I am deeply fascinated by musical ideas which manage to develop a polyphony of different formations of meaning — ideas that do not reject the possibility of dealing with specific and concrete instrumental gestures which then set up a whole range of distant echoes and memories, allowing us to establish a dialogue of specific presences and absences: a musical space inhabited by the significant presence of absences and by the echo of absent presences. (Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future)
The image of Mahler that has emerged from this study is neither that of a nostalgic modernist nor that of a neoromanticist. Mahler was not melancholically looking backward in the sense that he longed to reinstate traditions presumably lost or mourned values associated with earlier times — an image that was in part created by Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter, but that, in a far more sophisticated way, also underlies Adorno’s ideas about Mahler. What is sometimes called Mahler’s “eclecticism” — a term I am not entirely comfortable with, because it has associations with a passive borrowing and an implied lack of creativity, while Mahler’s music is also highly original when it refers to tradition — is one aspect of Mahler’s work that is far closer to the aesthetic strategies of the avant-garde version of modernism, which considered all of the means that cultural history had in stock as potential tools (see “Introduction”), than to the nostalgic modernism of some of Mahler’s contemporaries. Mahler chose to use traditions selectively and in a critical way, and in doing so showed that German cultural history was far more diverse than the nationalistic mobilization of German cultural heritage that occurred around 1900 would suggest. It is important to realize that he did not simply mimic the cultural and literary preferences of his time but rather made determined and conscious choices. In doing so, he reconstructed German cultural history in ways very different from those of the composers before him in whose tradition he worked (Wagner, Bruckner) as well as those of his contemporaries (Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss).
To some extent Mahler viewed cultural history, as did many of his contemporaries, as a conversation between great men — a conversation in which he himself would participate. Accordingly, he was very interested in positioning his own creative works within cultural tradition, musical and otherwise. This may partially account for his privileging of earlier writers and thinkers over his contemporaries. And yet despite this approach to the German cultural canon, Mahler’s use of text is emancipatory and critical of ideological investments. Initially, this critical agenda manifests itself in Mahler’s insistence on a notion of crisis that does not allow for easy resolution. The First Symphony can be read as a critique of the Bildungsroman and, more broadly, of notions of Bildung that the nineteenth-century German middle class sought to read into its literary and cultural history. Similarly, in his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Wunderhorn songs Mahler takes apart notions of the “Volk” that were beginning to play an increasingly important role in nationalistic politics. The Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies seek to keep alive the radical, modern impulse of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics — his sense that Western culture is in a crisis to which there are no easy solutions — not only in contrast to the reactionary modernism of the later Wagner, but also in reaction to the kitsch industry developing around Nietzsche. Later Mahler actively searches for alternative readings of German culture. In the Seventh Symphony Rembrandt stands for an alternative way to look at German cultural history, one that focuses on the marginal and repressed. The Eighth Symphony searches for a sense of community that is tolerant toward alterity and historical difference, while arguing that human emotions shape a form of commonality among different cultures. Mahler’s most radical attempt to deal with different cultures and their views and value systems is his Rückert adaptations (including the Kindertotenlieder) and Das Lied von der Erde. It is very much a dialogic perspective on cultural difference that Mahler promotes, but the dialogue focuses both on difference and on what humans have in common. Again, emotions play a key role.
The writers and thinkers who interested Mahler represented a way of engaging with German cultural history that was deeply critical toward normative ambitions. They were, in their way, radical thinkers. It is because of their texts and the way they were situated in the cultural contexts of their time that we can understand Mahler’s radical side as well — despite his skepticism toward text. Texts were of great importance to him, in spite of their fallibility and inability to provide final answers.
One of the most interesting musical responses to Mahler’s oeuvre is Sinfonia (1968/69) by Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925–2003), the third movement of which is based on the scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony but augmented by a plethora of heterophonic textual and musical references. The musical references include Schoenberg’s Fünf Orchesterstücke, Debussy’s La Mer, Hindemith’s Kammermusik, Berg’s Violin Concerto, Ravel’s La Valse and Daphnis et Chloé, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Agon, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, and Boulez’s Pli selon pli, along with numerous references to Mahler’s symphonies. The textual references are to Beckett’s L’innommable (The Unnamable) — a clear reference to Mahler’s distrust of programs — one of Berio’s own essays, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Valéry’s Le cimetière marin (The Marine Cemetery).1 Berio added also texts specifically designed for Sinfonia. While the quotations that Berio used were not entirely random, his choice was limited to the materials he had brought with him on vacation in Sicily, where he composed the piece, and to what was available in the Catania Public Library.2 In addition to being a highly original piece of music on its own, Sinfonia’s third movement also offers us a way of looking at Mahler. If one follows Berio’s lead, the problem with Mahler’s music is not that text is a fallible and imperfect medium for expressing thoughts (and emotions), but rather that there is not enough text and there are not enough musical references in it to do justice to its complexity. By making both more complex — that is, by adding more text and more quotations from Western musical history rather than questioning the value of both — we come to a closer approximation of what Mahler’s music has to tell its audiences.
For Berio, what I described in my “Introduction” as the problem of Mahler’s anti-programmatic programs is a predicament facing musical history in general. According to Berio, Western musical history since Boethius (475/480?–524/526?) has conceived of music as having a cognitive function, as a means or instrument of knowledge, rather than as being solely a medium of pleasure.3 The problem is, however, that when we think of cognition we think of language; it is very hard to conceive of forms of knowledge that cannot be captured, one way or another, in language. According to Berio, we feel a need to translate music (31). But music does not work this way. Any effort to get to the cognitive essence of a piece of music through language is doomed to fail or to be, at the very least, incomplete; eventually such attempts will be confronted with “an elusive elsewhere” or an “empty space” not accessible through textual analysis (51 and 137). And yet Berio is by no means ready to give up on language or text as a means for understanding music. For him the key is that the functioning of language and text offers a model for understanding how music and its cognitive contents affect its listeners. He is interested in “open forms” of art;4 this openness is the result of the many “intertextual” references that a work of art contains. According to Berio, “great works invariably subsume an incalculable number of other texts, not always identifiable on the surface — a multitude of sources, quotations, and more or less hidden precursors that have been assimilated, not always on a conscious level, by the author himself” (126). It is only through reconstructing implicit or explicit references that we can get to the layers of meaning that a musical piece can have, without necessarily arriving at any final conclusions about it. It is with this context in mind that I understand Berio’s statement that analyzing a work of art is an invitation to “renew our perception of history, maybe to re-invent it” (45). The third movement of Sinfonia is constructed according to this principle and, as such, represents the best possible analysis of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony (40), without however, one might add, damaging its “unnamable” core.
The idea of the existence of such forms of cognition that are not language-bound as Berio posits plays a important role in Martha Nussbaum’s deliberations on Mahler. Her work unquestionably figures among the most interesting examples of Mahler scholarship published in recent years. In her study Upheavals of Thought Nussbaum is interested in music because it is an example of “forms of cognitive/intentional activity, embodying ideas of salience and urgency, that are not linguistic.”5 The cognitive content of music, for Nussbaum, is linked to the fact that it expresses emotions. It should immediately be added that it is not a simplistic view of emotions as a momentary state of our psychic life that Mahler is after. Rather, the main thesis of Nussbaum’s book is that emotions are “forms of evaluative judgment that ascribe to certain things and persons outside a person’s own control great importance for the person’s own flourishing” (22). Emotions are, in other words, about much more than feelings: they are experiences that tell us something about our values, about what we think is important or not, about intuitions of a better life, whether we are conscious of this or not. For Nussbaum, too, text does not necessarily stand in the way of understanding such experiences as long as we realize that their essence cannot be captured by language (265).
The idea that emotions are of crucial importance to humans’ functioning as social beings, for their sense of value, is very much in line with the readings I have developed in the preceding chapters. In particular, the final movements of Mahler’s Second, Third, and Eighth Symphonies are reflections on the value of emotions for human life. Here Mahler comes close to saying that, by paying attention to our emotions, we not only learn something about our values but also experience an intuition that an ethical life is possible in this world. By reflecting on the value of emotions, these symphonies indirectly meditate on their own impact and importance as works of art. But where the nexus is less obvious or explicit, emotions appear to play a key role for understanding Mahler’s music as well. Text can help us to understand how complex, perhaps even paradoxical, emotions can be. From a literary/cultural historical perspective, the Trauermarsch of the First Symphony is one of the most intensively thought-out pieces of music that Mahler composed. At the core of the images and texts that Mahler evoked to explain this movement is precisely its emotional ambiguity: it is sad and mournful, and yet at the same time an expression of the joy of life (along with the many emotions falling between these two poles). It is thanks to the piece’s multi-layered intertextual references that we understand the music’s many dimensions. A similar observation can be made about the final movement of the Fourth Symphony, the conclusion of Das Lied von der Erde, “Der Abschied,” and many other pieces in which multiple layers of emotions seem to be determinative for the music’s cognitive content.
For Berio, text is closely connected to the avant-garde side of Mahler’s work, which he finds fascinating. Text and the mode of cognition to which it alludes are very much part of this fascination, even though in the end they teach us to live with a certain openness, an “elusive elsewhere.” Both Berio and Nussbaum are interested in text in their analyses of Mahler, not because it can give final answers but because it can provide us with an intuition of what is at stake and how complex and ambiguous this music is. But what does this multiplicity and ambiguity mean in the context of modernist cultural discourse in Vienna around 1900?
If Mahler’s Jewishness is part of his current fascination for us, as Leon Botstein suggested (see “Introduction”), then we need to ask how Mahler’s work and its reception history relate to the authoritarian regimes that paved the way for the Third Reich and the Holocaust.6 This may seem a simple or perhaps even superfluous question, but it is not. When we think of Mahler and the Third Reich, we tend to think of performances of Mahler’s music by Jewish orchestras in Berlin in early 19417 or in Amsterdam during the German occupation8 — events to which only Jews were admitted. These were highly symbolic happenings that could be interpreted as (desperate) attempts to hold onto the viability of a European-Jewish cultural tradition under the direst of circumstances. Leonard Bernstein’s efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce Viennese audiences to a “new” Mahler could be considered critical attempts at revitalizing this tradition. In a sense, Bernstein was attempting to bring back the “old,” more authentic Mahler through a performance practice reflecting the musical and cultural diversity of Vienna around 1900, as opposed to the rather homogenous cultural landscape of Austria after the Second World War.
If there exists something like a counterpoint to Bernstein’s efforts, it must be the attempts to make Mahler into a national icon during the authoritarian regime that ruled Austria from 1934 and 1938, a period known today as “Austrofascism” — a little-known chapter in the history of Mahler’s reception. In contrast to Germany, where Jewish music was forbidden and Jewish musicians could no longer perform (except under exceptional circumstances), and despite the anti-Semitic undertones of the new Austrian regime,9 Mahler became a figure that this regime promoted,10 in part to consolidate an independent cultural identity but also to foster the image that Austria (unlike Germany) was an open-minded, tolerant, and liberal country.11 This was possible because of the close friendship among Alma Mahler, Bruno Walter, and Kurt Schuschnigg,12 the new chancellor of the deeply Catholic, autocratic, anti-parliamentarian Austrofascist regime that envisioned a state modeled after Mussolini’s Italy. Efforts were undertaken to erect a monument to Mahler at the Grinzingerplatz;13 they failed, mostly because Alma had a falling-out with the sculptor, Fritz Wotruba.14 On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mahler’s death in 1936, Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic performed the Second and Eighth Symphonies (Mahler’s most affirmative works), as well as Die Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and Das Lied von der Erde.15 This was followed later by performances of the Fifth Symphony (in late 1937) and finally the Ninth in January 1938, also conducted by Walter, weeks before the Nazis invaded Austria (a recording of this last performance is extant). In his efforts to make Mahler acceptable to the new regime and new audience, Walter filed away the music’s sharp edges and aimed for an interpretation that showed the similarities between Mahler and the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition.16 In his autobiography, Theme and Variations, first published in 1946, Walter describes Schuschnigg in exceptionally positive terms as someone whose “quiet, serious, firm personality made a deeply sympathetic and powerful impression” on him (317; see also 319). While recognizing the regime’s “authoritarian constitution,” the Schuschnigg government “proved friendly to the world of the spirit and tried to further Austria’s cultural mission,” something that was especially clear, according to Walter, in the flourishing of the Salzburger Festspiele.17 Alma Mahler is reported, by her daughter, to have occasionally worn a swastika on her coat collar during this period, even though she was not a member of the NSDAP.18
To be sure, both Bruno Walter and Alma Mahler later rethought their political alliances of the Austrofascist period. But the question raised by this rather unfortunate episode in Mahler’s reception history is whether something in his music catered to this kind of affirmative ideological (ab)use, or whether using Mahler’s music for legitimizing an authoritarian regime was a fundamental misunderstanding of what his music is about, of the critical intentions that were meant to resist this kind of appropriation.
The answer to this question is that, to some extent, both statements are true. Of course, as someone writing in the early twenty-first century I would like to affirm that there indeed is an element of resistance in Mahler that immunizes his music, once and for all, against its uncritical, affirmative mobilization for anti-humanitarian purposes. To some extent, the problem sketched out here is not specific to Mahler’s music alone but encompasses music in general. Because music is the most abstract (and the most German) of the arts, it may appear defenseless against ideological abuse. The problem I have attempted to describe here is also a problem of modernism in general. Neither the Nietzschean vocabulary of cultural decline and renewal,19 which Mahler and his circle utilized, and which is so important for understanding Vienna modernism, nor the modernist concept of culture underlying his work, which emphasized autonomy and followed a broader pattern in German culture by conceiving of it as substitute for political action (see “Introduction”), was necessarily immune from appropriation by authoritarian regimes. But the problem is also specific to Mahler’s work. There is a fundamental ambiguity underlying Mahler’s musical and literary language. The religious imagery used at the end of the Second and Eighth symphonies, the symphonies Walter performed with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1936, may have appeared to many audience members to fit in neatly with the new regime’s Catholic identity. But in order to do so it had to be taken at face value, while what the music and texts of these symphonies actually did was to deconstruct the imagery and traditions that they quoted. What, then, in Mahler’s work resists its ideological abuse?
The critical dimension of Mahler’s work has something to do with his Jewishness; and it is precisely in order to identify the critical dimension in Mahler’s compositions that we need to look at them from this perspective. One does find, in Mahler’s works, traces of a discourse that sought to link together Jewishness, the Enlightenment, and modernity.20 I would argue against reading Mahler and his work as examples of the attempt to assimilate into German culture that has often been associated with this discourse: Mahler’s investment was not in adapting to German cultural standards, not in acculturation, but rather in reinventing the German cultural tradition differently. As I said at the outset of this chapter, he made determined and conscious choices that were different from those of his contemporaries. And he was invested in a modern way of looking at the world, in humans’ ability to invent their own norms and values, rather than their need to rely on others for those norms and values. Mahler was interested in what Michael P. Steinberg has called “the emancipatory potential of the modern,” in “interrogating past absolutes, by making the marginal central.”21 The thinkers who dominate Mahler’s thought have in common that they propagated a clearly modern view of life, in the sense that they did not believe in an authoritative tradition and believed in human autonomy as a means of establishing one’s own norms and leading an ethical life. Mahler, in other words, sought to keep modernity’s critical potential alive, rooted in its secularism, without buying into its pressure to conform.
Mahler’s readings of German cultural history focus on those moments when this tradition turns critical and self-reflective. This explains his insistence on the notion of crisis seen throughout his work. While the notion of crisis is a genuine aspect of fin-de-siècle Vienna modernism (see “Introduction”) — and perhaps, even more broadly, of late nineteenth-century German culture in general — many of his generation interpreted this notion in very different ways. Some of his contemporaries tended to resolve it with a nostalgia for times past, but not Mahler. His insistence on a notion of crisis that cannot be easily resolved is, in my view, to be understood as a response to Wagner. It involved uneasiness with the normative and political ambitions underlying Wagner’s later works, particularly Parsifal. This discomfort was at the time most prominently articulated by Nietzsche. Mahler appropriated Wagner in that he picked up on some of the issues that had been brought into German cultural discourse by Wagner, but simultaneously he sought, with Nietzsche’s help, to be smarter than Wagner. And more importantly, through his readings he wanted to show that German cultural history was on his side rather than Wagner’s. Wagner’s theoretical writings formulated a strictly normative framework stipulating specifically what Jewish composers could and could not do. Mahler countered such a framework by continually reinventing himself, taking the greatest possible liberty with German musical and cultural history, and ultimately by showing that he could do whatever he wanted to do.
A third critical aspect of Mahler’s works, especially his later works, is their emphasis on difference and diversity, on the need of his music to be heterophonic, to tell many different stories. Karen Painter has pointed out that the polemics surrounding Mahler’s music (and, to some extent, that of Schoenberg and Richard Strauss as well) in the first decade of the twentieth century were not about harmonics (atonality and dissonance) — Adorno’s model! — but rather about counterpoint and polyphony.22 Within this debate, Mahler chose a radical position: his technique of orchestration aimed for a “maximum independence of lines” (203), a proliferation of thematic and melodic material. This is a highly interesting observation for several reasons: First, it helps us understand how Mahler’s music, in its insistence on heterophony, was perceived as radical within the musicological and journalistic discourses of fin-de-siècle Vienna. As Painter reports, within anti-Semitic discourse during the latter period, this kind of heterophony was associated with the stereotype of the assimilated Jew (202 and 207) who could not master pure (German) counterpoint. Second, Painter’s observation also enables a different way of looking at musical history. If we look at Mahler from the perspective of a history of music focused on increasingly complex harmonic configurations (Adorno’s model), Mahler lags behind in comparison to some of his contemporaries. But if we look at musical history as a movement toward increasingly heterogeneous melodic patterns and narratives, not only do we have the tools for describing the complex nature of Mahler’s music but we can also reconceive the relationship of Mahler’s oeuvre to the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky,23 for instance, who in their respective ways also aimed for more diverse narratives. In early-twentieth-century music, there is a link between the musical heterophony Mahler was interested in and the textual dimension of his music. In the so-called Jews’ Quintet from Strauss’s Salome, which, as Painter observes, seems to have served as a matrix for stereotypes about Jewish heterophony (202), the music’s heterophony is mimicked by a highly polyphonic proliferation of text and an inability to come to consensus. Here too, text helps to illustrate what music is about.
While I have argued that there is a link between Mahler’s Jewishness and the critical ambitions of his music in fin-de-siècle Vienna, this does not mean that there is an automatic connection between modernist or avant-gardist art and Jewishness.24 In fact, Jewish artists made many different choices, as the examples of Mahler, Schoenberg, Schreker, and Zemlinsky show. But did the critical ambitions of Mahler’s music matter? One could point out that, even for Mahler himself, it was not at all clear that the critical paradigm he proposed was going to work. As we saw in our readings of the later Wunderhorn songs (chapter 2) and of the Seventh Symphony (chapter 4), Mahler was often highly skeptical in his reflections about the use, functioning, and value of art — a skepticism he shared with many of his modernist contemporaries. Such reservations should not, however, keep us from looking for a critical or radical gesture in his music. Even Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist regime sought to use Mahler, as I have explained above, to showcase its independence and cosmopolitanism in comparison to Nazi Germany; it sought, in other words, to capitalize on the critical dimension associated with Mahler’s name.
In this book I have argued that the cultural choices that Mahler made were clearly connected to his Jewish heritage. He did not wish to assimilate into German culture but rather sought to assert his own voice and to construct German cultural history in ways that diverged from the mainstream and that were indisputably at odds with the nationalistic and anti-Semitic cultural critics among his contemporaries. Rather than speaking of “assimilation” or “acculturation”25 when characterizing Mahler’s ties to German culture, it would therefore be more accurate to speak of Mahler’s “reading” of German cultural history. It is important to realize that he was not primarily interested in a genealogical reconstruction of Jewish contributions to “German” cultural history, even though some of his findings may have ended up doing exactly that. He did, however, pay a price for his rereading of German musical and cultural history. Many of the polemics surrounding his works seem to have their roots in his highly individual way of reading German culture, which nationalistic, conservative, or anti-Semitic critics deemed inappropriate. Furthermore, the occasional presence of masochistic imagery in Mahler’s texts (for instance in the novel Titan, so important for the First Symphony, in the song “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,” and in the Faust excerpt in the second movement of the Eighth) may be indicative of the fact that Mahler’s relationship to German culture on some level was more conflict-ridden than a more superficial reading would suggest.26
The attitude that Mahler proposes toward one’s own culture and the cultures of others could be more precisely described as a specific modality — a mode of dealing with texts, cultures, and the history within and underlying them. Part of the ethics underpinning Mahler’s work as a composer is to engage with absolutely everything, canonical or otherwise, but also to pay attention to elements of heterogeneity and crisis in cultural material. Mahler’s point is that such a dialogue should not concern merely our rational faculties but our emotions as well. It is through our affect that we learn about our values and investments. But what is the cultural meaning of the heterogeneity in Mahler’s music today? This is one of the issues that Berio alludes to when he reminds his readers that “heterogeneity and pluralism have to translate themselves into processes and ideas, not into forms and manners” (30). Mahler teaches us to read differently. It is part of Mahler’s aesthetics that it accepts no final answers. The relation between language and music becomes a metaphor for humankind’s metaphysical homelessness, for its longing to find something that makes sense, a stable relation between the two and its inability to do so — or at least to find any final answers. But this metaphysical homelessness is also an opportunity.
While the ability to read differently, to discover heterogeneity and diversity, is constitutive of Mahler’s music, it is not necessarily its final answer. When engaging rationally and emotionally with the diversity in our own cultural history or that of others, we may actually find that the investments of others appeal to us more than those of what we perceive to be our own culture. We may find commonality rather than alterity, along the lines of Goethe’s concept of “world literature” (see chapter 6), but only after we have gone through the process of rethinking our investments, of trying to conceive of ourselves differently. Music can function this way because different cognitive dimensions work together in it. Music, as Mahler saw it, is designed as an interaction between narrative or text on the one hand and a sensual experience that appeals to our emotions and the values, intuitions, and priorities we associate with them on the other. Reading cultural history while listening to music is both a creative and a critical endeavor, even though it may be a fragile form of resistance against the totalitarian, homogenizing powers at work in society then and now. Rather than conceiving of Mahler’s relationship to past cultural traditions as that of an “untimely modernism,” emphasizing that Mahler’s “conservative worldview”27 may be relevant for us today, I see Mahler’s attitude toward cultural history as a form of “remembering the future” — the title of Berio’s lecture series and a formula that offers the most concise summary of his views on the contemporary relevance of cultural history.28 It is Mahler’s consistent sense of crisis, his need to bring to the surface what has been left out, and the interest in heterogeneity and otherness seen in his readings of literary and cultural history that may be anticipatory of future thinking and are very much part of his relevance today (and far from conservative).
Today Mahler is part of the canon, no doubt as he wanted to be. Canonicity, however, never stopped him from taking apart and rethinking the past. And perhaps it is precisely in his complex model of engaging with the past — our past and that of others — that his legacy is most clear to us. It is the hope of finding a secular approach to (cultural) history that seeks to learn from the problematic moments (crises) in that history, accepts living in a chaotic world, but is simultaneously interested in rethinking that history and discovering not only diversity but commonality. Ultimately this is a vision that has also political relevance.29 To approach Mahler as he himself approached cultural history means paying attention to moments of crisis in his music and to the music’s heterogeneity. It means looking for those instants in his music that are ironic or humorous, but also for moments that are uncomfortable, uncanny, disruptive, or heterophonic. It entails finding a performance practice that articulates and reflects on those moments, and one that therefore may still challenge our ideas about him and his time. However, if we take his model seriously, we should also dare to move beyond him and construct new contexts for his work that may include fin-de-siècle Vienna — the names Korngold (Erich Wolfgang), Křenek, Rathaus, Schreker, Ullmann, Wellesz, and Zemlinsky come to mind — but may also go much further than that and seek a global sense of how culture and identity can be thought and experienced together. We need to break open our view of musical and cultural history, and open our minds to those traditions that have been discarded or are ignored. It is not simply that Mahler’s music is among the most complex and engaging in existence; his views on text and culture allow us, in Berio’s words (29), to look at cultural history, our own and that of others, as being “inhabited by the significant presence of absences and by the echo of absent presences.”