Two essays that Mahler wrote in 1877 as part of his final exams for obtaining his high school diploma have survived. One of them deals with the Duke of Wallenstein (1583–1634), a military hero from the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) best known from a series of plays that Schiller wrote about him. Mahler was clearly not (very) familiar with them and as a consequence received a failing grade. The other essay topic asked him to discuss the impact of the Orient on German literature. For this essay, Mahler received a passing grade, even though it was clearly unfinished.1 And indeed he has interesting things to say; one might call Mahler’s essay cosmopolitan and progressive. It argues unambiguously in favor of cultural cross-pollination: cultures should learn from each other; cultures that isolate themselves risk marginalization (he cites the Chinese as a cautionary example). Mahler links cultural differentiation (entirely in line with the theories of Herder, among others) to differences in climate and geography.2 The Orient’s strangeness is attractive to the West, and in Mahler’s view it is the German mind in particular that has sought to assimilate the cultural products of other nations.3
The fact that a topic such as “The Influence of the Orient on German Literature” was assigned to high school students in a small town like Iglau is but one proof of the prominent role that Orientalism played in nineteenth-century culture. Mahler’s essayistic response also illustrates that the discourse about the East emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries associated the Orient with predominantly positive images. Current scholarship has come to a more nuanced reading. The term “Orientalism” was introduced into Cultural Studies by Edward W. Said’s highly influential 1978 study Orientalism.4 Said’s approach was innovative in that it pointed to Orientalism’s constructed, textual nature. His study stresses that the Western view of what it called the “Orient” had its roots in literary topoi and stereotypes rather than in any form of actual experience of the East. Orientalism sought to reduce the non-Western Other to some form of unchanging “essence,” thereby suggesting far more clearly delineated differences between East and West than in fact existed. Said’s analysis also calls into question the supposedly positive views of the East constructed by Western Orientalism. It demonstrates that the Western view of the Orient is prejudiced, even if it is meant to be cosmopolitan and open-minded. The East is instrumentalized by the West in part to serve the West’s imperial ambitions, but also to flesh out a Western identity (the West as the opposite of the East).
Mahler’s opinions on Western European colonialism are quite clear: like Sigmund Freud he was an admirer of Multatuli,5 the pen name of the Dutch colonial author Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–87), who wrote the bestseller Max Havelaar (1860), a book that was highly critical of the Dutch involvement in the far East. However, concerning the second issue at stake in Said’s Orientalism, the way in which Mahler viewed the relationship and interactions between Orient and Occident is not so obvious. His high-school essay shows that, early in life, he had what one could consider a relatively sophisticated view of the Orient, one that was clearly informed by German cultural history. In some of his late compositions — in particular Das Lied von der Erde, but also the Rückert songs and the Kindertotenlieder — Mahler would return to the topic. Adorno has characterized the Orient of Das Lied von der Erde as “pseudomorphous” in the sense that it “also” functions as “cover for Mahler’s Jewish element” (Pseudomorphose ist dieser Osten auch als Deckbild von Mahlers jüdischem Element), even though he adds immediately that what is Jewish in Mahler’s music is intangible in spite of its omnipresence (MP, 291; MPE, 149). Implicit in Adorno’s deliberations is the reproach that Mahler’s music lacks authenticity, which is in line with Said’s critique of Western Orientalism: Mahler’s Orient resembles a “porcelain China” (MPE, 149; ein China aus Porzellan: MP, 291) rather than the real China. For Adorno, Mahler was not primarily interested in faithfully recreating a different acoustic culture but rather in producing music that would sound alien and irritating to listeners conditioned by European music.
I believe that Adorno is right in claiming that Mahler’s interest in the Orient is not free of clichés and is related to his Jewish background.6 But the question that Adorno does not answer is how exactly Mahler’s Orientalism is relevant for his Jewishness. Do Mahler’s compositions do more than merely unsettle the expectations of Western listeners? And if so, what kind of knowledge about Jewishness or ethnic diversity in general is contained in Das Lied von der Erde and Mahler’s other compositions that play with “Oriental” tropes? Here too, text can help to answer these questions. While these compositions clearly participated in constructing a non-Western “Other,” they also reflect, I will argue in the following, upon the conditions under which this “otherness” is constructed by Western culture in general and by fin-de-siècle Vienna culture in particular. The latter aspect in particular has not always been recognized.
In Vienna around 1900 there existed something akin to a popular interest in the Orient that involved literature, music, and the visual arts. Sometimes the period around 1900 is referred to as the “Second Oriental Renaissance.”7 In the year 1900 the Secession organized a major exhibition on Japanese art — the largest one in Europe until that point, exhibiting approximately 700 objects. In May 1901 a “cherry blossom festival” (Kirschblütenfest) took place in the Rotunde building located in the Vienna Prater; 150,000 people attended, all dressed in Japanese costumes.8 At the Kunstschau exhibition in the spring of 1908 Oskar Kokoschka exhibited illustrations from Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys) in the style of Japanese woodcuts (discussed in chapter 3).9 Alma and Gustav Mahler were among the visitors.10 Gustav Klimt’s paintings frequently involved Oriental motifs. And in 1905 Richard Strauss’s Salome premiered in Dresden; it was an opera that Mahler admired and sought to have performed in Vienna, over the objections of censors and some of his contemporaries. For Salome Strauss not only used an Oriental setting but also engaged Jewish history; his intention was to write an opera in the tradition of “Oriental and Jewish operas” (Orient- und Judenopern), but one that was more authentic than those of his contemporaries.11 These examples are important, because they show that Oriental art started to shed its image of being primarily decorative or ornamental that set it apart from German high art.12
German Orientalism was far less homogenous than is sometimes assumed. For someone who was interested in Orientalism around 1900, German cultural history offered two fundamentally different models for looking at the Orient. A key text for understanding German Orientalism is Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808). Schlegel built on Herder’s idea that human civilization had started in Asia.13 In his book, however, Schlegel attempts to give a more stable foundation to Herder’s theory through what are meant to be precise linguistic and cultural observations. His main thesis is that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit is related to Persian, ancient Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages, and that this points to a developmental relationship among them.14 The origins of Germanic culture are consequently to be found in India, according to Schlegel. While Herder believed in a single source from which all civilizations originated,15 Schlegel in contrast emphasizes the existence of competing linguistic and cultural traditions that originated independently of each other, even though they did have considerable influence on each other.16 Thus Schlegel distinguishes between two geographical areas of the Orient. One area has its center in India and is seen as being closely related to the Germanic tradition; these are the roots of what later scholars were to call the “Indo-European” or “Indo-Germanic” tradition. Schlegel’s other Orient includes everything else: Tibet, China, Arabia, and, to some extent, the Jewish cultural tradition, and is seen as being very different from this “Indo-Germanic” tradition (115, 297 and 299). While Schlegel emphasizes that all of these traditions are legitimate in their own ways (163), there can be no doubt that he views the “Indo-Germanic” tradition as being superior. Indo-Germanic languages are superior because they know the principle of inflection, in contrast to more “primitive” languages like Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and the American-Indian languages.17 In Schlegel’s view, this linguistic superiority is a sign of cultural superiority.
It is precisely this split between a superior and inferior, good and bad Orient that is at the heart of the later distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan (or Semitic) nations that was to have disastrous consequences for Germans’ views of other cultures in general, and of Jewish culture in particular.18 One could say that Schlegel initiated a politicization of German Orientalist discourse in that he made this discourse about the roots of German culture. In his genealogical search, Schlegel was interested in establishing a central trajectory for Germanic culture, and he had a rather negative view of the interactions among divergent traditions that are an unavoidable part of any cultural history.
This is precisely the issue that Goethe addresses in his West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan), the second text of the period that had a paradigmatic function for German thinking about the Orient. This work, which I discussed briefly in chapter 5, is a collection of poems based primarily on the fourteenth-century Persian court poetry of Hafiz and accompanied by a lengthy essay entitled Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans (Notes and Treatises to Further the Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan). It was first published in 1819, roughly a decade after Schlegel’s text, and clearly had a polemical function.19 Goethe’s motivation to turn his creative interest eastward is in part explained by the much higher regard for poets that can be found, in his view, in the Orient.20 But he also quite explicitly looks at the Orient with an interest in alterity. At the very beginning of his commentary Goethe emphasizes how different East and West are. He wants to be seen as a traveler who does his best to adapt to the “unfamiliar way of life” (fremde Landsart) but also realizes that such attempts can be successful only up to a point, that his “own accent” (eignen Akzent) would cause him to be recognized as a “stranger” (Fremdling).21
Goethe’s view of the Orient, in contrast to Schlegel’s, is heterogeneous and yet highly inclusive. At one point he describes Oriental culture as a “mixture” (Gemisch).22 Hebrews, Arabs, Persians, and Christians are all part of Goethe’s Orient, and while Goethe has his preferences among these cultures, he, like Herder, conceives of their relations primarily in developmental terms and not hierarchically. Only once we realize the fundamental differences between East and West do we start to see similarities between East and West, between Horace and Hafiz.23 Goethe does not intend to collapse the differences between East and West but rather to accept the East and what it stands for as part of his own self-image. Only if we acknowledge the fundamental otherness of the East do we fully appreciate the provocation of Goethe’s statement that “what we Germans call Spirit” (was wir Deutsche Geist nennen24) can be found in Oriental poetry. At a time when the Napoleonic wars were a recent memory and nationalism was rampant, Goethe reminded his fellow Germans to look elsewhere. For Goethe, in contrast to Schlegel, the Orient represented the other side of the West — of Western rationality — but he wanted this other side also to be part of the West. The Orient allows the West to get back in touch with its repressed Other. Thus he envisions a dialogue that moves beyond geographical and linguistic borders. Even though he did much to counter stereotypes about the Orient, in particular its alleged despotic character, Goethe’s view of the Orient is of course not without Orientalist clichés.25 In the end, Goethe’s Orientalism, too, primarily functions as a form of Western self-reflection; the East is instrumentalized in the service of the West’s self-improvement. Nevertheless, the polemical potential of Goethe’s model of the Orient in the early nineteenth century is considerable.
The aftershocks of the debate between Goethe and Schlegel can be felt throughout nineteenth-century German cultural history, for instance in Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, 1851), which specifically seeks to formulate a non-Christian philosophical ethics and in doing so quotes Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan extensively,26 or in Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, a book that is often understood, like Nietzsche’s other works, within the framework of Western philosophical history (see chapter 3), but that is in fact framed as an imaginary conversation between one of the oldest documented religions of the East (Zoroastrianism) and the decadent West of the late nineteenth century. Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s texts had become part of the canon by 1900. One of the more prolific nineteenth-century writers, however, whose work engaged the Orient was the poet Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866). He is largely forgotten today, but his works appear to have been popular in German-speaking countries at the turn of the century. Remarkably, three multi-volume editions of Rückert’s collected works were published in the year 1897 alone, each with a different editor;27 one of them was by Reclam in Leipzig, a publisher instrumental in popularizing the German classics through cheap but generally reliable editions.
Mahler started work on setting a number of Rückert’s poems to music during the summer of 1901. While the precise chronology of the so-called “Rückert songs” and of the Kindertotenlieder, also based on poems by Rückert, is not known, it appears that Mahler worked on both groups of songs simultaneously in the summer of 1901; he then composed one more Rückert song in the summer of 1902, and two more Kindertotenlieder in the summer of 1904.28 At the same time, he was working on his entirely instrumental Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies. He first published what have now become known as his Rückert songs in 1907 in a collection together with his last two Wunderhorn songs, “Revelge” and “Der Tamboursg’sell.” It is interesting to note that Mahler chose to publish these songs together. One could argue that “Revelge” and “Der Tamboursg’sell” articulate a kind of culmination. Both songs end with the deaths of their protagonists. They also signal what one could describe as “the end of ideology”: Whether one follows the orders of one’s superior or rebels against them, in the end the result is the same (see chapter 2). Art may allow us to remember our past or point to the existence of forms of knowledge in our culture that in everyday life are more or less forgotten, but it does not give its audience an ethical framework to live by. The Rückert songs and Kindertotenlieder respond to this by seeking out a different basis for art. They no longer evoke the conflict between individual and society that, implicitly or explicitly, was at the core of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Wunderhorn songs. Language holds a very different status in the Rückert songs in particular. One could say that Rückert’s poetry allows Mahler to reinvent himself as a composer (not unlike how the West-östlicher Divan allowed Goethe to reinvent himself as a poet).
In contrast to Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, Friedrich Rückert had tangible scholarly credentials in Oriental studies. Suzanne Marchand describes Rückert very correctly as “caught between romanticism and historicism”; from Romanticism he borrowed its “grand political and aesthetic dreams,” while increasingly historicist approaches to Oriental languages and cultures were responsible for his desire to be considered as a scholar doing scientifically sound work (138). Rückert had been a professor of Oriental studies, initially in Erlangen and later at a more prestigious post in Berlin, in addition to being a very prolific translator of ancient Oriental texts and a poet in his own right. Interestingly, he is known to have been an industrious reader of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and it has been argued that these poems also served as a model for his own poetry.29 Rückert had also been an admirer of Jean Paul until the latter author made clear to him that he had little respect for Rückert’s work.30 In contrast to Goethe, Rückert, thanks to his in-depth Oriental studies, had the linguistic knowledge needed for working with original Oriental texts in many different languages. In his own poetry Rückert sought to reproduce Oriental metric and stanza forms; within German literary history he is known for introducing the ghazal (Ghasel) into German poetry.31 In spite of such high ambitions and an extremely prolific career as a translator, Rückert in his capacity as a scholar frequently reflected on the fact that translations are always imperfect,32 which was very much in line with Goethe’s thinking on the subject. Rückert’s poetry inspired by his Oriental scholarship is, however, only one side of his creative work. While pursuing his Oriental studies, Rückert also aimed for a career as a popular — some would say “frivolous” — author who wrote many poems for specific occasions and contributed to and edited popular magazines. This earned him the reputation of someone who was not always able to think critically about his own published output. It also may explain why Rückert, beyond the unquestionably lively interest in his work seen in the late nineteenth century, did not become part of the literary canon over the long term. In fact, he is now mostly known through Mahler’s compositions that use his texts.
How does Rückert position himself in the German debate on Orientalism? It is clear that Rückert initially takes Friedrich Schlegel as his model. In his early works he seeks a religious and national revival from studying ancient Indian texts. His dissertation, which he wrote in 1811, was greatly inspired by Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier and the nationalist tendencies underlying the latter’s work; in it he imagines a “reconstructed German version of the divine Ursprache emerging as the foundation of German nationhood.”33 In line with this model offered by Schlegel, Rückert actively participates in the nationalistic turn that characterized the work of many Romantics, in particular after 1810. Throughout his life he would combine political leanings toward German unity with an outspoken conservative political agenda. However, there is another side to Rückert as well. When Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan was published in 1819, Rückert responded very enthusiastically and immediately planned a similar project, which was eventually published as Östliche Rosen (Eastern Roses) in 1822.34 The first poem in this collection is in fact a homage to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan; in it, Rückert not only commends Goethe for offering a pure vision of the East but describes his own preoccupation with the Orient as a form of rejuvenation that was akin to the impact of Italy on the younger Goethe.35 Perhaps not surprisingly, Goethe recommended in a review of the volume that these poems be set to music.36
I believe that the impact of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan on Rückert was considerable. It is clear that the year 1819 was a kind of turning point in Rückert’s life. During the winter of 1818–19 Rückert, returning from a trip to Italy, spent several weeks in Vienna, where he lived in the same house as Friedrich Schlegel and met the famous Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, whose 1812/13 translation Diwan des Hafis (Divan of Hafiz) inspired Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. These meetings motivated Rückert to turn his attention back to Oriental studies and were followed by a period of intensive study bolstered by the publication of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan in late 1819.37 It was in 1819 that Rückert first wrote poems in an Oriental style.38
Before discussing Mahler’s individual Rückert songs, the question arises as to whether the composer viewed the songs now known as Rückert songs as being related to Rückert’s interests in Orientalism. The clearest answer to this question comes from Donald Mitchell. There are indeed musicological grounds for characterizing the Rückert songs as having been composed in an Orientalist style. These songs use, for instance, a pentatonic scale: a scale that organizes the octave into five pitches, and that is often used to evoke exotic — or more precisely, Oriental — connotations (as by Mahler’s contemporaries Debussy and Ravel), but is also associated with folk music, for instance by Bartók (SSLD, 60).39 The use of the pentatonic model links these songs in particular to Das Lied von der Erde, in which this model also plays an important role. A second feature characteristic of the Rückert songs is their “heterophony” (SSLD, 62): the simultaneous presence of several melodic lines that are rhythmically distinct. This, too, is a characteristic feature of Oriental music. Mahler’s friend, musicologist Guido Adler, published an article in 1908 on what he called “heterophony,” in which he mentioned “Siamese, Japanese, and Javanese music, as well as Russian folk songs” as examples of polyphonic music, but also pointed to the polyphonic roots of Western music.40 Adler defines “heterophony” as a more irregular and radical form of polyphony (SSLD, 631). Mahler’s interest in heterophony seems to have grown out of a renewed interest in the technique of counterpoint, also noticeable in his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, which were composed simultaneously with the Rückert songs and the Kindertotenlieder.
But are there textual reasons, in addition to these musicological reasons, for characterizing the Rückert songs as “Oriental”? The imagery in all the songs based on Rückert’s texts is very different from that in Mahler’s previous songs. In the words of Donald Mitchell: “Gone are the fanfares, the military signals, the dance and march rhythms and the quasi-folk style of the ‘Wunderhorn’ songs” (SSLD, 68). The attitude toward language in these songs is very different from that in his earlier songs. Interestingly, if one follows the order in which they were initially published in 1907, both the first and second Rückert song involve the phenomenon of semantic ambiguity. Especially if the song is heard and not read, the “Lieder” (songs) of the first song’s title “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder” (Do not look at my songs)41 could easily be understood to be “Lider” in the sense of “eyelids.”42 The fact that this second interpretation is encouraged is clear from the song’s second line “Meine Augen schlag’ ich nieder” (I cast down my eyes), which seems to reinforce the impression that we are dealing with “Lider” and not “Lieder” in the first line. Similarly in the second song, “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” (I was breathing a subtle fragrance),43 “linden Duft’ (subtle fragrance) can also be understood as “Lindenduft” (scent of a linden tree), a term also used in the poem. The first poem, “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder,” is essentially an argument against interfering with or reflecting on the creative process: poets should produce their texts just as bees build their cells, and once they are done, readers should enjoy the product without questioning its background (just as humans enjoy the bees’ honey). The second song puts this wisdom into practice: the poem is impressive first and foremost as a play on sounds, in particular i, ei, and ie:
Im Zimmer stand
ein Zweig der Linde,
ein Angebinde
von lieber Hand.
Wie lieblich war der Lindenduft!
[In the room stood
a twig of a linden tree,
a gift
from a loving hand.
How lovely was the scent of the linden tree.]
Semantic content is less important than form in this poem: obviously, the branch of the linden tree is associated with love — it is the memento a lover has left, as the text tells us — but we learn very little else. “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” is as close as Mahler has ever got to creating a work of art that is interested in art’s aesthetic properties alone (an attitude often described as l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake).44
Through their reflection on and use of language — unprecedented in Mahler’s oeuvre — these first two Rückert songs certainly appear to articulate a new beginning. They formulate an aesthetic ideal that seeks enjoyment and an emotional response unhampered by reflection, an ideal that transcends the (Western) division of mind and body, beyond the schism of the rational from the irrational. Goethe associated the Orient with a language liberated from “the need to represent” (Repräsentationszwänge), a compulsion that, in the West, had resulted in an instrumental way of using poetry (“instrumentelle Dichtungsweise”).45 The fact that the linden tree functions as a symbol of a newfound aesthetic attitude for Mahler is remarkable, not only because he used it in one of his earlier songs (“Die zwei blauen Augen” from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen), but also because of the prominent role that the linden tree plays in Schubert’s Winterreise cycle, which contains a song entitled “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree; see chapter 2). It is as if Mahler is asking us to interpret an old symbol in a new way. Simultaneously these songs, as I hope to have made clear, live from the ability of language to allow for multiple story lines. This ability is based on the wordplay in these poems, for which Rückert had quite an affinity, an attitude he shared with Oriental poetry in general.46 It is in their ability to allow for diverging narratives that the words of Rückert’s poems assert their autonomy over meaning. One could also argue that particular sensitivity to the relative power of words over their meanings and attention to the sound of language are typical for non-native speakers of that language. It is as if Rüchert steps outside of the German language and asks his reader to do the same.
The next Rückert song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I am lost to the world), emphasizes, like “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder,” the separation between the artist and his surrounding environment: The narrator reviews his past and feels that he has “wasted” (verdorben) too much time taking action for or in this world. The line “I live alone [now] in my heaven” (Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel) can be taken as an intertextual reference to “Das himmlische Leben,” the final movement of the Fourth Symphony that also articulated an ideal of art as free play of the imagination (see chapter 3). “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” like the final Rückert song, “Liebst du um Schönheit,” was taken from Liebesfrühling (Spring of Love),47 a collection of love poems that Rückert wrote for his wife in 1821, the year when they first got to know each other, and published as a collection in 1834.48 Knowing this is relevant, because from its text alone it is not necessarily clear that this poem is a love song. Of the three stanzas, the first two stanzas are dominated by imagery of death, even though it is clear that this imagery is used to explain a mode of being; it is “for the world” (der Welt) that the song’s protagonist has died: “For truly for the world I have died, died” (Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben, gestorben der Welt). The word “truly” (wirklich) has a paradoxical function here: while it is meant to emphasize the reality of death, the line simultaneously points to death’s metaphorical function for understanding a subjective experience, a feeling. It is not until the song’s last two lines that the narrator explains why he is “lost to the world,” and even there his answer is ambiguous: it is because of his “love” (Lieben) or “song” (Lied) that he is no longer participating in everyday life. If one takes the song to be about emotions, it tells three different stories: about death, love, and art, but also about loneliness and companionship. The song’s point is that all of these stories are equally true.
“Um Mitternacht” (Around Midnight)49 is one of the Rückert songs in which Mahler’s play with heterophony is quite pronounced; the song is therefore representative of Mahler’s new style (SSLD, 56, 59, and 64). It also anticipates formal aspects of Das Lied von der Erde (SSLD, 67), Mahler’s most prominent experiment with Orientalism. On the other hand, “Um Mitternacht,” like “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” before it, also establishes clear intertextual relationships to other compositions by Mahler: to Zarathustra’s “Mitternachtslied” in the fourth movement of the Third Symphony, for instance, or to the nocturnal imagery of the Seventh Symphony (which Mahler would compose several years later). Like these two other compositions, “Um Mitternacht” uses night as an image for illustrating humankind’s metaphysical homelessness — symbolized in this poem not only by the invisibility of stars (stanza 1), but also by the absence of “enlightening thought” (Lichtgedanke; stanza 2). Midnight is interpreted as a moment of pain (stanza 3), as a battle for the suffering of humankind (stanza 4), and as a moment between life and death (stanza 5). Much has been made of the autobiographical associations that this poem must have evoked in Mahler: during the night of 24–25 February 1901, six months before Mahler composed this song, he suffered a potentially lethal hemorrhage.50 This should not detract, however, from the fact that this text also articulates a new philosophy of life in its last stanza: the insight that the decision about life and death is not up to the individual but to a power beyond the individual, and that it is good that way, that this needs to be accepted — even though the music accompanying the final stanza is highly dissonant.51 This is a philosophy of life that Mahler will work out in much greater detail in Das Lied von der Erde.
The last Rückert song, “Liebst du um Schönheit” (If you love for beauty),52 is, following statements by Alma, often taken as a private gift by Gustav to her, even though it was published (with only a piano score) in the 1907 collection (SSLD, 110). It is indeed an unmistakable love song declaring that love is fundamentally indifferent to beauty, youth, or material wealth. When read in context with “Um Mitternacht,” this song seeks to give a positive turn to what could be called the dependence of human existence on the body. It is possible to read the song as a rejection of the materialist “Western” world in favor of an “Eastern” attitude that is less concerned with material things while simultaneously acknowledging the physical limits of human life. In terms of atmosphere — short and lighthearted rather than dark and long — the song harks back to the collection’s first two songs. This is also true in terms of content: the song argues for the autonomy not only of love but also of art. The text’s narrator speaks as an artist who clearly distances himself from what could be interpreted as bourgeois standards in favor of a more insecure but creative existence, but in addition, by presenting itself very explicitly as a love song, the song also turns into a statement about love and art. In love the essence of art articulates itself, and vice versa. Both are characterized by autonomy. In addition to acting as a message to Alma, which it certainly was, the song thereby also articulates an artistic program that reaffirms the idea of aesthetic autonomy previously articulated in the first two songs of the cycle.
Mahler’s Rückert songs use language differently from all of Mahler’s previous songs — a phenomenon that may have something to do with the fact that the texts he used came from a very different source, but that also points to Mahler’s rethinking of his aesthetic agenda. The Wunderhorn songs are much more worldly in the images they evoke and in the topics they discuss. The Rückert songs, despite the fact that they at times deal with topics familiar from Mahler’s other works, not only introduce an alternative aesthetic model (for example, through their use of the pentatonic scale) but also begin to allude to a philosophy of life that Mahler associates with the East (and that he will develop more fully in the Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde). This orientation toward a different view of human existence is especially clear in the way “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” and “Um Mitternacht” discuss death (also a key topic in the Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde). Finally, the heterophonic treatment of melody in the songs is mirrored by the multiple stories that these songs tell. While many of Mahler’s songs, one way or another, are predicated on a certain ambiguity, the Rückert songs go one step further by insisting on multiple narratives simultaneously.
Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) are based on a collection of poems with the same title that the 45-year-old Friedrich Rückert wrote after the deaths from scarlet fever of his children Luise at age 3 on 31 December 1833 and Ernst at age 5 on 16 January 1834. Rückert’s 425 Kindertodtenlieder are highly personal texts. At the request of his wife he did not publish these poems but instead, after their completion sometime in late June 1834, gave the autograph manuscript to her.53 The collection was not printed until 1872, well after the deaths of both Friedrich Rückert and his wife Luise. Mahler composed three of the Kindertotenlieder during the summer of 1901, while also working on the first four of his Rückert songs and before starting work on his Fifth Symphony that summer. He composed the remaining two Kindertotenlieder three years later, during the summer of 1904.54
The key to understanding these songs is, in my view, the cycle’s fourth song “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” (I often think they just went out walking).55 This poem starts with the (quite moving) fantasy that the children, who we know have died, have only temporarily gone out into the nearby hills. While the reader would expect some kind of disillusionment, a rejection of the fantasy, the poem actually takes a very different turn: there is some truth to the fantasy in the sense that the children, in a variation of the opening line of the third stanza, “have just gone ahead of us” (sind uns nur vorausgegangen). By reimagining history, we humans can learn something about our future. The children have gone where eventually “we” — a pronoun that may be taken to refer to the poet and his wife but may also be interpreted to include the reader or listener — will also have to go. The poem, in other words, asks us to rethink what we could consider a dark reality in favor of an alternative reality, by offering an image: that of the sun-covered “heights” (Höh’n).56 This image helps us to work through the absence caused by death and to accept mortality, not just that of others but also our own. The poem very explicitly does not refer to Christian imagery or to the promise of an afterlife.57 It seeks to incorporate the sadness accompanying death without giving in to melancholy. Instead, the poem seeks to work through the experience of death. Nature may be able to help in this, precisely because it does not allow the mourning subject’s sadness to carry over into nature: the poem paints a beautiful day with plenty of sunshine, but in the end it is imagination that asserts its autonomy over everyday reality (mimicking the call for aesthetic autonomy in the Rückert songs discussed above). It is through the poem’s central image, the image of the children having gone ahead and the parents catching up with them, that the writer/reader/listener can accomplish the difficult operation of accepting mortality as part of life. The instrumental accompaniment, however, which at the very end of the song relates contrapuntally to the sung text, emphasizes that this is a very ambivalent process; the music highlights the deep ambiguity underlying the text.58
Nature plays an important role in the other songs as well, particularly in the first and last songs of the cycle. But at no time is nature part of the resolution of the songs’ underlying conflict; rather, it functions as a reminder of the chaotic essence of life on earth. The bright sun of “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” is also present in the first of the Kindertotenlieder entitled “Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n” (Now the sun will rise brightly).59 We discover the narrator at daybreak, but here the world of nature and the mourning subject clash. The narrator reminds himself not to give in to the dark of night, but does so in vain. The poem contrasts a little lamp going out in the narrator’s tent — reminiscent of the Oriental models that Rückert used for his poetry — used as a symbol of death, with the “light full of joy” (Freudenlicht) outside. There is no way of reconciling the two, a fact also underlined by the song’s slow and somber melody. The light referred to in the text is counteracted by a melody that is “unstable in mode — rapidly alternating or combining major and minor — and also in dynamics, which are characteristically intricate, nervous and gusty” (SSLD, 93). The second song of the cycle, “Nun seh’ ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen” (Now I see why such dark flames),60 can be read as a confirmation of the message underlying the first song. Light plays a role in this poem in the “dark flames” (dunkle Flammen), which the narrator remembers were sometimes visible in the eyes of his children when they were still alive. The poem is structured as an imagined dialogue between narrator and his deceased children. The dark flames in their eyes foreshadow the future: they express a desire to stay nearby but also disclose the knowledge that fate will not allow this. In the poem’s last line, only the stars are present to remind the narrator of his children’s eyes. The cycle’s third song, “Wenn dein Mütterlein” (When your dear mother),61 comes closest to “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” in terms of its thematical structure: The narrator imagines, for a moment, that in the dark the child is following its mother into the house, as it used to do. As in the preceding poem, this poem is structured as a dialogue with the child. The tension between imagination and reality remains unresolved in this song. The narrator realizes his mistake and in the song’s final two lines laments the child’s untimely death.
If “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” had been the cycle’s last song, one could speak of a reconciliatory ending, although an ambiguous one. The cycle’s last song “In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus” (In this weather; in this storm)62 is a dark footnote to the entire cycle, and in particular to “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen.” This song also imagines the children as having gone out, although against their will and that of their father (“Never would I have let the children out” [Nie hätt’ ich gelassen die Kinder hinaus]) — a statement that is repeated, phrased in different ways, in each of the first four stanzas. The father finds some consolation in the idea that the children are now resting “like in their mother’s, mother’s home” (als wie in der Mutter, der Mutter Haus), suggesting that their death can be seen as a return to their origin,63 and that they are protected from the storm. The poem’s last stanza, in other words, suggests some kind of reconciliation between nature’s cruelty and the father’s fears, albeit a bitter one, since the text here clearly alludes to the children’s graves. This ending is anticipated in the third stanza, in which the father finds some solace in the fact that he does not have to worry about his children dying tomorrow (“sie stürben morgen”), the implication being that since the children are no longer living there is no reason to worry about their future anymore. While “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” emphasizes the potentially therapeutic function of imagination, “In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus” primarily stresses its dark side: it leads the mourning subject to the childrens’ graves. To be sure, the music accompanying the poem’s last stanza quiets down; not mimicking, however, as has been suggested,64 a quieting of the storm, but rather (as the text makes clear) the quietness of the newfound “house” amid the storm. Imagination, as the quintessence of all art, does not offer a shelter from life’s brutal realities. While in the fourth song of the cycle imagination enabled some form of overcoming death, symbolized by the sunny heights where the parents join their children, the fifth song in contrast ends with a metaphorical evocation of the children’s grave. The “als wie” (like) preceding the image of the “mother’s house” makes it clear that no real return takes place, only a metaphorical one. By explicitly pointing to the metaphorical status of this image, the poem reflects its own status as a poetic construction.
Again, Mahler’s songs offer no easy solutions; at the end of the cycle we are left with conflicted emotions. In the Kindertotenlieder, too, we see how Mahler’s songs tell multiple stories. This is particularly clear through the juxtaposition of the mourning subject, its emotions, and desires on the one hand, and nature as a cruel entity, exemplifying the chaotic essence of life on earth on the other. Nature is present in all of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, although it moves into the background somewhat in “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen,” the imagery of which is to be read in tandem with the final poem, as I have shown. Many scholars have commented on the strange coincidence whereby Mahler, in his Kindertotenlieder (1901–4), appears to anticipate the death of his own daughter Maria Anna (known as Putzi) that occurred several years later in 1907. A number of psychoanalytic critics have sought to explain Mahler’s interest in Rückert’s Kindertodtenlieder through a combination of his brush with death during the night of 24–25 February 1901, half a year before starting work on the Kindertotenlieder, his subsequent resolution to marry and have children, and memories of his many brothers and sisters who had not lived to see adulthood.65 I find these to be plausible readings, even though Mahler had not yet met Alma when he started to conceive his Kindertotenlieder. He may have had other motives as well, however. In this context, it is important to be aware of the fact that, for Rückert, the Kindertodtenlieder also documented and engaged with a crisis in his creative life.
While it is not clear whether Mahler was aware of the chronological framework of the Rückert texts he chose (we do not know which edition of Rückert’s texts Mahler used when working on his adaptations), it is quite interesting. The first two Rückert songs that Mahler published in his 1907 collection were taken from the collection Haus- und Jahreslieder, and in the 1897 edition of Rückert’s works edited by Conrad Beyer, they were dated “Fall 1833” (Herbst 1833) and “May through July 1833” (Mai bis Juli 1833).66 This means that Rückert wrote these texts just before the Kindertodtenlieder, which were written during the first half of 1834 immediately following the deaths of his children Luise and Ernst. Two of the three remaining Rückert songs Mahler took from the collection Liebesfrühling, written in 1821 during Rückert’s engagement to his future wife but not published as a collection until 1834, when they appeared in volume 1 of the Gesammelte Gedichte.67 Rückert worked on this edition the summer after the deaths of two of his children and after he had finished the Kindertodtenlieder. Taken together, Mahler’s Rückert songs and the Kindertotenlieder offer a sort of psychogram of Friedrich Rückert in 1833 and 1834. The first two Rückert songs reconstruct Rückert’s state of mind immediately before the deaths of his children. The Kindertodtenlieder document the grieving process. Following this line of thinking, the songs from Liebesfrühling could be interpreted as reminiscences of earlier and happier times, to which Rückert sought to return during the summer of 1834.
There is no doubt that, for Rückert, the deaths of his two children challenged his creativity. This confrontation with death led him to question why one should write poetry at all.68 Some comments that Mahler made during the summer of 1901 to Natalie Bauer-Lechner indicate that he too doubted his ability to sustain his own creativity. Clearly, early in the summer of 1901 Mahler was struggling with some form of composer’s block (see GME, 188–90 and 192–93; RGM, 168, 170, and 172), though Bauer-Lechner downplays his difficulties. Unable to work on a symphony, he took on the Rückert-inspired songs to help him through this crisis (a situation that repeated itself to some extent in 1904).69 Eventually however, the summer of 1901 would turn out to be quite productive: he composed 7 songs and the middle movement of the Fifth Symphony. One can stipulate that, at least in part, Mahler’s creative difficulties were triggered by his brush with mortality in the preceding months. In this context, it may also be relevant that Mahler had started his summer recuperating from an operation resulting from the hemorrhage he had suffered during the night of 24–25 February.70 The Rückert texts offered an aesthetic model that allowed Mahler to reinvent himself, much as the poetry of Hafiz allowed Goethe to reinvent not simply his poetry but also his philosophy of life in his West-östlicher Divan. The first Rückert song, “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder,” not only very explicitly thematizes the issue of creative block but also suggests an ideal of creativity as wholly unproblematic (in the image of the bees building their cells). If Mahler’s creative crisis was in fact triggered by being reminded of his own mortality, this certainly would explain why death is an important topic in these poems.
All the songs based on texts by Rückert are composed in an “Oriental” style, as demonstrated by their pentatonic scale and emphasis on polyphony. Most of the texts formally follow a simple folksong pattern with straightforward rhyme schemes, with the exception of “Nun seh’ ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen,” which is a sonnet.71 The songs do not experiment with the more complex Oriental metric and strophic forms that Rückert uses elsewhere. There are, however, thematic reasons to characterize these poems as “Oriental.” Schopenhauer, in his Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, advises making it a principle to focus not on attaining “the pleasures and comforts of life” (die Genüsse und Annehmlichkeiten des Lebens) but rather on avoiding “the numerous things that are unpleasant” (den zahllosen Uebeln).72 “Happiness is but a dream; suffering is real” (le bonheur n’est qu’un rêve, et la douleur est réelle), Schopenhauer notes, citing Voltaire (442). Schopenhauer is critical here of a Christian ethical model that assumes that humans will act nobly only if they are promised a reward in the hereafter. Instead, Schopenhauer places human suffering at the center of human ethics; avoiding suffering should be at the core of humanity’s efforts. It is not in the West but in the East that Schopenhauer sees a philosophy of life that follows this principle. This at least partially explains not only the many references in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, but also Schopenhauer’s interest in Brahmanism and Buddhism, which he articulated elsewhere. Schopenhauer found in Indian philosophy an ethical framework without a God.73 Furthermore, Brahmanism and Buddhism distinguish themselves from other religions by their very different attitude toward suffering and death.74 Rather than pursue the goal of happiness, humans should acknowledge suffering as the purpose of life.75 Death is nothing but abandoning our individuality in favor of joining a “primordial being” (Urwesen) or “Brahm”;76 or in Schopenhauer’s own terminology, abandoning the general will to live that underlies everything in nature. Both Brahmanism and Buddhism fit Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life in that they acknowledge the unavoidability of human suffering. However, precisely because of this insight, studying these religions could lead to a reinvented, more authentic Christianity.77
In the end, this is what Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Rückert songs seek to accomplish: to find a philosophy of life based in the here-and-now that incorporates the experience of suffering and death and seeks to accept them as an integral part of life. It is the song “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” that most clearly articulates this insight. Mahler projected his newfound Schopenhauerian philosophy of life onto the “Orient” and saw it as being fundamentally different from the West. He was not interested in Schlegel’s model of appropriating part of the Orient and discarding the rest, but rather in a dialogue between East and West along the lines of Goethe’s model in the West-östlicher Divan.
To understand Mahler’s return to Orientalism in his Lied von der Erde, composed during the summer of 1908 and not performed until after his death, it is useful to look into his relationship with Richard Strauss and in particular his attitude toward Strauss’s opera Salome, which seems to have functioned as a catalyst in early-twentieth-century debates about not just Oriental but also anti-Semitic clichés in music.
Race played a role in how contemporaries viewed Mahler and Strauss and compared their compositions. This is made clear, for instance, in a review by Richard Batka of the premiere of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony in Prague. The review quotes Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), a novelist and playwright of German-Jewish descent living in Vienna who was also an astute observer of Austrian society and culture, in addition to being a great admirer of Mahler’s music.
Arthur Schnitzler apparently said recently in a private conversation that someone who didn’t known that Richard Strauss is Aryan and Gustav Mahler is of Jewish descent would undisputedly observe specifically Semitic characteristics in the composer of Salome: the luxuriant, erotic sensuality; the unbridled Oriental imagination; the proclivity toward outward effect; the talent for self-representation, and in general the skill at the economic exploitation of his work. One would contrast him with Gustav Mahler, as a man of mystic rumination, one who storms gigantic boulders, a chaste “Wunderhorn” singer who is able to render the “Wayfarer” music of the Volk suited for symphonic form, and an idealist, in short as the paragon of the German artist.
[Arthur Schnitzler soll jüngst in einem Privatgespräch gemeint haben, wenn man nicht wüßte, daß Richard Strauß Arier und Gustav Mahler jüdischer Abstammung ist, würde man bei dem Schöpfer der “Salome” unstreitig die üppige erotische Sinnlichkeit, die orientalische ausschweifende Phantasie, den Hang zum äußeren Effekt und das Talent zur Selbstaufmachung, überhaupt das Geschick zur wirtschaftlichen Verwertung seiner Arbeiten als spezifisch semitische Eigenschaften bemerken und ihm Gustav Mahler, als den Mann der mystischen Vergrübeltheit, als gigantischen Felsblockstürmer, als den keuschen Wunderhornsänger, der die Musik der fahrenden Gesellen aus dem Volke symphoniefähig macht, als Idealisten, kurzum als den Typus des germanischen Künstlers entgegenhalten.]78
Schnitzler’s comments are interesting because they document how steeped the cultural landscape is in racial categories around 1908, when the premiere of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony took place. At the same time, he deconstructs the very categories that were used in order to navigate contemporary culture: if one takes them seriously, Schnitzler says, Richard Strauss would have to be Jewish and Gustav Mahler Aryan.79 Most importantly however, Schnitzler gives an example of what Jewish music in the perception of his contemporaries was supposed to sound like: like Richard Strauss’s Salome.
Not only the music but also the libretto and imagery of Strauss’s opera Salome are full of Orientalist clichés. Based on a text by Oscar Wilde, the opera picks up on one of the predominant Orientalist topoi: the association of the East with exuberant, out-of-bounds, and perverse sexuality.80 Strauss’s opera in particular associates sexuality and cruelty in the figure of Salome, daughter of Herodias, who according to an apocryphal tradition was responsible for the death of John the Baptist (in Strauss’s opera named Jochanaan). She exemplifies the cruel female or femme fatale who is a figure of fascination in fin-de-siècle European culture and who can also be found in some of the works of the Secession artists, for instance in Gustav Klimt’s Judith I and Judith II (1901 and 1909); the first painting was also often referred to as Salome.81 Salome, however, does not merely personify the Oriental woman but also embodies the Jewish woman: she refers to herself as the “princess of Judaea” (Prinzessin von Judäa).82 In Richard Strauss’s opera, clichés about the Orient turn into clichés about Jewish people and their culture, something that is also made clear by Strauss’s own characterization of it as an “Oriental and Jewish opera” (Orient- und Judenoper) later in his recollections.83 In Salome we return to the dialectic between a good and bad Orient that we first encountered in the writings of Schlegel. By demanding Jochanaan’s head, Salome, and to some extent her mother (who approves of her actions), live out their perverse sexuality and represent the bad Orient. Jochanaan represents the good Orient, along with (at least to some extent) King Herod who, in spite of his promise to Salome that he will fulfill any of her wishes after she has danced for him, is uncomfortable with her request that he give her Jochanaan’s head — he would rather give her half of his kingdom.84
A second anti-Jewish cliché is that of the Jews quarreling about their religion like “wild animals” (wilde Tiere) at the opera’s outset,85 later epitomized in the so-called “quintet of the Jews,” in which five Jews debate what to do with Herod’s prisoner, Jochanaan.86 The music that Strauss composed for this scene mimics their squabbling through the very pronounced use of polyphony and dissonance.87 The scene can be interpreted as Strauss’s reflection on the cultural stereotype that sees Jewish speech (so-called “mauscheln”) as a form of deficient or decadent use of German.88 Such a reference is certainly intended, and anti-Semitic critics did not hesitate to pick up on it.89 In the context of the German debate on Orientalism, however, it is important to note that the scene is also a comment on a specific model of Orientalism: the dialogic model promoted by Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan that considered “speaking with an accent” as something positive. What is put into question in Strauss’s opera is a dialogic attitude toward one’s values. At stake is one of the basic tenets underlying one model of German Orientalism: the willingness to engage in a debate about one’s belief system and that of others.
Mahler’s response to Richard Strauss’s Salome was ambivalent. When Strauss told Mahler that he planned to write an opera based on Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Mahler reacted negatively, but once he had heard the music (when Strauss played it for him at a piano store in Strasbourg during a visit in May 1905), he changed his mind.90 It is hard to believe that Mahler initially rejected Salome on basis of its text alone because of his conservative literary taste, as has been suggested,91 given his admiration for a play like Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) which he saw in Berlin92 — a play that dealt very openly with a range of sexual behaviors, not all of which fell within the norms of middle-class society at the time. Mahler did everything he could to get Salome to Vienna, but he was not able to convince the censor. He responded very positively to the two performances of Strauss’s Salome that he attended on 9 and 12 January 1907 in Berlin. In a letter he wrote to Alma on 13 January, he called Salome “one of the greatest masterworks of our time” (eines der größten Meisterwerke unserer Zeit); at the same time, however, he admitted some puzzlement as to how Strauss could have composed something like it: “I cannot make sense of it and only suspect that somewhere in this genius the ‘spirit of the earth’ makes itself heard” (Ich kann es mir nicht zusammenreimen und nur ahnen, daß aus dem Innern des Genies die Stimme des “Erdgeistes” tönt; GR, 308). This is a very interesting statement. Mahler clearly thinks that this piece of music is very different from Strauss’s other works. His claim that he “cannot make sense” of Strauss’s having created a work of art like this should be read in the context of his general opinion on Strauss’s artistic output, which is not always positive (Salome is the major exception). When speaking of Strauss as a person, Mahler often emphasizes his coldness (see, for example, GR, 266–67, and 279). Musically speaking, this translates into an image of Strauss as someone who composes music that is technically advanced but lacking body and soul. The observation that Strauss, in the case of Salome, has been touched by the “spirit of the earth” points to a very different creative origin for this opera in comparison to his other works. The “Erdgeist” is a reference to one of the early scenes in Goethe’s Faust I (vs. 460–513) where Faust seeks to break through his intellectualism, his life of the mind, in order to embrace another reality associated with the “spirit of the earth” and the body. Mahler’s reference to the “Erdgeist” is of course also interesting, because it appears to allude to Mahler’s own “Lied von der Erde” and suggests that this composition is to be read in tandem with Strauss’s Salome.
What remains puzzling are Mahler’s (well-documented) extraordinary efforts to have Salome performed at the Imperial Opera in Vienna.93 Did Mahler want to have Salome performed in Vienna so that he could distance himself from its music and the stereotypes accompanying it, to show that he was not “one of those loud, gesticulating Eastern Jews” that Strauss parodied in his opera?94 Or did he see it as a chance to engage with the stereotypes that Strauss was promoting? It is not unthinkable that Mahler viewed Salome as an opera that Strauss had composed with him in mind. Salome is a far more eclectic work than other works by Strauss. Strauss’s experiments with polyphony and atonality mirrored Mahler’s own interests. At the very least, Strauss’ Salome created a frame of reference for Mahler that would allow him to pursue his own related interests, although the latter would take him in a very different direction. If we accept that Salome plays a catalytic role here, then the role that Strauss plays for Mahler in the first decade of the twentieth century is not that different from that played by Wagner for the younger Mahler.
I argue in the following section that Das Lied von der Erde is conceived as a direct dialogue both with Strauss’s opera and its libretto and with the Orientalist imagery that both evoke.
It is possible that Mahler’s Rückert adaptations, in particular the Kindertotenlieder, were a critical response to a cycle of songs based on texts by Rückert that Richard Strauss had composed in 1899 and 1900,95 which emphasized the poet’s erotic side and his faith in God. However, Das Lied von der Erde’s thematic focus on death and suffering creates an atmosphere very different from that of the exuberant “Oriental” sexuality in Strauss’s Salome (or Klimt’s Judith series).
More than the Rückert-inspired songs, Mahler’s Lied von der Erde reproduces a pattern that is typical for Orientalism. In Das Lied von der Erde Mahler was not interested in the Orient as it existed in his time; rather, he decided to focus on a classical period within an Oriental literature he conceived of as representing the “good” Orient.96 While in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the German image of China was predominantly positive, in the nineteenth century Germans had mostly negative associations with that country, in part because of its absolutist form of government. It was no longer an object of fascination.97 Few texts were translated from Chinese into German in the nineteenth century.98 For Schlegel, China was quite clearly not part of the “good,” proto-European Orient but rather prototypical for the “other” Orient that had not contributed to European civilization. Mahler based the texts of Das Lied von der Erde on poems from the collection Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute) by Hans Bethge (1876–1946). He had got to know this collection some time in 1907, the year in which the volume was first published, after the death of his daughter.99 Bethge, who was mostly known for his poetry compilations, presented them as “adaptations of Chinese poetry” (Nachdichtungen Chinesischer Lyrik), but in fact based them on German and French translations of Chinese poetry.100 The model that Bethge followed was clearly that of Goethe in his West-östlicher Divan. Goethe did not know Persian either and “adapted” — a better formulation might be “improvised on” — existing translations. It was a given that such “Nachdichtungen” would by no means be authentic, but they compensate for this lack of authenticity by reflecting explicitly on similarities and differences between Western and Eastern literary traditions (both collections were accompanied by secondary materials).
Several extant letters from Mahler to Bruno Walter dating back to the summer of 1908 document Mahler’s work on Das Lied von der Erde. The first one is quite negative: Mahler complains about loneliness and about not being able to hike as intensively as he used to because of his heart condition (Br, 365–66). Walter’s letter replying to Mahler’s has been lost, but it is clear Mahler was not particularly happy with it. In a second letter to Walter that summer he gives his suffering a positive turn; in particular, his remark that he “now at the end of life as a beginner must learn to walk and stand again” (nun am Ende eines Lebens als Anfänger wieder gehen und stehen lernen muß) (Br, 368) is intriguing. This certainly refers to feelings of mortality evoked by the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of his own heart condition, both of which occurred during the previous summer. But Mahler refuses to psychologize on his condition: he clearly states that he is no hypochondriac and that what he is going through is not something a psychologist (“Geistesarzt”) can do anything about. He also rejects Walter’s suggestion to take a vacation up north — a suggestion reminiscent of Freud’s advice to Walter to take a vacation in Sicily when Walter consulted him for a (psychosomatic?) problem with his right arm that was interfering with his conducting and piano playing.101 To me, Mahler’s comment suggests that he has found a way to integrate his thoughts on mortality into a philosophy of life along the lines of the Kindertotenlieder. In Das Lied von der Erde, however, these thoughts are more explicitly projected onto the Orient.
An anonymous announcement that was published in the journal Der Merker a few weeks before the premiere of Das Lied von der Erde speaks of the “expression of a most perfect turning away from and denial of the world” (der Ausdruck vollkommenster Weltabkehr und Weltverneinung) as the cycle’s guiding idea.102 A statement like this certainly suggests a Schopenhauerian view of the Orient. It is possible to read Das Lied von der Erde as a meditation on Schopenhauer’s insight in the Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, discussed above, stating that an ethical form of life should focus not on attaining happiness or pleasure but rather on learning to accept and live with the suffering that inevitably accompanies any individual’s life. It is precisely these two conflicting perspectives on life that are at the core of Mahler’s cycle.
This is illustrated in an exemplary way by the first song, “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrows), based on a poem by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Tai Po, 701–62, today also known as Li Bai.103 The song works with sets of oppositions that are closely linked to the West’s Orientalist imagination and that are musically illustrated by the constant presence of upward and downward melodic lines (SSLD, 179). At first glance, the song seems to propagate a philosophy that projects onto the Orient a life of pleasure and indulgence, symbolized by the wine lavishly praised by the singer-protagonist in the song’s first and second stanzas. Such a life of excess is contrasted with and considered superior to a life of material wealth at the end of the second stanza: “A goblet full of wine at the right moment / is worth more than all the empires in the world!” (Ein voller Becher Weins zur rechten Zeit / ist mehr wert als alle Reiche der Welt!); the importance of the last line is underscored by a “gnashing dissonance.”104 This too alludes to an Orientalist cliché: the Orient as a place of immeasurable riches, although this stereotype is usually associated with the Arabic Orient rather than with the Far East. From Bethge’s afterword, Mahler will have known that Li Tai Po, the poem’s author, was an adventurer, vagabond, and drinker.105 Li Tai Po is, in other words, one of the figures of mobility that had interested Mahler already in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (see chapter 2). In the song’s third stanza a second, contrasting perspective appears: the realization that humans are mortal — “Not for a hundred years can you enjoy yourself” (Nicht hundert Jahre darfst du dich ergötzen) — an insight born of the realization that earth and nature’s seasonal cycle are timeless while the human lifespan is time-limited. While the first two stanzas presented a world without time, here time suddenly becomes the center of attention.
The third stanza also forces us to revisit the first two stanzas. What is important to realize is that Mahler’s song contains what one could call a work-immanent poetics: it reflects on its own status as text. While the singer encourages his audience to embrace a life of pleasure, he also asks it to postpone doing so (briefly) in order to listen to his song. The function of the song is to remind its audience of life’s dark side; it is a “song of grief” (Lied vom Kummer) that the singer intends to sing. And yet, simultaneously, the song is also threatened by this grief; if grief approaches, the song and the joy it brings may die. The image that the song’s narrator uses to illustrate this point at the end of the first stanza is a comparison of the soul with gardens that have been abandoned and are therefore “wild” (wüst). Poetry, in other words, is to serve as a counterweight to a philosophy of indulgence in the here and now, and to the suffering that goes along with life. The song’s fourth stanza is an elaboration of the third. Its dominant image is that of an ape, “wild and haunting” (wild-gespenstisch), howling on the graves in the light of the moon. The accompanying music is highly dissonant.106 Mahler’s contemporaries may have felt reminded of Typhoeus, the giant ape-like creature of Klimt’s Beethoven frieze from the Secession exhibition of 1902 (see chapter 5), who is accompanied by his daughters, the three Gorgons, representing illness, madness, and death. Clearly the ape in “Das Trinklied” is some kind of counterfigure. He stands for animalistic life, a life that lacks reflection. In the context of the song, this also means giving in to one’s dark side, to one’s sorrows and anguish. Leaving his audience with this image in mind, the singer returns to the beginning: now it is time to drink the wine. Only now do the full implications of the song’s refrain “Dark is life, is death” (Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod) become fully clear: it is impossible to think of life without death; human suffering is but a reminder of death’s continual presence in life.
In the end, “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” is very much centered on the question of what the Orient is about. Is it a place of sensual indulgence or of reflection on life’s suffering? This song’s answer is, to some extent, that the Orient is both: suffering is nothing but the reverse side of a life that seeks pleasure. From the beginning onward, the joyous atmosphere of the song sounds “strained and out of control,” an effect that Mahler also achieves by having the tenor sing almost beyond his range.107 It is significant that the Orient is depicted in the song as a space without metaphysical consolation: suffering is quite decisively not part of some kind of learning process. The world not only of “Das Trinklied” but also of Das Lied von der Erde in general could be called Schopenhauerian, in that it categorically rejects any form of Christian elevation of pain and suffering. In the end the second perspective, that of art as a medium for reflecting on human suffering, dominates. It is not merely the acknowledgement of human suffering as part of “Oriental wisdom,” but also the component of reflection, of working through this experience, that sets the Orientalism of Das Lied von der Erde apart from that of Strauss’s Salome.
Like the first song, the cycle’s second song, “Der Einsame im Herbst” (The Lonely Man in Autumn), has a first-person narrator. While Bethge’s version has a female narrator, Mahler changes her into a male.108 This allows the audience to assume that we are dealing with the narrator of the preceding song. But while the first song shows the narrator in a social context, the second song thematizes isolation and loneliness. In atmosphere and imagery, the song picks up on the last stanza of the preceding song. Nature is dark and cold; the lotus flowers have withered. This song also reflects on the role of the artist, albeit very indirectly. Contemplating the dreary landscape, the narrator feels as if “an artist has sprinkled dust of jade / over the delicate blossoms” (ein Künstler habe Staub von Jade / über die feinen Blüten ausgestreut). Art, in other words, is perceived not as reconciling humans with their mortality — as the first song’s program suggested, if one is inclined to read a program into that song — but rather as adding to the gloominess of life. The line “Now take the wine!” (Jetzt nehmt den Wein!), although accompanied by an ascending melody, sounds “tired and drained,” in Mitchell’s words (SSLD, 204). Only sleep can relieve the narrating subject from its state of mind, although the use of the word “resting place” (Ruhestätte) in this context, already present in Bethge’s version of the poem, should make us skeptical; it is often used in the sense of a “final resting place.” It is not sleep but death that the narrator desires. While scholarship (not very convincingly, in my opinion) has attempted to read a perpetually returning seasonal progression into the Lied von der Erde (SSLD, 252),109 in the second poem, “Autumn” functions explicitly as a metaphor for a state of the human mind: “The autumn in my heart lasts too long” (Der Herbst in meinem Herze währt zu lange). It makes “Der Einsame im Herbst” into a poem about aging, and prepares the way for the third and fourth songs, with their reflections on youth as reminiscences of earlier times. The narrator of the second song does not believe that love will ever return.
To a greater extent than Mahler’s earlier song cycles, Das Lied von der Erde focuses on friendship rather than love as a basis for human association. The cycle’s third song, “Von der Jugend” (Of Youth),110 depicts an idyllic scene of friends meeting. The song’s title is by Mahler and resembles the short chapter titles in Nietzsche’s “Orientalist” text Also sprach Zarathustra.111 The youthful scene it depicts is of a group of young men assembled in a pavilion in the middle of a pond, drinking and talking, with some of them writing poetry. Their image and that of their surroundings is mirrored in the pond. The work of art is doubly thematized in this song. When the mirror image is first introduced, in the fifth stanza, the music slows down radically, only to return to the original tempo soon thereafter. Could this be an expression of the desire to stop time?112 In any case, the image of the friends writing poetry as part of their get-together suggests a concept of art that emphasizes its social functions or sees art as a logical extension of being in society (rather than being separate from society as in “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde”). Beyond that, the song suggests the possibility of a mimetic ideal of art, visualized in the idyllic scene of the friends’ meeting being mirrored — “reflected” in a literal sense — in the pond. Nothing in the song is ambivalent; nothing destroys the idyll, except for our knowledge that the mirror image in the water can only be a temporary one. The song is a play on form rather than meaning; Arthur Wenk has suggested that by repeating part of the first three stanzas in the song’s second half, the text suggests the shape of an arch, one of the song’s major images.113 The song suggests an ideal of art for art’s sake114 that we also found in the Rückert song “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” and projects this ideal onto the Orient.115
“Von der Schönheit” (Of Beauty),116 the cycle’s fourth song, is to be read in tandem with “Von der Jugend” and depicts a similarly idyllic scene: young girls picking flowers on the bank of a river or lake. Again the song is about friendship, this time friendship between women. And here, too, we find a mirroring scene: the light of the sun117 behind the girls mirrors their figures and their eyes in the water in front of them. Suddenly, however, this idyllic scene is disturbed: a group of young men appears on wild horses, trampling the flowers. Now it is the image of the young men on horseback that is reflected in the water before they leave. One could say that the appearance of the boys has endangered the girls’ friendship. The song’s focus of attention is no longer the group of girls but only the most beautiful girl among them. Her eyes longingly follow one of the departing boys (instead of focusing on her own figure in the water as she had done earlier in the poem). An element of sexuality has broken into the idyll: “plaintively” (klagend) the girl’s heart longs for the lost love object. In his additions to Bethge’s text, Mahler emphasized the text’s physical and erotic elements.118 Interestingly, one critic notes that the music of this song at times appears to allude to Strauss’s Salome.119
“Von der Schönheit” is followed by another drinking song “Der Trunkene im Frühling” (The Drunkard in Spring).120 The first-person narrator who was absent in the third and fourth songs returns in the first stanza of this song and has not changed his philosophy: “I drink until I can drink no more, / all day long!” (Ich trinke, bis ich nicht mehr kann, / den ganzen lieben Tag!). The song’s first line, “If life is but a dream” (Wenn nur ein Traum das Leben ist), is a clear reference, I would argue, to the idyllic “dream-like” sequences of the previous two songs. This also explains the absence of the first-person narrator in these songs. “Von der Jugend” and “Von der Schönheit” function as tableaux, imaginary scenarios, images of desire, playing out in the mind of the narrator, but without his participating in them. The narrator in “Der Trunkene im Frühling” seeks to hold onto the lighthearted, happy atmosphere of the previous two poems. The song’s orchestration is marked, however, as was the first movement, by a juxtaposition of “ascending and descending motion” (SSLD, 313). The search for happiness is marred by the insight that the earlier tableaux are just figments of his imagination; that is why he seeks drink and sleep (as in the first and second songs). The point is clear: the imaginary scenarios of songs 3 and 4 could have functioned as parts of a learning process, but in reality they do not. Neither does nature. Spring, already alluded to in the first drinking song in one of the changes Mahler made to Bethge’s text,121 finally arrives. Here too, however, the text cautions against finding in nature a metaphysical foundation for life or, more modestly, a medium of consolation. Nature offers no solace or, in the words of the narrator: “What do I care about spring?” (Was geht mich denn der Frühling an?), although there may be food for thought in the fact that the music slows down radically when spring is first mentioned (SSLD, 322). Interestingly, this song also thematizes art, in the image in the fifth stanza of the drunkard singing until the moon comes up. Art does not have the communal or social function suggested in “Von der Jugend”; it is nothing but the drunken ruminations of someone who is uninterested in communicating with anyone. Art here, as in the second song, is strongly associated with existential loneliness.
Movements 2 through 5 of Das Lied von der Erde develop out of the tension formulated in the very first song: that between the desire to find happiness and the realization that suffering is an integral part of life. This basic dilemma underlying the cycle is linked to the question of what the West can learn from the Orient, and Das Lied von der Erde’s answer to that question is decisively heterophonic. The five songs discussed so far offer a variety of perspectives on the Orient. Death and suffering are omnipresent from the cycle’s very first song on. Mahler chooses some highly idealizing images of the Orient in songs 3 and 4; while these songs emphasize the pursuit of happiness, they are far from the exuberant sexuality in Richard Strauss’s Salome. What is remarkable, particularly in the context of Mahler’s other song cycles, is Das Lied von der Erde’s clear privileging of friendship over love or sexuality, especially in songs three and four; sexual desire threatens the idyll of friendship (“Von der Schönheit”). Friendship is also a major topic in the final song. Another aspect that sets these songs apart from Strauss’s Salome is their thematic heterophony: their questioning of ideas, their fundamental hesitation to give a single answer or privilege a single ideology. The East in Das Lied von der Erde is not monolithic but a highly diverse entity.
If the song cycle were to provide anything akin to a conclusive answer, it would have to be found in the last song, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), a song that is equal in length to all of the other songs of Das Lied von der Erde combined and is distinctly different in its musical structure — it is much more loosely organized than the preceding movements (SSLD, 341, 344–45, and 383) — and narrative. Mahler based the text of his final song on two poems from Bethge’s collection: “In Erwartung des Freundes” (In Expectation of a Friend) by Meng Haoran (also known as Mong Kao Yen, 689/691?–740) and “Der Abschied des Freundes” (Goodbye of a Friend) by Wang Wei (701–61), found in Bethge’s volume on pages that face each other (18 and 19). While Mahler treats both poems as a single unit — together they provide the text for “Der Abschied” — they are separated in the song by a large orchestral interlude and thus are clearly recognizable as separate sections. What is remarkable here, in comparison to the cycle’s other songs with a first-person narrator (songs 1, 2, and 5), is that the narrative has changed mood entirely: the narrator is sober and contemplative. The exuberant Orient is abandoned and yields to something more reflective. The first section of “Der Abschied” describes nature at dawn: sunset in the mountains, the moon over a lake, a breeze, pine trees, a brook, flowers, and so on — indeed, as Adorno notes, a somewhat clichéd image of the Orient, resembling the Dolomites, where Mahler was staying when composing Das Lied von der Erde (MP, 291; MPE, 149). The poem, however, also reflects not only on the impact that these images have on the narrator but on his need for such images as well: “All desire now longs to dream” (Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen). The sentence originates from Mahler and is at no point implied by Bethge or his sources, and it of course establishes a relationship with the beginning of the previous song. Here, too, we find a work-immanent poetics, poetry-about-poetry; Mahler thinks through the imagery he uses far more consciously than is often assumed.
The narrator longs for sleep — reminiscent, of course, of “Der Einsame im Herbst” with its evocation of the (final) “resting place” (Ruhestätte). But it is the desire to see his friend that keeps him from giving in to sleep and dreams. This is the second time that the narrative “I” is mentioned explicitly in this context: “I stand here and wait for my friend” (Ich stehe hier und harre meines Freundes). The protagonist walks back and forth and is overcome by beauty, love, and life. The term used in this context, “trunken,” is interesting. Here it should be translated as “intoxicated,” but its literal meaning is “drunk”; it establishes a (weak) link to songs 1, 2, and 5 as a sort of reminiscence or afterthought of earlier exuberance. These final three stanzas of the first section, together with a major orchestral interlude, function as a transition to the song’s second section.
While Mahler made considerable changes to Bethge’s texts in general, at the beginning of the second section he does something that would strike even a superficial reader or listener as inconsistent. Rather than continuing the poem’s narrative from a first-person perspective, as in Bethge’s original, Mahler consciously changes to a third-person narrative, as the beginning of the second section makes clear: “He dismounted from the horse and gave him / a farewell drink” (Er stieg vom Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk / des Abschieds dar; my italics). This third-person narrative on the farewell between two friends, in turn, gives way to a dialogue between the two friends that reintroduces two first-person narratives. This shifting between first- and third-person narrative perspectives could be interpreted as a shift between a statement of the speaking subject’s direct articulation of his feelings and a search for a different style, in which the narrator produces images but functions only as an outside observer. It reproduces something we found earlier in Das Lied von der Erde: the interruption of songs with a first-person narrator (1, 2, and 5) by songs offering more distanced imaginary scenarios in the form of tableaux that do without a first-person narrator (songs 3 and 4). Instead of seeing this as an inconsistency, Mahler’s decision to change the narrative perspective of the last song is clearly an intentional manipulation of the cycle’s narrative structure. What follows after section 1 is a tableau or imaginary scenario, consisting in part of a dialogue between the two friends that never took place. The poem gives at least an implied reason for this: the friend is not coming, as is clear from the words of the narrator toward the end of the first section. “Where are you lingering? You are leaving me alone for a long time!” (Wo bleibst du? Du läßt mich lang allein!). The suggestion is that the narrator sings a song; at the end of the first poem we find him pacing back and forth (another sign of the friend not arriving) with his lute. The narrator imagines a farewell, which we assume to be imaginary.
In stylistic terms, these last four stanzas are highly elliptical. It is as if language is leaving the narrator at the moment of his demise. One sign of this elliptical style is the trouble we have in assigning different personae to the pronouns used in the poem, although doing so is certainly not impossible.122 The event that can be articulated only through imagination is the experience of death as something deeply contradictory (incidentally, the music at the end of “Der Abschied” is among the most heterophonic that Mahler ever composed). The two friends stand for different aspects of the song’s protagonist. “Death” is imagined through the image of the friend giving the farewell drink, speaking about the mountains — not unlike the “heights” in “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” and the mountains of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust — to which he will travel, and about his seeking rest for his “lonely heart” (einsam Herz). “Death” is imagined as an irrevocable separation between human beings, as a trip to other places from which one will not return. It is precisely this image of the friend leaving for other places that allows the narrator to go home in the knowledge that his time will also (soon) come: “My heart is quiet and waits for its hour” (Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde). The imagery used comes close to suggesting peace and resignation. Death is imagined as a form of homecoming, not unlike “In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus,” and as a return to a sleeplike form of existence, to one’s place (Stätte), reminiscent, of course, of the “resting place” (Ruhestätte) in “Der Einsame im Herbst.” What we see here is the difference between death as a promise of a life elsewhere — evoking associations with Christianity and the West,123 although the text and music here remain firmly embedded in the Orient — and a view of death as a purely immanent event, accepted but not celebrated,124 that was projected onto the Orient, at least within the Schopenhauerian framework in which Mahler was working.
Das Lied von der Erde is about the existential loneliness of human beings when facing death; the fundamental inability to imagine what is happening within the dying person; and the need or desire to invent images in order to make the process understandable. In the last stanza we find the narrator imagining the earth blooming again in spring and the eternally blue horizon (behind which we assume his friend has disappeared), a clear reference to the blue sky of the cycle’s first song, with the protagonist mumbling “forever . . . forever” (ewig . . . ewig). The nature imagery undoubtedly has positive connotations, but how does it relate to the dying protagonist? This is not the first time in Mahler’s work that a narrative becomes fragmented, its syntactic structure breaks down, and a gradual dissolution of the narrative frame takes place (for example, in the final lines of “Die zwei blauen Augen,” the final song of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; see chapter 2). The breakdown simulates the moment of dying as if the narrator were falling asleep; the narrative dissolution dramatizes the inadequacy of language to describe what is going on. It is highly significant that the final stanza of “Der Abschied” does not consist of material taken from Bethge’s collection but was written by Mahler himself and evokes associations with poetry that Mahler wrote himself much earlier. The lines
The dear earth blossoms everywhere in spring
and turns green again
[Die liebe Erde überall blüht auf im Lenz
und grünt auf’s Neu]
show at least some similarity to
the spring has come
and flowers blossom everywhere
[der Lenz gezogen
und Blumen blühn ja überall]
from the poem “Vergessene Liebe” (Forgotten Love) that Mahler wrote in 1880.125 Of course references to spring in nature poetry are not uncommon, but what counts here is that spring fulfills very similar functions in both texts. Moreover, this is not the only instance in the text of “Der Abschied” where Mahler revisits his own poetry. Earlier in “Der Abschied” Mahler quoted from an untitled poem he wrote for the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen cycle in 1884 but never used (see chapter 2 for a discussion of this poem in the context of that cycle). The following lines in “Der Abschied”
the tired people go home,
to learn anew in sleep forgotten happiness
and youth!
[die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts,
um im Schlaf vergeß’nes Glück
und Jugend neu zu lernen!]
resemble the lines
And tired people close their eyelids
in their sleep, to learn anew forgotten happiness
[Und müde Menschen schließen ihre Lider
Im Schlaf, auf’s neu vergessnes Glück zu lernen]
from the 1884 Gesellen poem.126 At the very end of Das Lied von der Erde, the last of Mahler’s compositions for which he used text, it is not merely spring that returns. Mahler also revisits his own beginnings as a composer: the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the closely related First Symphony. One can take these lines as another instance of work-immanent poetics: the need to produce (dream-like) images, images of nature and past happiness, in the face of death. Mahler is telling us something here about the roots of his creativity. At the same time, by placing these lines in a new context, he is also rewriting and reinterpreting his own work. Precisely the ability to produce alternative visions is a red thread throughout Mahler’s oeuvre.
The question then remains as to what exactly the word “ewig” and the references to spring and nature blossoming again in Das Lied von der Erde’s final stanza mean. “Ewig” can mean “in eternity,” suggesting something like the “eternal life” after death — a suggestion so self-evident to some scholars that they do not even feel they have to discuss alternatives to it. Scholars have speculated that Mahler is embracing a vision of “divine nature,” in which human essence would live on — a vision supposedly inspired by the works of Fechner.127 “Ewig,” however, can also mean something like “forever,” in the sense of a perpetually returning process. The term “ewig” in fin-de-siècle Vienna would certainly have evoked associations with Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same” (ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen), one of the key concepts in Also sprach Zarathustra and in Nietzsche’s philosophy in general; the concept also stands at the heart of Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics (see chapter 3). For Nietzsche it represents the autonomy of nature: the perpetual recurrence of natural phenomena, independent of and indifferent to any human action or need for transcendence.
Perhaps it is the ambiguous nature of the term “ewig” that prompted Mahler to use it in the final lines of Das Lied von der Erde. The term lives off the tension between the desire to find something eternal beyond the here and now and the realization that it is precisely life on earth that will carry on perpetually. “Ewig” in the context of the end of Das Lied von der Erde is expressive of the protagonist’s effort to accept the fact that life goes on without him. In spite of its religious etymology, it does not in any way contain a promise that anything like a divine order or ongoing spiritual essence of nature exists.128 The song’s final stanza refers to a renewal of life (spring), but it leaves entirely unresolved the issue of how this is meaningful for the main character, particularly since in the previous movement, “Der Trunkene im Frühling,” spring had left him indifferent. Das Lied von der Erde, as do many of Mahler’s other compositions, ends with a question rather than an answer. Ultimately, the question is what these images and this music mean to the listener, what emotions and thoughts s/he associates with them.
A primary characteristic of Mahler’s view of the Orient is an insight into the body’s primacy over the mind — echoing the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and fin-de-siècle Viennese culture in general — combined with a strong need to contemplate human dependency on the corporeal. Das Lied von der Erde is very much the product of a reflection on human dependence on the body, but this reflection is an inquisitive one. If the song cycle provides any answer to the question of how to make sense of human mortality, the answer itself is full of ambiguities. One could call this Mahler’s acknowledgement that in matters of life and death humankind will always be searching for answers, and no answer is definitive. Das Lied von der Erde tells many stories. It constructs the Orient in many different ways. Mahler’s vision of the Orient is a highly heterophonic and dialogic one. In it, as we have seen, the “ability to doubt” has an unequivocally positive connotation. In the end, it is a vision that seeks to incorporate diversity rather than to exclude and discard it. This is in line with Goethe’s thinking in the West-östlicher Divan and very different from the model proposed by Friedrich Schlegel in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier.
In Mahler’s late works, such as the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, pre-Nietzschean thinkers such as Goethe and Schopenhauer function as points of reference, and the influence of Nietzsche is much less visible than was the case, for instance, in the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies. And yet the persistence of the body, along with the profound skepticism toward metaphysics also seen in these late works, has something very Nietzschean about it. While Mahler’s intellectual interests had certainly moved beyond Nietzsche at this point in his life, I do not believe that he had discarded Nietzsche’s cultural and philosophical diagnosis; he still held to his insight that humankind was living after the death of God, in an eternal return of the same, and that any kind of future ethical theory or practice would need to take this insight into account. The fact that Mahler returns to Nietzsche at the end of Das Lied von der Erde is of more than symbolic significance in this context.
Musically speaking, Mahler strongly emphasized the Oriental nature of Das Lied von der Erde. In addition to the pentatonism and heterophony that had already characterized the Rückert songs and the Kindertotenlieder, the lack of a bass function in the traditional sense and the fact that the tenor has to sing in an exceptionally high register can be said to contribute to an Oriental atmosphere.129 Mahler also uses specific instruments (bass drum, cymbals, harps, glockenspiel, piccolo, tamtam, and triangle) to create an Oriental impression.130 In general, the very noticeable presence of woodwinds adds to the Oriental impression (the oboe, which plays such a prominent role in “Der Abschied,” is also used prominently by Richard Strauss at the beginning of the very Oriental “Dance of the Seven Veils” of Salome). It is clear that in Das Lied von der Erde the Orient serves as a model for reflecting cultural otherness, albeit in a thoroughly German-Austrian context. Text is very much a part of this Orientalism. In what is a definite attempt to boost his own creativity, Mahler was interested in creating fundamentally new perspectives on things, even though he simultaneously makes it abundantly clear (quite intentionally in my opinion) that similarities exist between Das Lied and his earlier works. The Oriental character of Das Lied von der Erde, however, raises the question of which models of cultural diversity were available in German cultural history when Mahler sat down in the summer of 1908 to create this work of art.
One of these models was Goethe’s idea of a “world literature” (Weltliteratur). Late in life, Goethe developed this concept in order to find a formula for some of the ideas first expressed in the notes accompanying the West-östlicher Divan. One of the most succinct descriptions of the idea of a “world literature” can be found in a letter from Goethe to Thomas Carlyle dated 20 July 1827:
A truly general tolerance will be reached most certainly if one leaves intact what is unique about individual people and nations while simultaneously maintaining the conviction that what deserves true merit distinguishes itself by the fact that it belongs to all of humankind. Germans have contributed to such a mediation and reciprocal recognition for a long time. A person who understands and studies German finds himself in a marketplace where all nations offer their goods; he acts as the interpreter while he enriches himself.
[Eine wahrhaft allgemeine Duldung wird am sichersten erreicht, wenn man das Besondere der einzelnen Menschen und Völkerschaften auf sich beruhen läßt, bey der Überzeugung jedoch festhält, daß das wahrhaft Verdienstliche sich dadurch auszeichnet, daß es der ganzen Menschheit angehört. Zu einer solchen Vermittlung und wechselseitigen Anerkennung tragen die Deutschen seit langer Zeit schon bey. Wer die deutsche Sprache versteht und studirt befindet sich auf dem Markte wo alle Nationen ihre Waren anbieten, er spielt den Dolmetscher indem er sich selbst bereichert.]131
The concept of “world literature” is often mentioned in relation to Rückert’s writings.132 In many respects these writings represent the epitome of what Goethe had in mind, with the added benefit of of Rückert’s knowledge of many Oriental languages — a knowledge that Goethe did not possess. The idea underlying Goethe’s idea of “world literature,” in line with Herder’s ideas discussed in chapter 2, is, on the one hand, that through studying the literature of other nations one gets to know and respect their ideas and values, their culture.133 True tolerance means respecting what is unique about other peoples and their cultures. On the other hand, however, in spite of the great differences between cultural traditions, there is also something in them that belongs to “all of mankind” (der ganzen Menschheit). Literatures from very different traditions appeal to ideas or emotions that are common to all of humanity. In the Rückert adaptations, Das Lied von der Erde, and in the Goethean second movement of the Eighth Symphony, Mahler seeks this commonality in alterity. This is not unlike Rückert himself, one of whose goals was to show that the great human emotions are the same everywhere.134 The idea that certain emotions can be similar throughout space and time is — quite intentionally, I would argue — also what motivates Mahler’s borrowing from his own early poetry in the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde.
Today, the “inauthenticity” of the “Oriental” texts with which Mahler was working, noted by Adorno, may strike us as problematic. The idea of a “marketplace” (Markt) of ideas may appear to us outdated and naively optimistic. And despite the truly cosmopolitan intentions informing these ideas, one should not overlook a certain German nationalism resonating in these statements. By letting German intellectuals and the German language play a privileged role in the process of mediating world literature, Goethe, through the back door, reintroduces an element of German patriotism, if not nationalism — something we encountered in Mahler’s high school essay discussed at the beginning of this chapter, which is clearly informed by Goethe’s ideas of a “world literature.” And yet Goethe’s narcissistic privileging of German culture (and European culture135) is perhaps less important than the message that his deliberations contain about cultures in general: we should conceive of cultures as being open toward each other rather than closed; borders between cultures are permeable, and there is something to be learned from a dialogue between cultures. There is a polemical impetus behind these ideas that may hold some validity today as well. On the one hand, the awareness that we are always dealing with our own constructions when looking at other cultures; on the other hand, that it is not only what differentiates humans that counts, but also what they have in common. Ultimately the question is whether it is possible to experience what we perceive as different as a potential in ourselves as well.