general and with Wagner in particular. I hope to have shown convincingly that Mahler’s interest in the night in relation to the Seventh was inspired by a desire to reread German cultural history. In the section “Musical Matters”(Musikalisches), Langbehn — referring to statements by Wagner, who had characterized the adagio as the “foundation of all musical determination of time” (Grundlage aller musikalischen Zeitbestimmung) — calls the adagio “the specifically German musical tempo” (das speziell deutsche Musiktempo).48 Beethoven’s Adagios are invoked to illustrate Langbehn’s point; Beethoven serves here, as in much of the nineteenth-century’s cultural imagination, as the quintessence of German culture. But, improbably enough, for Langbehn Rembrandt’s paintings express this German Adagio as well. Langbehn’s call for a “German” Adagio is followed immediately by a deliberation on how one form of art (painting) can be translated into another form (music). Through the experience of nature, music enters Rembrandt’s paintings: “In Rembrandt’s painting there seems to resound a bit of the soft murmuring of the sea surrounding his homeland” (In Rembrandt’s Gemälde scheint etwas von dem leisen Rauschen des Meeres hineinzutönen, das seine Heimath umspült). It is very interesting that Langbehn, in his rather far-fetched example of the transition of one medium to another, uses “water” to illustrate his point. One of the very few statements of a somewhat programmatic nature that Mahler made about the first movement of the Seventh is, as I have already shown, that the beginning of this movement is inspired by the sound made by the oars of a rowboat.
The musical ideal that Langbehn advocates is characterized not merely by slowness but also by a specific mood (typical for adagios). In elaborating on this “Rembrandtian” musical ideal, Langbehn draws a comparison with “certain Northern-German folk songs” (gewisse Volkslieder des nördlichen Deutschlands) and then speaks of the melancholic character that is typical for this music, a character that can also be found in Rembrandt’s paintings and in Beethoven’s music. Langbehn describes the general ambiance underlying these works of art as “a sort of softspoken German grace that has turned away from the world” (eine Art von zartverschwiegener weltabgekehrter deutscher Anmuth) that is to serve as a northern European alternative to the superficial lightness of southern — that is, Italian — European music. Langbehn also characterizes this mood as “melancholic.” The dark colors of Rembrandt’s paintings are echoed in the melancholic nature of the musical ideal that Langbehn envisions. Much later in his text Langbehn further clarifies the musical ideal outlined here. He makes the interesting observation that “after [Wagner] music, if it wants to progress, will need to return to the highest form of intimacy” (nach [Wagner] wird die Musik, wenn sie überhaupt fortschreiten will, zur höchsten Intimität zurückkehren müssen; 278). “Intimacy” is the key word here — intimacy as opposed to superficial splendor. The second, third, and fourth movements of the Seventh Symphony exemplify, I would argue, such a program of intimate music. Mahler experiments with a reduced orchestra — reduced, as it were, to a chamber-music ensemble — in order to evoke melancholy and intimacy, in contrast to music that is interested in overpowering its audiences through pure effect. Bearing in mind that Mahler, like his contemporaries Hugo Wolf, Arnold Schönberg, and Alexander Zemlinsky, was obsessed by the question of developing a musical language that would move beyond Wagner, Langbehn’s remark is especially interesting, because it gives a hint as to how this could be realized. Langbehn’s deliberations here, incidentally, proved to be prophetic. Not only Mahler but the avant-gardists Schönberg and Webern would, after experimenting with large orchestral settings, turn to composing music for much smaller ensembles.
While Langbehn, in the section that I have just discussed, suggests that his ideas follow or at least are inspired by Wagner’s program, a later section on music in Rembrandt als Erzieher sheds a very different light on his intentions. In this section, appropriately titled “Wagner,”49 Langbehn’s attitude toward Wagner is very different; Wagner does not serve as a model but as a countermodel for the musical ideal outlined by Langbehn. Here he is clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s harsh criticism of Wagner, even though Nietzsche is surprisingly absent from Rembrandt als Erzieher. Langbehn questions how long Wagner’s music will dominate the German musical landscape. He criticizes Wagner’s lack of modesty; Wagner’s music knows “no rest” (keine Ruhe). Wagner is interested only in superficial effects; his music is characterized by nervousness: “He is nervous and makes others nervous” (Er ist nervös und macht nervös). His music is not even German: “He wanted to be German; but his form of passion does not always achieve this; the loud lovelorn lunacy of Isolde may have something Celtic about it” (Er wollte deutsch sein; aber seine Art von Leidenschaft ist dies nicht immer; der laute Liebeswahnsinn seiner Isolde dürfte eher keltisch sein.) Wagner’s music has more in common with Meyerbeer than he would like to admit.
Wagner’s music — or at least a version of his music — also plays an important role in the final movement of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The last movement, the Rondo-Finale, has often been criticized and is among the most controversial in Mahler’s oeuvre. Far from creating an atmosphere of intimacy, it seems to want to appeal to a mass audience. There is an apparent critical consensus that the last movement expresses a return to light. Mahler did suggest this during rehearsals, as we have seen, and the idea has since been generally accepted.50 Diepenbrock characterizes this movement with the words “the radiant sun; night is gone” (die strahlende Sonne, die Nacht ist gewichen).51 Diepenbrock further links Mahler’s symphony to Nietzsche’s cultural criticism in Die Geburt der Tragödie by stating that here Apollo has defeated Dionysos.52 The music seems excessively loud and fast. Adorno writes of a “positivity” that is rarely found in Mahler and that is indicative of a “disproportion between the splendid exterior and the meager content of the whole” (MPE, 137; Mißverhältnis zwischen der prunkvollen Erscheinung und dem mageren Gehalt des Ganzen: MP, 281). Others echo Adorno’s criticism. Musicologists have criticized the final movement because of its “pompous attitude” and “superficial splendor”;53 it has been seen as typical “Kapellmeistermusik” because of its assumed compositional shortcomings and supposed lack of originality.54 In particular, the juxtaposition of the leitmotiv of Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg with a theme from Léhar’s Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) has stupefied critics.55 Adorno is undoubtedly referring to this juxtaposition when he speaks of the “meager content” of this movement. The suggestion has been made that this must be some kind of intentional play on the tradition of the “affirmatory finale”56 but critics are at a loss to explain what Mahler may have intended.
It may be possible to find biographical explanations here. Is Mahler articulating his frustration with contemporary audiences, who loved the operas of Wagner and Léhar but despised Mahler’s own far more demanding symphonies? The return to daylight is simultaneously a return from the margin (Amsterdam) to the center of German culture (Vienna) and the humdrum routine of running the Vienna Court Opera.
Langbehn’s cultural criticism may also be helpful here. Above all, the Seventh Symphony, I would argue along with Langbehn, articulates a clash of cultural concepts, of ideas relating to what music is about, and even what music is. We know that Mahler did not have a very high opinion of Léhar’s Lustige Witwe; for him, it exemplified a form of useless entertainment comparable to playing a game of cards.57 The fact that Mahler quotes the leitmotiv from Die Meistersinger is also no coincidence. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is an opera about the competition between two singers in late medieval Nürnberg, one of them, Beckmesser, characterized in ways that contemporary audiences would have recognized to be “Jewish.”58 This quote at the beginning of the fifth movement of the Seventh Symphony not only points to the element of competition but also is to be read as a reference to Mahler’s Jewishness; here the Jewish composer takes up Wagner’s challenge to find a new road to German culture. Langbehn’s criticism of Wagner as overly loud and pompous is to be read in the context of what, very early on in his book, he calls “Ueberkultur.” At the beginning of the book he argues that the problem with German society is not a lack of culture (“Unkultur”) but a surplus of culture. This German “Ueberkultur” is more damaging than “Unkultur” (3). Germans are obsessed with “Bildung” and “Kultur” — it is part of Germans’ self-image — but their understanding of these concepts is no more than superficial. Wagner caters to these superficial needs. In the last movement of this symphony, Mahler, I would argue, seeks to accommodate his audiences’ need for “Ueberkultur”; that is, their intense but superficial interest in things cultural. Interpreted in this way, through the lens of Langbehn, the Seventh Symphony ends with a comment on the decline of art. The negative associations in the response of many critics to this movement are programmed into the music and are part of Mahler’s intention, not the result of Mahler’s incompetence as a composer. And yet, in its earlier movements, this work also aims to give an impression of other forms of art, of what German art could have been and still might be.
How do the above references to literary, intellectual, and cultural history add up to a different view of the Seventh Symphony? What narrative, in other words, does it present to us? It articulates neither a trajectory from innocence to experience nor a course in the opposite direction, from experience to (regained) innocence. If one accepts the premise underlying the philosophical-literary argument in this chapter that it is in the “night” that the listener experiences some anticipation of “meaning” accompanied by a fundamentally new way of experiencing the world, then it is not at the beginning or end of the symphony, but in the middle — more specifically, in the three middle movements — that the process of Bildung takes place, if it can be called that: it is after all an experience of only a very temporary nature. Rather than understanding the symphony as a form of Bildungsroman, I propose that it should be understood, not unlike the Fourth Symphony, as the musical equivalent of an essay: an essay on the night.
All the literary and philosophical texts discussed above thematize the highly diverse ways in which the night can be experienced. The emotions associated with darkness are profoundly ambiguous. Initially, in the first movement, darkness is experienced as something uncanny and chaotic; the night here is associated with some form of the primal force of nature. Gradually, in particular in the two Nachtmusik movements (the second and fourth movements), this experience of uncanniness makes way for more specific and yet also highly ambivalent emotions. Night is never far away and never really disappears from the background in these pieces. In the third movement night is associated with death, and in the fourth movement with love. This speaks to the cyclical nature of the emotions associated with both death and love; they are associated with each other, respond to each other. The final movement makes us forget about the core of the symphony, about the learning experience of these earlier movements. The key movement within the symphony is unquestionably the second movement with its programmatic reference to Rembrandt. It is this movement that explains the transformation of the first movement’s primal nature into something more meaningful — perhaps not into a sense of order, but rather into something that is more than chaos. It is possible to read Rembrandt’s painting as a powerful argument for breaking with tradition, or as a statement about finding commonality in individuality, about mobility, and about the attempt to bring (some) order into chaos (or light into darkness). In the end, the painting functions as a powerful metaphor for the music, and the music as a powerful illustration of the painting.