Notes

Introduction

1 See Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002).

2 Leon Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ, and London: Princeton UP, 2002), 1–53; here 14.

3 Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” 6.

4 See in this context Walter’s introduction to the 1957 edition of Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1957), in which he states that Mahler’s work “with all its boldness nevertheless belongs to the healthy period that developed under the influence of our great classical music, and even in our ailing present maintains its vitality” (“mit all seinen Kühnheiten doch der gesunden Epoche angehört, die sich unter dem Einfluß unserer großen klassischen Musik entwickelt hat, noch im kranken Heute seine Lebenskraft bewährt”; 10). All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. See also Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, esp. 85–87. Regarding the “authenticity” of Walter’s approach to Mahler, see K. Kropfinger’s comparison of Walter’s performances of the Fourth Symphony with those of Willem Mengelberg in “Gerettete Herausforderung: Mahlers 4. Symphonie — Mengelbergs Interpretation,” in Mahler-Interpretation: Aspekte zum Werk und Wirken von Gustav Mahler, ed. R. Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1985), 111–75; here 173–75. Kropfinger argues that the great liberties Meng­elberg takes with the score and the greater contrasts in his performance of the Fourth, in particular regarding tempo and dynamics, may be more authentic (that is, similar to Mahler’s own performance practice) than Walter’s balanced, classical reading. This is confirmed by Scheit and Svoboda’s analysis of a review from 1934 that compared the two conductors’ approaches to that same symphony (Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 82–84).

5 See, for example, Constantin Floros, Die geistige Welt Gustav Mahlers in syste­matischer Darstellung, vol. 1 of Gustav Mahler, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1987), 122–25.

6 Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” 3.

7 See Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870—1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 263–307; here 263.

8 Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions,” 278.

9 A collection of quotations from Mahler about musical programs can be found in Floros, Die geistige Welt, 19–20 and 22–24. I do not share Floros’s view that Mahler changed his ideas in 1900, but rather believe that Mahler was ambivalent about programs throughout his career.

10 Bruno Walter, letter to Ludwig Schiedermair, 6 Dec. 1901, in Briefe, 1894–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1969), 48. Further references to this work are given in the text using page numbers alone.

11 See Morten Solvik, “The Literary and Philosophical Worlds of Gustav Mahler,” 27, in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 21–34.

12 See Jens Malte Fischer, “Gustav Mahler und das ‘Judentum in der Musik,’”Merkur 51 (1997): 665–80; here 668. Adorno is of course aware of this anti-Semitic cliché and refers to it in his essay “Mahler heute” (Gesammelte Werke 18:226–34; here 226).

13 See Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” 20–33. For a similar problematization of Adorno’s concept of culture, see Marc Weiner, “Hans Pfitzner and the Anxiety of Nostalgic Modernism,” in Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950, ed. Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žagar (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 17–28; here 27.

14 Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna: E. P. Tal, 1922), 25; In English, “Alfred Roller” (excerpt), in Mahler Remembered, ed. Norman Lebrecht (New York and London: Norton, 1988), 149–65; here 163–64; see also Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” 21.

15 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 262.

16 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics, 262. The following summary is based primarily on Adorno’s overview of musical development in Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 55–63.

17 Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” 19; see also 3.

18 See, for instance, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 60–61. Richard Leppert speaks in this context of a “progressive core in Wagner.” “Commentary,” 538, in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002).

19 This observation is made by Dieter Borchmeyer, in his book Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2002), 14–15.

20 Adorno, “Zu einem Streitgespräch über Mahler,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 18:244–50; here 247.

21 See for instance Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 17–25, in Gesammelte Schriften 13:7–148, in particular his discussion of Wagner’s relationship with the conductor Hermann Levi.

22 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), “Introduction,” xxvii. For a discussion and critique of the ways in which Schorske’s views shaped scholarship on fin-de-siècle Vienna, see Steven Beller’s introduction to Rethinking Vienna, 1900, ed. Steven Beller (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 1–25.

23 See Steven Beller, Rethinking Vienna, in particular Beller’s introduction, 1–25, and Allan Janik’s “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems,” 27–56.

24 See for instance chapter 3, “Politics in a New Key,” in Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 116–80.

25 Ernst Křenek, “Gustav Mahler,” in Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, trans. James Galston (New York: Greystone, 1941), 155–220; here 159.

26 See for instance Hans Rudolf Vaget’s response to Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1992), in “Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose: Merkwürd’ger Fall!” German Quarterly 66 (1993): 222–36. For a counterperspective, see Marc Weiner, “Über Wagner sprechen: Ideologie und Methodenstreit,” in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, ed. Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Beck, 2000), 342–62.

27 See in this context also Paul Reitter’s criticism of “backshadowing” in the discourse on Jewish self-hatred: “The Jewish Self-Hatred Octopus,” German Quarterly 82.3 (2009): 356–72; here 359.

28 See Charles Maier, “Mahler’s Theater: The Performative and the Political in Central Europe, 1890–1910,” in Painter, Mahler and his World, 55–85; here 71–72.

29 This is argued by David J. Levin in Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2007), 44 (see also fn. 17). For a detailed discussion of the Tristan production of 1903 see Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2006), 165–70.

30 See for instance his letter of 29 June 1896: “Unfortunately I have to go to Bayreuth again this year. (I received again a letter from Cosima, in which she declares that she expects to see me there)” (Ich muß heuer leider nach Bayreuth [Ich habe wieder einen Brief von Cosima bekommen, in dem sie die Erwartung ausspricht, mich dort zu sehen]). Gustav Mahler, “Mein lieber Trotzkopf, meine süße Mohnblume”: Briefe an Anna von Mildenburg (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2006), 133; see also 112 and 231.

31 Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 672.

32 See Richard Wagner, “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” 97–98, in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1911]), 42–178; in English, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Aston Ellis (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993), 69–213; here 127–28. See also Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2003), 160.

33 See Jens Malte Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 87; see also Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (1958; repr., Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), 249, fn. 35.

34 See Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NJ, and New York: Doubleday, 1973), 33; and Jens Malte Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 88.

35 Jens Malte Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 88.

36 See Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hugo Wolf: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Henschel, 2003), 106 and 126.

37 Fischer-Dieskau, Hugo Wolf, 124–25.

38 Fischer-Dieskau, Hugo Wolf, 126; de La Grange, 1:72.

39 In a recent essay Leon Botstein has shown that Jewish responses to Wagner’s work and its anti-Semitic agenda were highly diverse in fin-de-siècle Vienna. See “German Jews and Wagner,” in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009), 151–97; here 162–77. Interestingly, Botstein’s essay also proves that there was a lively debate about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in Vienna around 1900.

40 See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 139: “[Mausch­eln] is the use of altered syntax and bits of Hebrew vocabulary and a specific pattern of gestures to represent the spoken language of the Jews. What is stressed is the specifically ‘Jewish’ intonation, the mode of articulation as well as the semantic context.” Mahler’s remarks also confirm Gilman’s insight that “Mauscheln was a quality of language and discourse that Jews perceived as a major problem in their true and total acceptance within the German community” (141).

41 On Mime as a personification of anti-Semitic stereotypes, see Marc Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE, and London: Nebraska UP, 1997), 144–45 and 169–72.

42 Siegfried Lipiner, quoted in Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Fragmente: Gelerntes und Gelebtes (Vienna: Rudolf Lechner & Sohn, 1907), 235.

43 See Donald Mitchell’s list of Mahler’s early works, which includes a fairy-tale opera Rübezahl and an opera project with the title Die Argonauten; texts for these projects may have existed, but the assumption is that very little of the actual music was composed (Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, 116–20). On the question as to why Mahler did not write operas, see also Křenek, “Gustav Mahler,” 177–78.

44 Barbara Jelavich, Modern Austria: Empire & Republic, 1800–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 87. See also Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 155–57.

45 For a detailed discussion of the importance of the Enlightenment’s legacy for Jewish emancipation in Vienna around 1900 see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867—1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 122–43. Concerning the highly ambiguous feelings of many Jews regarding the ideal of assimilation, see also Ritchie Robertson, The “Jewish Queston” in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 233–378.

46 Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 147–48.

47 Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 155–62.

48 See, for example, William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1974), 12–13, 53–54, and 69.

49 McGrath, Dionysian Art, 89.

50 This argument has been made by Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, xxvi; Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867—1938, 156 and 158; and Maier, “Mahler’s Theater,” 68.

51 McGrath, Dionysian Art, 208.

52 Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 162. Charles Maier points out that, at the time, “not all nationalist trends appeared menacing. Cultural nationalism and ethnic diversity could appear as progressive forces . . . nonetheless, such nationalism with a human face or incipient multiculturalism remained a precarious and vulnerable stance” (“Mahler’s Theater,” 68).

53 Alma Mahler reports that on 1 May 1905 Mahler ran into a workers’ demonstration and enthusiastically joined them. See Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 104–5; see also McGrath, Dionysian Art, 243–44).

54 See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1996), in particular “Pre-Weimar Origins,” 19–21; quote from 20.

55 Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler, 25; Mahler Remembered, 163.

56 See the detailed reconstruction of the many anti-Semitic incidents surrounding Mahler’s tenure as director of the Court Opera in volumes 2 and 3 of Henry Louis de La Grange’s biography on Mahler.

57 Talia Pecker Berio, “Mahler’s Jewish Parable,” in Painter, Mahler and His World, 87–110; here 89.

58 See Botstein, “Sozialgeschichte und die Politik des Ästhetischen: Juden und Musik in Wien, 1870–1938,” in quasi una fantasia: Juden und die Musikstadt Wien, ed. Leon Botstein and Werner Hanak (Vienna: Wolke, 2003), 43–63; here 49–50.

59 Patrizia C. McBride, “Introduction: The Future’s Past — Modernism, Critique, and the Political,” in McBride, McCormick, and Žagar, Legacies of Modernism, 1–13; here 6. For an approach that understands Vienna modernism as centered around the notion of “crisis,” see Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Norris (New York: Continuum, 1993), esp. 30–45.

60 Křenek, “Gustav Mahler,” 193 and 219. The following quotes are from 193. The reference to the avant-garde is cryptic and yet highly relevant, since it can be found in the last paragraph of Křenek’s essay and therefore can be seen as (part of) the essay’s conclusion.

61 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 23. In English, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, forew. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 18.

62 See Hermann Bahr, “Das junge Oesterreich,” in Studien zur Kritik der Mo­derne (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1894), 73–96; here 75.

63 Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 28–29; Theory of the Avant’Garde, 22–23.

64 See the DVD with the excerpts from Bernstein’s Vienna rehearsals of the first movement of Mahler’s Fifth (Leonard Bernstein, Mahler Rehearsals: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 9; Das Lied von der Erde. DVD. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 2005), in particular 1:29–34:35; see also Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 248–57.

65 See, for an exemplary illustration of this point, Bernstein’s analysis of the Trauermarsch (third movement) of the First Symphony in his video essay The Little Drummer Boy: An Essay on Gustav Mahler (DVD. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 2007), 6:42–12:42. Philip V. Bohlman has recently argued that Jewishness was an integral part of popular music in Vienna around 1900; the identification of specific Jewish elements in Mahler’s music, however, suggests specific borders between traditions where these did not exist and presupposes therefore a model of tradition that does not adequately describe cultural realities. See Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 184.

66 Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006), 9.

67 See Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture, 15–16, 23, 27, 39–41, and 54.

68 See Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, 260–62.

69 See Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, 157. It is unlikely that this is true, even though there exists a version of Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” that is earlier than the one Beethoven decided to use and is considerably more political (see Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, 47). From Bernstein’s program notes for the performance, it is clear that he was aware of the nineteenth-century controversy (Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, 261–62).

70 For a critical discussion of the political meanings of this concert, see James Schmidt, “’Not these Sounds’: Beethoven at Mauthausen,” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 146–63, esp. 147–48, 153, and 156; and Josef Haslinger, “Klasse Burschen,” in Klasse Burschen: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001), 27–36.

Chapter 1

1 See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005), 157–59.

2 Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1957), 102–3; In English, Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, trans. James Galston (New York: Greystone, 1941), 137–38.

3 Bruno Walter, letter to Ludwig Schiedermaier, 6 Dec. 1901, in Bruno Walter, Briefe, 1894–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1969), 51. Bauer-Lechner’s remarks above are based on a letter she wrote on 16 Nov. 1900 at Mahler’s request to the critic Ludwig Karpath. A little more than a year later Walter wrote his letter, also on behalf of Mahler, directly contradicting Bauer-Lechner!

4 Mahler’s statement was recorded by Robert Holtzmann in 1918 (quoted in Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 226).

5 A concise overview of the nineteenth-century history of the Bildungsroman can be found in Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (Columbia SC: Camden House, 1993), 15–30. Kontje discusses the gendered agenda associated with the genre (17 and 27). Regarding the Bildungsroman as a genre focused on love and work, see Friedrich A. Kittler, “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters,” in Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 13–24; here 14–15.

6 This translation is proposed by W. H. Bruford in his classic study The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (London and New York: Cambridge UP, 1975). Bruford in particular highlights the term’s association with Germanness (see for instance his introduction, vii–x). For a chronological overview of the development of the concept “Bildung” in German intellectual history, see Ursula Franke, “Bildung/Erziehung, ästhetische,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, ed. Karlheinz Barck, vol. 1 (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 696–727.

7 Peter Sprengel, “Einleitung,” lxix, in Jean Paul im Urteil seiner Kritiker: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Jean Pauls in Deutschland, ed. Peter Sprengel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), xv–xcii.

8 Sprengel, “Einleitung,” lxix.

9 See Gert Ueding, Jean Paul (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 50.

10 The similarities between the biographies of Jean Paul and Mahler have been noted by Jost Hermand in his chapter “Deutsch-jüdische Zerrissenheit: Gustav Mahlers I. Symphonie,” in Judentum und deutsche Kultur: Beispiele einer schmerz­haften Symbiose (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 71–84; here 75. More recent biographical research has shown that the conditions in Mahler’s parental home were less severe than is usually assumed and that the family was actually somewhat well-off; see Jonathan Carr, Mahler: A Biography (Woodstock, NY and New York: Overlook, 1998), 10–11; and Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 30–31.

11 For an example of Jean Paul’s strategy of turning a negative experience into something positive, see his discussion of the hunger he suffered during childhood in his autobiographical text Selbsterlebensbeschreibung, in Werke, vol. 6, 4th ed., ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1987), 1037–1103; here 1044; see also Ue­ding, Jean Paul, 11–22.

12 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 14.

13 See Jürgen Fohrmann, “Jean Pauls ‘Titan’: Eine Lektüre,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 20 (1985): 7–32; here 9.

14 See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Blick auf Jean Paul,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 434–37; here 434. Herta Blaukopf argues that Jean Paul experienced a renaissance in Vienna around 1880, but she produces very little evidence to support her claim. Blaukopf, “Jean Paul, die erste Symphonie und Dostojewski,” in Gustav Mahler: Werk und Wirken, ed. Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Vienna: Vom Pasqualatihaus, 1996), 35–42; here 35.

15 Goethe’s poem “Der Chinese in Rom” can be found in Goethes Werke, vol. 1, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 206. See also Sprengel, “Einleitung,” xxx–xxxiii; and Hendrik Birus, “Der ‘Orientale’ Jean Paul: Versuch über Goethes ‘Vergleichung,’” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 20 (1985): 103–26; here 108–10.

16 See Sprengel, “Einleitung,” xxxii–xxxiii. Goethe’s characterization of Jean Paul can be found in the annotations to his West-östlicher Divan, in Werke, vol. 2, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 184–86.

17 Birus, “Der ‘Orientale’ Jean Paul,” 113.

18 See Peter Sprengel, “Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Jean Pauls ‘Titan,’ Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 17 (1982): 11–30; here 20.

19 Jean Paul, Titan, in Werke, vol. 3, 6th ed., ed. Norbert Miller (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1999). Further references to this work are given in the text using the page number alone.

20 The third edition of Eucharius Ferdinand Christian Oertel’s Gemeinnütziges Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verteutschung der im gemeinen Leben vorkommenden fremden Ausdrükke . . . (Ansbach: Gassertsche Buchhandlung, 1816) defines “Schnurrer”/“Schnurrjude” as a Jewish beggar (2:783). The Jewish Encyclopedia defines the “Schnorrer” as a Jewish beggar having some pretensions to respectability; examples given are someone collecting money to provide a dowry for his daughter or someone who needs money in order to reestablish himself after his house has been burned down “in a general conflagration.” See http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=344&letter=S&search=schnorrer (accessed 26 Oct. 2009).

21 The most prominent among them is of course Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose drama Nathan der Weise, with its emphasis on tolerance, is a homage to his friend the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In Titan, Moses Mendelssohn is also respectfully mentioned once (299).

22 See Jean Paul, Selbsterlebensbeschreibung, 1090–91, and Richard Otto Spazier, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter: Ein biographischer Commentar zu dessen Werken, 5 vols. (Leipzig: C. Brüggemann & O. Wigand, 1833), 1:93, and 99–100.

23 Spazier, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 3:195–98; see also Ueding, Jean Paul, 85.

24 For example, in his letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 8 Sept. 1803, in Die Briefe Jean Pauls, vol. 4, ed. Eduard Berend (Munich: Georg Müller, 1926), 263–66; here 264. Jutta Schönberg makes Jean Paul’s statement the point of departure for her analysis of Titan, which seeks to reflect the text’s heterogeneity and the conflicts and tension in Jean Paul’s conceptualization of subjectivity. See Schönberg, Anti-Titan: Subjektgenese und Subjektkritik bei Jean Paul im psychokulturellen Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 10 and 11, esp. fn. 2.

25 While many nineteenth-century critics sought to read normative ideals into the genre, more critical views emphasizing “irony” were by no means absent (e.g., Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, 11, 16, and 29–30).

26 Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, “Verführung durch Phantasie,”Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 26/27 (1991/92): 92–107; here 98.

27 Wuthenow, “Verführung durch Phantasie,” 94.

28 See also Fohrmann, “Jean Pauls ‘Titan,’” 17.

29 See Ralf Berhorst, Anamorphosen der Zeit: Jean Pauls Romanästhetik und Geschichtsphilosophie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002), 314.

30 For a concise overview of Freud’s theory of masochism, see Michael C. Finke, “Introduction,” in One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, ed. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 1–13; here 5–10.

31 Bruno Walter, Theme and Variations: An Autobiography, trans. James A. Galston (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1966), 105. See also Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2001), 28.

32 This thought is expressed by Lipiner when he states: “We have the experience of nature; the old generation had nature.” (“Wir haben Naturgefühl, die Alten aber hatten die Natur.”) Lipiner, quoted in Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Fragmente: Gelerntes und Gelebtes (Vienna: Rudolf Lechner & Sohn, 1907), 157.

33 Berhorst, Anamorphosen der Zeit, 334.

34 Berhorst, Anamorphosen der Zeit, 344–45.

35 Fohrmann, “Jean Pauls ‘Titan,’” 9.

36 See Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt, 82; Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, 105: “He does not illustrate in sound that which he had experienced — that would be ‘program music.’ But the mood of his soul, engendered by memory and present feeling, produces themes and influences the general direction of their development without, however, introducing itself forcibly into the musical issue. In that manner, a compact composition is born which, at the same time, is an avowal of the soul.” (Er schildert nicht etwa Erlebtes in Tönen — das wäre Programmusik; aber die Stimmung seiner Seele, von Erinne­rung und gegenwärtigem Gefühl hervorgerufen, produziert Themen, wirkt auf die Gesamtrichtung ihrer musikalichen Entwicklung ein, ohne sich jemals in den musikalischen Ablauf gewaltsam einzuschalten, und so entsteht eine geschlossene Komposition, die zugleich Seelenbekenntnis ist.)

37 Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 158.

38 See Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies (Pompton Plains, NJ, and Cambridge: Amadeus, 2000), 36.

39 See Jean Paul, Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs, in Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, vol. 2 (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1999), 7–576.

40 See Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 28.

41 See Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, “Vorrede,” in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, in E. T. A. Hoffmanns sämtliche Werke; Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Carl Georg von Maassen, 2nd ed. (Munich and Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1912), 3–9.

42 Jost Hermand assumes that the notes accompanying Walter’s last recording of Mahler’s First Symphony refer specifically to the thirty-second book of Titan (see Judentum und deutsche Kultur, 78); I agree, even though there is no specific reference to Jean Paul’s novel in Walter’s text. See “Bruno Walter on Mahler’s Symphony No. 1”; essay accompanying Walter’s last recording of the First Symphony: Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D (“The Titan”), Bruno Walter/Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Columbia Masterworks 1962, Stereo LP MS 6394.

43 See Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni [score], 225–31, in Sämtliche Werke: Neue Ausgabe, 2:17 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1968).

44 See Francien Markx, Der Kritiker als Magier: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Musikerzählungen im Kontext der Allgemeinen Musikalischen Zeitung (PhD diss., U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003), 116–17.

45 Susanne Vill links this expression to Dante’s Divina Commedia, with which it is often associated, even though it is not used in Dante’s text itself. Vill, Vermitt­lungsformen verbalisierter und musikalischer Inhalte in der Musik Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing, Germany: Hans Schneider, 1979), 213.

46 Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 48.

47 Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt, 82; Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay, 105.

48 For the biographical information discussed here about Mahler’s relationship with Marion von Weber and its relevance to the First Symphony, see Jonathan Carr, Mahler: A Biography, 44–47, and Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute, 207–9.

49 Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe, 137–38; Memories and Letters, 110–11.

50 Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Werke, vol. 9 (Munich: Beck, 1982), 587.

51 Willem Mengelberg in a letter to his wife, Dresden, 10 Jul. 1907, in Gustav Mahler und Holland: Briefe, ed. Eduard Reeser (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1980), 90. The Dutch original of this letter is printed in E. Bysterus Heemskerk, Over Willem Mengelberg (Amsterdam: Heuff, 1971), 55–57.

52 For an analysis that views Jean Paul’s Titan as critical of the tradition of the Bildungsroman, see Jürgen Jacobs and Markus Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 129, and 137–38.

53 Jacobs and Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, 143 and 149.

54 Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, 31–32, and 35.

55 See Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, 16th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 272–73. Regarding Dilthey’s importance for the nineteenth-century history of the term, see Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, 27–30.

56 For two contrasting perspectives, which both, however, incorporate elements critical of the tradition of Bildung, see Kontje, The German Bildungsroman, 77–79, and Jacobs and Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, 99–102.

57 See Umberto Eco’s classic study of the open work of art, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989).

58 See also Donald Mitchell, who argues that Jean Paul’s “handling of his materials” and the “nature of his imagery” are the main connection between novel and symphony (Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 227).

59 Alphons Diepenbrock, letter to Johanna Jongkindt, 17 Oct. 1909. Diepenbrock, Brieven en Documenten, ed. Eduard Reeser (’s-Gravenhage, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 152–57, quote 155; see also Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland, 32.

60 In my view this is a decisively modernist feature of Mahler’s aesthetics, and one that also differentiates his music from Wagner’s: “One could say that in [Wagner’s] works there is a mode of address, a kind of voice speaking to the audience that brooks no discussion and refuses to recognize the autonomy of the listening subject.” Marc A. Weiner, “Primal Sounds,” Opera Quarterly 23.2/3 (2007): 217–46; here 217.

61 The original German versions of both programs were taken from Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NJ, and New York: Doubleday, 1973), 747–48. All translations are mine.

Chapter 2

1 See Renate Stark-Voit, “‘Bild — Symbol — Klang’: Zu Gustav Mahlers Wunderhorn-Vertonungen,” in Mahler-Gespräche: Rezeptionsfragen — literarischer Horizont — musikalische Darstellung, ed. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002), 118–43; here 120.

2 Stark-Voit, “‘Bild — Symbol — Klang,’”120.

3 See Ludwig Achim von Arnim, “Von Volksliedern,” in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, ed. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 377–414.

4 Johann Gottfried Herder, Volkslieder, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Weigandsche Buchhandlung, 1778/79).

5 Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 39, 40.

6 See Philip V. Bohlman, “Landscape — Region — Nation — Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2002), 105–27.

7 See Reinhart Koselleck, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 141–431; here 316.

8 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 347.

9 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 575.

10 This explains Herder’s interest in Germany as a “cultural nation” (Kulturnation), that is, a nation unified through its cultural production. See Bernd Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist; Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 200. This concept would prove to be highly influential for German intellectuals’ self-perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

11 Koselleck, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” 317–18.

12 See Alexander von Bormann, “Volk als Idee: Zur Semiotisierung des Volksbegriffs,” in Volk — Nation — Europa: Zur Romantisierung und Entromantisie­rung politischer Begriffe, ed. Alexander von Bormann (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), 35–56; here 52.

13 Von Arnim, “Von Volksliedern,” 381 and 384. Page numbers in the following paragraphs refer to this volume of this edition.

14 For a discussion of the roots of the Völkische Bewegung in nineteenth-century culture, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), for example, 139–40, and 175. Supporters of the Völkische Bewegung believed in the “Volk” not as a concrete but as an abstract category: a “mystical entity above, apart from, and outside social class or political party.” George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970), 117. When looking at Mahler’s folk songs, it is advisable to remember that although it was predominantly after the First World War that the Völkische Bewegung gained popularity, its roots were in the late nineteenth century even though at that time its political ambitions may not have been recognized as such.

15 See Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2002), 143.

16 Richard Wagner, “Was ist Deutsch?” 46, 49, in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10, 36–54; here 46, 49. English version: “What is German” 161, 164, in Art and Politics (Lincoln/London: Nebraska UP, 1995), 149–69; here 161, 164 (translation modified).

17 With that characterization he refers to the central concepts of his book, namely the division between Apollonian and Dionysian forms of art. Apollonian art, according to Nietzsche, is rational and individual; it is associated with light, and it seeks higher truth and calm wisdom. Dionysian art, in contrast, is irrational and orgiastic; it is associated with the body, the abandonment of individuality, and the goal of repairing the bond between mankind and nature (see SW 1:25–30; BT, 14–19).

18 Jens Malte Fischer has pointed to Baumbach’s text as one of the possible sources of inspiration for Mahler’s cycle (Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute, 217).

19 See Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years, 119–22; Mahler refers to the importance of this relationship for his songs in his letter to Friedrich Löhr of 1 January 1885 (Br, 57). The assumption is that he wrote the texts shortly before the letter. Two of the poems are dated 15 and 19 Dec. 1884; the songs were probably orchestrated in 1892. See de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NJ, and New York: Doubleday, 1973), 741–42.

20 While “Geselle” has historically assumed many different meanings, the element of travel has been important from the term’s origins onward; the word originally referred to someone who traveled as part of the entourage of a nobleman (it was also used in a military sense, as we will see below). For the etymological history of “Geselle,” see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 5 (Munich: DTV, 1991), 4025–37.

21 The song is based on an untitled poem in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. See Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 119–21. See Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler 1:743 for a detailed comparison of the two texts.

22 Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 124.

23 A comprehensive bibliography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Wanderliteratur can be found in Wanderzwang — Wanderlust: Formen der Raum- und Sozialerfahrung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühindustrialismus, ed. Wolfgang Albrecht and Hans-Joachim Kertscher (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 239–309.

24 See Andrew Cusack, The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008) 15, 34, and 50.

25 Cusack, The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, 195.

26 See Peter Revers, Mahlers Lieder: Ein musikalischer Werkführer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 61.

27 Revers, Mahlers Lieder, 65.

28 Revers, Mahlers Lieder, 61.

29 See Revers, Mahlers Lieder, 58.

30 See Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen für eine Singstimme mit Orchester [score], 47, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14.1 (Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, and London: Josef Weinberger, 1982).

31 See Jonathan Carr, Mahler: A Biography (Woodstock, NY, and New York: Overlook, 1998), 10, and Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler, Der fremde Vertraute, 30–32.

32 See Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Munich: DTV, 1991), 26:454–55.

33 Ida Dehmel, Diary, cited in Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 117.

34 Martina Vordermayer, Antisemitismus und Judentum bei Clemens Brentano (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999), 135. Other texts in Des Knaben Wunderhorn speak about Jews in more neutral terms (Vordermayer, Antisemitismus, 135–36).

35 For a brief discussion of this text, see my essay “The Romantics and Other Cultures,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 147–61. I do believe that Mahler was aware of the anti-Semitic undertone in Brentano’s work, since he knew Brentano’s Märchen von Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (Fairy Tale of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia); see my discussion of this text in chapter 3.

36 See George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 57. The German reception of the figure of the “wandering Jew” was influenced in particular by a pamphlet dating from 1602. A comprehensive collection of materials on the “wandering Jew” in Western culture can be found in Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds., The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).

37 Mosse, The Image of Man, 57.

38 Mahler, letter to Josef Steiner, 17–19 June 1879, in Br, 32. For a very detailed analysis of this letter, see Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1986), 11–38.

39 See Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 140–43. Before composing these orchestral settings, between 1888 and 1891, Mahler had composed piano versions of a series of nine (different) songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

40 See the two 1905 programs reprinted in Renate Stark-Voit, “Bild — Symbol — Klang: Zu Mahlers Wunderhorn-Vertonungen,” in Mahler-Gespräche, ed. Aspetsberger and Partsch, 118–43; here 122 and 125. Also in this context, see Henry-Louis de La Grange’s question whether the songs constitute a collection or a cycle (De La Grange, Gustav Mahler: vol. 2: Vienna; The Years of Challenge (1897–1904), 731.

41 Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 73, and 150–51.

42 Von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1:182.

43 See Revers, Mahlers Lieder, 83. For Paul Hamburger, the status of the girl is open (“Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” in Mahler Companion, 62–83; here 72), but the last few lines make it clear that the entire song is sung by the sentinel.

44 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1:334–35.

45 Based on von Arnim and Brentano, 1:189–90.

46 Hamburger, “Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” 75.

47 Hamburger, “Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” 75.

48 The original version in von Arnim and Brentano’s collection is much more cynical. We learn that the girl can be had for 1,000 Thaler and the promise never to indulge in wine again or to spend the parental inheritance; that is, the man will have to marry her and be a good husband.

49 There is some folkloric evidence that associates white geese with fertility, as illustrated by the saying: “A white goose breeds well” (Eine weiße Gans brütet gut). Heinrich Lessmann, Der deutsche Volksmund im Licht der Sage (Berlin and Leipzig: Haude & Spenersche Buchhandlung Max Paschke, 1922), 364.

50 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 2:17–18; in the collection the song is entitled “Verspätung” (Delay) and is located immediately before “Urlicht” (18).

51 See Goethe, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1982), 154–55.

52 See de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1, 768 for a discussion of the different designations Mahler used for these songs.

53 See Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1986), 222–23.

54 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 2:39–40. The original title is “Wettstreit des Kukuks mit der Nachtigal” (Contest of the Cuckoo and Nightingale). The fact that the song is Mahler’s response to his critics is reported by Bauer-Lechner, GME, 56 (RGM, 58). An unfinished sketch shows that the song’s original title was “Lob der Kritik” (de La Grange, Mahler 1:778).

55 See Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen, 255–56.

56 Borchmeyer, Ahasvers Wandlungen, 251.

57 See Marc Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, 118–24; for a counterargument, see Borchmeyer, Ahasvers Wandlungen, 255–75. Borchmeyer does not address Weiner’s arguments directly.

58 Von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 2:22–23. The Rhine frequently functions as a symbol of Germany in folk songs (see Bohlmann, “Landscape — Region — Nation — Reich,” 111).

59 This is the (archaic) meaning of the word “grasen” that Mahler’s text uses and also explains the reference to the sickle in the poem. He is not a shepherd, in other words, as has been suggested (Hamburger, “Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” 80).

60 See the final section of my “Introduction” and Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006), in particular chapter 1, “Culture: A Noble Substitute” (9–26), for a brief history of this idea.

61 Von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 3:109.

62 Hamburger, “Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” 81.

63 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1:67–69 and 72. For the dating of these songs, see GME 135 and 193 (RGM, 173) and Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 142.

64 Donald Mitchell, “Mahler’s ‘Kammermusikton,’” in The Mahler Companion, 217–35; here 232.

65 “Gesell” in “Tamboursg’sell” goes back to an older meaning of “Geselle”: someone who is part of an army troop (see note 20 above).

66 On militarism and anti-militarism in the Wunderhorn collection, see Heinz Rölleke, “‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ — eine romantische Liedersammlung: Produktion — Distribution — Rezeption,” in Das “Wunderhorn” und die Heidelberger Romantik: Mündlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit, Performanz, ed. Walter Pape (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 3–19; here 11–12.

67 Eric Hobsbawm: “Mass-Producing Traditions; Europe, 1870—1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 263–307; here 263.

68 See Klaus von See, Freiheit und Gemeinschaft: Völkisch-nationales Denken in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2001), 11–15.

69 Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 1–14; here 7.

70 Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions,” 278; Hobsbawm sees both the less-precise historical references and the importance of the image of an enemy as being characteristics of late-nineteenth-century German Nationalism (278–79; see also 274–75).

71 Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 6.

72 Weissberg, “Introduction,” 15, in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999), 7–26.

73 Weissberg, “Introduction,” 12.

74 Azade Seyhan, Writing outside the Nation (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and Oxford: U of California P, 1992), 15. For a historical overview of the concept of “cultural memory” see Weissberg, “Introduction,” 12–18.

75 For a discussion of the anthropological view of “culture,” see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1999), 98.

76 See Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), 142–44, for a comparison of Mahler’s, Bechstein’s, and the Grimms’ versions. The following summary is based on the original version of the cantata in three parts.

77 See Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 97–107, and also Freiheit und Gemeinschaf, 29–40 and 93–100.

78 Von See, Freiheit und Gemeinschaft, 112 and 130.

79 Mosse, The Image of Man, 133.

80 See Mosse, The Image of Man, 119–32.

81 See Mosse, The Image of Man, 56–76, for a history of the countermodel to existing ideals of masculinity.

82 See my essay “The Romantics and Other Cultures,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 147–61.

Chapter 3

1 See Raymond Furness: Zarathustra’s Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, UK: Camden House, 2000), 3; and Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and Oxford: California UP, 1992), 18–19.

2 See Hillebrand, “Einführung,” in Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur: Texte zur Nietzsche-Rezeption, 1873–1963, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978), 1–55; here 6; see also Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 23.

3 Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 52.

4 For a comprehensive chronological overview of Nietzsche’s impact on Mahler and the many thematic similarities in their thinking, see Eveline Nikkels, “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” Friedrich Nietzsches Bedeutung für Gustav Mahler (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1989).

5 William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1974), 53–54.

6 See Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythology (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 188–89.

7 Frank, Der kommende Gott, 197–98.

8 The fact that this statement is also important to Nietzsche is seen in his repetition of it later in his text (SW 1:152; BT, 113), and also in the new introduction he added in 1886 (SW 1:17; BT, 8).

9 Frank, Der kommende Gott, 194.

10 See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 10.

11 It is interesting to note in this context that the Greek god Dionysos had Oriental origins. It should be no surprise, then, that Nietzsche twice characterizes this view of nature as being close to a Buddhist vision of life (SW 1:116 and 133; BT, 85 and 98). Nietzsche associates Buddhism with a vision of nature that is beyond space, time, and individuality. This Oriental imagery returns in Nietzsche’s later works, most prominently in Also sprach Zarathustra, and also, for instance, in Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (see chapter 6).

12 See Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Nietzsche,” 125–26, in Musik in der deutschen Philosophie: Eine Einführung, ed. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2003), 115–34.

13 See Hillebrand, “Einführung,” 1; Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 104; and Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 32–34.

14 See McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics, 62 and 64; regarding the correspondence between Lipiner and Nietzsche, see 69–71.

15 See Nietzsche, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, section 2, vol. VI 6/2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1980), 737–38. See also William J. McGrath, “Dionysian Art: Crisis and Creativity in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna,” in Nietzsche and the Austrian Culture/Nietzsche und die österreichische Kultur, ed. Jacob Golomb (Vienna: WUV, 2004), 23–41; here 25; and McGrath, “Mahler and the Vienna Nietzsche Society,” in Golomb, Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 218–32; here 220.

16 For a detailed reconstruction of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, see Dieter Borchmeyer and Jörg Salaquarda, “Nachwort: Legende und Wirklichkeit einer epochalen Begegnung,” in Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen einer epo­chalen Begegnung (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1994), 2:1271–1386.

17 See, for example, Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler oder der Zeitgenosse der Zu­kunft, 2nd ed. (Vienna, Munich, and Zurich: Fritz Molden, 1969), 142–43; Constantin Floros, Die geistige Welt Gustav Mahlers in systematischer Darstellung, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1987), 70; and Nike Wagner, “Nietzsche komponieren,” 278 and 281, in Golomb, Nietzsche and the Austrian Culture/Nietzsche und die österreichische Kultur, 271–88.

18 See Siegfried Lipiner, Über die Elemente einer Erneuerung religiöser Ideen in der Gegenwart (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Vorstandes des Lesevereines der deutschen Studenten Wiens, 1878), 2–3. Further references to this work are given in the text using page numbers alone,

19 Malwina von Meysenbug, Memoiren einer Idealistin, vol. 3, 6th ed. (Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1900), 166.

20 Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 107.

21 See Lipiner’s letter of 15 Oct. 1877 to Nietzsche (Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, 6/2:738–40, esp. 739) and Aldo Venturelli, “Nietzsche in der Berggasse 19: Über die erste Nietzsche-Rezeption in Wien,”Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984): 448–80; here 459.

22 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack (Munich: Piper, 1976, 1977), 2:173 and 179 (10 and 20 Sept. 1878).

23 Richard Wagner, “Religion und Kunst,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, Volksausgabe, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1911]), 211–85; here 211; in English, “Religion and Art,” in Prose Works, vol. 6, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 211–52; here 213. Parenthetical references to Wagner’s essay in the following will refer to these two editions, abbreviated as RK and RA, respectively. Manfred Frank has called this sentence a “concise summary of early-Romantic ideas about Art-Religion” (gedrängtes Résumé der frühromantischen Ideen zur Kunstreligion). See Manfred Frank, Gott im Exil: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 73.

24 Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, in Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz (1948–1952; repr., Munich: Beck, 1982), 12:470–71.

25 Wagner quotes Schiller’s letter of 17 Aug. 1795 to Goethe. See Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller and Goethe in den Jahren 1794 bis 1805, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Beetz (Munich: Hanser, 1990), 98 (= vol. 8.1 of Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Munich edition, ed. Karl Richter).

26 Frank, Gott im Exil, 65 and 74.

27 See Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004), 12, 16, 259, 275, and 321, fn. 23.

28 See Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NJ, and New York: Doubleday, 1973), 781.

29 See Peter Franklin, “‘Funeral Rites’: Mahler and Mickiewicz,” Music & Letters 55.2 (Apr. 1974): 203–8; here 206.

30 See Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier’ and the Problem of Program Music,” Nineteenth-Century Music 12. 1 (Summer 1988): 27–53, for a discussion of these parallels and the link with Werther (esp. 29–30), which is also noted in Lipiner’s foreword to his translation of Mickiewicz’sTodtenfeier (Dziady), in Poetische Werke, by Adam Mickiewicz, vol. 2, trans. Siegfried Lipiner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1887), “Einleitung: Zur Erklärung der ‘Todtenfeier,’” xiii, xiv, xviii, and xx.

31 Jean Paul, Titan, in Werke, vol. 3, 6th ed., ed. Norbert Miller (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1999), 825.

32 Lipiner, “Einleitung,” xvii.

33 Lipiner, “Einleitung,” xvii.

34 A very similar summary of the symphony’s program can be found in Bauer-Lechner, GME, 40 (RGM, 43–44).

35 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005), 271–72.

36 Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1986), 224.

37 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, kritische Ausgabe, ed. Heinz Rölleke, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 18.

38 See Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 183; German original in Gustav Mahler, GR, 89. In her edition of Mahler’s letters, Alma writes “in our ear” (an unser Ohr), making the song into a defense of a naive form of religion rather than a stage in the development of the symphony’s protagonist. Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 262.

39 Adolf Nowak, “Zur Deutung der Dritten und Vierten Sinfonie Gustav Mahlers,” in Gustav Mahler, ed. Hermann Danuser (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 191–205; here 194.

40 Mahler makes a point here about programs, claiming that they lead, not unlike revealed religions, to misunderstandings and simplification. In the scholarship on Mahler’s Second Symphony, Edward R. Reilly has picked up on the importance of this reference in Mahler’s letter for understanding his concept of religion. Reilly, “Todtenfeier and the Second Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 84–125; here 95, and 120–21.

41 See for instance Jack Tresidder, The Complete Dictionary of Symbols (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005), 417–18.

42 The editor of Brentano’s collected works assumes that the text is based on several Wunderhorn songs; see Brentano, Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, vol. 2 (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 1198.

43 See Clemens Brentano, Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl, in Werke 2:774–806; here 779. All parenthetical page references in the following refer to this edition.

44 See the score reproduced in Renate Stark-Voit, “‘Bild — Symbol — Klang’: Zu Gustav Mahlers Wunderhorn-Vertonungen,” in Mahler-Gespräche: Rezeptionsfragen — literarischer Horizont — musikalische Darstellung, ed. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002), 118–43; here 131.

45 See Stark-Voit, “‘Bild — Symbol — Klang,’” 130 and 132.

46 See Clemens Brentano, Das Märchen von Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia, in Werke, vol. 3 (Munich: Hanser, 1965), 661, 671, 694, 797, 809, 811, 814–15, 829, 831, 857, 871, 917, 922, and 930; the maxim’s origin is explained on 856–57; see also 694.

47 See Stark-Voit, “‘Bild — Symbol — Klang,’” 137. That the seal makers are Jews becomes gradually clear in the text; in an earlier version of the text, not published until 1924, the fairy tales’ antagonists are introduced as “three Jewish philosophers of nature” (drei jüdische Naturphilosophen) and later simply called “the three Jews” (die drei Juden). Brentano, Das Märchen von Gockel und Hinkel, 484–565; here 504–5.

48 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 628–29.

49 See Leonard Bernstein, The Little Drummer Boy: An Essay on Gustav Mahler. DVD (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 2007), 56:08–57:14.

50 See Vladimír Karbusicky, “Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 195–216; here 199.

51 See Gerhard Kaiser, Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang. 3rd ed. (Munich: Francke, 1979), 106–7.

52 Kaiser, Aufklärung, 109.

53 English translation in Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years, 184 (organization of text modified according to the facsimile reprint of the original document, 179–82, trans. modified). The fact that Mahler’s version is critical of biblical accounts is also implied, as Martha Nussbaum argues, by his famous remark in a letter to Arthur Seidl (Br, 223) that he went through all of world literature, including the Bible, only to decide in the end to develop his own version of Klopstock’s poem (Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, 615).

54 Mahler suppresses the “Halleluja” at the end of both stanzas and uses the word “called” (rief) instead of “created” (schuf) to express life’s origin. See Friedrich Klopstock, Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig: Göschen, 1840), 540–41.

55 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes this as the key thought of Also sprach Zarathustra (SW 6:335; AC, 123); see also Also sprach Zarathustra (SW 4:275–77; TSZ, 177–79).

56 See William J. McGrath, “Dionysian Art: Crisis and Creativity in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna,” 36–37, and also “Mahler and the Vienna Nietzsche Society,” 230.

57 Mahler to Friedrich Löhr, 29 Aug. 1895 (Br, 151). By the summer of 1896 Mahler had already abandoned the idea of incorporating “Das himmlische Leben”; he also started to use the subtitle “Ein Sommermittagstraum” (see Br, 188 and 196).

58 Bauer-Lechner transcribes Mahler’s letter incorrectly; see the reproduction on page 37 (translation modified).

59 The link between Mahler’s symphony and the “chain of being” was first made by Donald Mitchell in his essay “The Twentieth Century’s Debt to Mahler: Our Debt to Him in the Twenty-First,” in Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007), 556–96; here 566. For the roots of the idea of a “chain of being” in ancient Greek philosophy, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 24–66. For its adaptation by Christianity, see the same work, 67–98. This hierarchical view of nature leads Constantin Floros to interpret the symphony from a religious standpoint, even though he admits that the idea of a hierarchy of being can, for instance, be found in Schopenhauer, who was by no means a traditional religious thinker. Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies (Pompton Plains, NJ, and Cambridge: Amadeus, 2000), 88–91, esp. 90,

60 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 242–87.

61 See, for instance, Mahler’s first remarks, made during the summer of 1895, on the Third Symphony, in GME, 35 (RGM, 40). See also Franklin, “‘Funeral Rites,’” 203–8; here 206.

62 Mahler, letter to Richard Batka, 18 Nov. 1896 (Br, 202–3).

63 See the lemma “Pan,” in Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopedia of the Ancient World, vol. 10, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 420–22. Pan is often associated with Dionysos (421).

64 Lipiner, Über die Elemente, 11.

65 According to one of Alma Mahler’s footnotes accompanying the 1924 edition of Mahler’s letters, Mahler dropped the programmatic title “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” because audiences might think of Nietzsche’s text with the same title (Br, 149).

66 On the role of “chaos” in Nietzsche, see John A. McCarthy, Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe — Nietzsche — Grass) (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 159–60 and 252–54.

67 See Furness, Zarathustra’s Children, 4.

68 This is consistent with other ideas that Mahler discusses in relation to the Third Symphony: in a conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner about the symphony’s first movement Mahler envisioned the movement as the struggle of a young man trying to break away from lifeless nature, as in Hölderlin’s poem “Der Rhein” (GME, 56; RGM, 59 and 200). Mahler refers to the second stanza of the poem. Interestingly, the last two stanzas use the juxtaposition of noon and midnight/day and night; the poem ends with the evocation of night as a time of disorder and uncertainty. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 328–34.

69 See Zarathustra’s explanation of the poem: “Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored —” (Sagtet ihr jemals Ja zu einer Lust? Oh, meine Freunde, so sagtet ihr Ja auch zu allem Wehe. Alle Dinge sind verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt, —; SW 4:402; TSZ, 263).

70 Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 3:80–81.

71 That the element of play is important for Nietzsche is also clear from another passage in Zarathustra (see SW 4:85; TSZ, 48–49).

72 See, for instance, Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler oder der Zeitgenosse der Zu­kunft, 142–43; and Nike Wagner, “Nietzsche komponieren,” 282.

73 Parsifal is the “pure fool” who knows through “compassion” (durch Mitleid wissend / der reine Thor). See Parsifal, in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen 10:324–75, here 333 and 342; see also 328. Wagner’s concept of compassion in Parsifal is based on the philosophy of Schopenhauer; see Ulrike Kienzle, “Parsifal and Religion: A Christian Music Drama?” 91–93, and 106, in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, UK: Camden House, 2005), 81–130.

74 Franklin, Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 98–99; see also Mahler’s letter to Löhr and a letter of 1 Jul. 1896 to Anna von Mildenburg (Br, 151 and 189).

75 The complete text of the poem is as follows (see Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 3:192):

E r l ö s u n g
M a r i a
Mein Kind, sieh an die Brüste mein,
Kein Sünder laß verloren sein.
C h r i s t u s
Mutter, sieh an die Wunden,
Die ich für dein Sünd trag alle Stunden.
Vater, laß dir die Wunden mein
Ein Opfer für die Sünde sein.
V a t e r
Sohn, lieber Sohn mein,
Alles was du begehrst, das soll seyn.

 

76 Gustav Mahler, Unbekannte Briefe, ed. Herta Blaukopf (Vienna and Hamburg: Paul Zsolnay, 1983), 127.

77 The last words of Ecce homo are: “Have I been understood? — Dionysus versus the crucified” (Hat man mich verstanden? — Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten; SW 6:374; AC, 151). Earlier in the same text he states that “overman” stands in opposition to “Christians and other nihilists” (Christen und andren Nihilisten) (SW 6:300; AC, 101).

78 Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, 203–5; Furness, Zarathustra’s Children, 9–10.

79 Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, 247–49; Hillebrand, “Einführung,” 13.

80 Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2006), 251. The potential for ideological abuse made possible by the concept’s relatively obscure contours (see Hillebrand, “Einführung,” 9 and 12) may have led Nietzsche to abandon the term relatively quickly after introducing it; the term had a “rather brief career in his writings” (Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 250).

81 McCarthy, Remapping Reality, 234.

82 See Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, 107–8.

83 Franklin, Mahler: Symphony No. 3, 71.

84 William McGrath, “Mahler and the Vienna Nietzsche Society,” 229.

85 See John Lippitt, “Nietzsche, Zarathustra and the Status of Laughter,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32.1 (Jan. 1992): 39–49; here esp. 39–40, and 43.

86 James L. Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 47.

87 Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 37.

88 See Donald Mitchell, “‘Swallowing the Programme’: Mahler’s Fourth Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, 187–216; here 194. Mitchell bases his observation on Adorno, MP, 207–8 (MPE, 58).

89 Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1:275–77.

90 The most comprehensive overview is given by Zychowicz in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 18–25.

91 For a brief history of the origins of the “Schellenkappe,” see Maurice Lever, Zepter und Schellenkappe: Zur Geschichte des Hofnarren, trans. Kathrina Menke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 42–45.

92 Mahler used this formula to characterize the first movement in the original, 6-movement, design of the Fourth Symphony (see Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 48).

93 Bruno Walter, letter to Ludwig Schiedermaier, 6 Dec. 1901, in Briefe, 1894–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1969), 51–52.

94 Mahler had already noted this (see GME, 202; RGM, 183).

95 See Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 117–18; Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 12–13.

96 Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 55. See also Mitchell, “Swallowing the Programme,” 206.

97 This would be my answer to Donald Mitchell’s rhetorical question asking whether the movement demonstrates the impossibility of a return to the “simplicities” of the past (“Swallowing the Programme,” 204).

98 Walter, Briefe, 52. The “Grim Reaper” has, of course, a very different cultural iconographic archaeology from “Freund Hein,” but is the closest equivalent to that figure in the Anglo-American tradition. For a discussion of the figure of “Freund Hein” in German cultural history and in relation to Mahler’s symphony, see Raymond Knapp, “Perspectives on Innocence and Vulnerability in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony,” Nineteenth-Century Music 22.3 (1999): 233–67; here 256–57.

99 The reference to Holbein in Mengelberg’s score is reported by Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 764. Knapp discusses Mahler’s visual sources for the scherzo in great detail (252–56), and he also shows that one of Holbein’s woodcuts portrays death as a fiddler.

100 Mitchell, “Swallowing the Programme,” 215.

101 See Jonathan Carr, Mahler: A Biography (Woodstock, NY, and New York: Overlook, 1998), 12; and Jens Malter Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 34.

102 Walter, Briefe, 52.

103 The English version of Bauer-Lechner’s memoirs translates “Heiterkeit” as “serenity”; while this is a possible translation of “Heiterkeit,” it constructs, in my view, a narrative for the Fourth Symphony very different from the one Mahler envisions in his many documented statements, which consistently mention “humor” as its main component.

104 Donald Mitchell, “Swallowing the Programme,” 216; see also 214.

105 See Mitchell, “Swallowing the Programme,” 208–9, and 216.

106 See Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1:276–77; in addition to suppressing four verses, Mahler consolidated the third and fourth stanzas into one new and longer stanza.

107 Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 48.

108 See for example, Peter Singer, “Preface,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), xi, xii; here xi.

109 See von Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 1, commentary 304.

110 See the lemma on “St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15225d.htm).

111 See Adolf Nowak, “Zur Deutung der Dritten und Vierten Sinfonie Gustav Mahlers,” 202; see also Stephen E. Hefling, “Techniques of Irony in Mahler’s Oeuvre,” in Gustav Mahler et l’ironie dans la culture viennoise au tournant du siècle, ed. André Castagné, Michel Chalon, and Patrick Florençon (Montpellier, France: Climats, 2001), 99–142; here 113–17. In my own essay “Mahler contra Wagner: The Philosophical Legacy of Romanticism in Mahler’s Third and Fourth Symphonies,” German Quarterly 77.2 (2004): 189–210, esp. 201, I support such a reading and also point to the early-Romantic discussions of the concept of irony. In the following, I will develop Jean Paul’s understanding of “humor” as an alternative paradigm to understand this movement’s ambiguities.

112 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Werke, vol. 5 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1963), 9–456; here 148.

113 See de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 310.

114 See Symphonie Nr. 4, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. International Gustav Mahler Society (London: Universal Edition, 1963), [score] 102; see also Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 150.

115 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 129. Jean Paul here seeks to illustrate his claim that humor is the “reversed sublime” (das umgekehrte Erhabene; Vorschule der Ästhetik, 125).

116 Simon Critchley points out that there is a long tradition of understanding humor as a form of incongruity that includes, among others, Hutcheson, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard. Critchley, On Humour (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.

117 Critchley, On Humour, 5.

118 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 139–40. See also Critchley, On Humour, 41–52.

119 See Jean Paul’s ideas about humor as an “annihilating” (vernichtende) force (Vorschule der Ästhetik, 129).

120 See Adolf Nowak, “Zur Deutung der Dritten und Vierten Sinfonie Gustav Mahlers,” 204, 205.

121 See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 127–38, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2/3, ed. Anna Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999). Mahler would not necessarily have to have read Die Traumdeutung in order to be aware of these ideas; someone in his environment may well have discussed the book with him. Mahler’s awareness of Freud’s work, would explain why in the summer of 1910, when he was analyzed by Freud during a walk in Leyden, he exhibited an “intuitive understanding” of Freud’s ideas. Mary Bonaparte, quoting Freud in her unpublished diaries; reprinted in Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004), 229.

122 See Freud, “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren,” in Gesammelte Werke 7:213–23.

123 Oskar Kokoschka, Die träumenden Knaben und Der weiße Tiertöter (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1998), 25. See Mitchell, “The Twentieth Century’s Debt,” 561–62, for a discussion on Mahler’s innovative use of percussion instruments.

124 See Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001), 190.

125 Kokoschka, Die träumenden Knaben, 9.

126 Vergo, Art in Vienna, 190.

127 Kokoschka, Die träumenden Knaben, 9.

128 For a discussion of the biographical circumstances under which Kokoschka produced Die träumenden Knaben, see Heinz Spielmann, Oskar Kokoschka: Leben und Werk (Cologne: Dumont, 2003), 38–45.

129 Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1957), 102; in English, Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, trans. James Galston (New York: Greystone, 1941), 136–37.

130 Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe, 28.

131 Nikkels, “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” 101.

132 A typical statement in this respect can, for instance, be found in Mahler’s letter of 14 Dec. 1901 to Alma: “That I will love about you forever: that you are so real and simple” (Das ist mir so ewig lieb an Dir, daß Du so echt, so schlicht bist; GR, 92).

133 Walter, Ein Porträt, 101 (quote), and also 102; Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay, 135–36, trans. modified.

134 Aschheim mentions the year 1890 as a turning point (see, for instance, Nietzsche Legacy, 1, 11, 13, and 18). Before him, Bruno Hillebrand had noted the same phenomenon (“Einführung,” 1).

135 Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 33, 36.

136 See for instance Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s, vol. 2.1 (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1897), 268–69, 309, and 322–23. If one reads Wagner’s essay “Publikum und Popularität” (Public and Popularity) of 1878 as his (only) public response to the break with Nietzsche, even though the latter is not mentioned by name, then Wagner too believed that Nietzsche’s break had something to with his own popularity. Wagner’s defense is that he never aimed for this, that Bayreuth rather was designed to break with the normal dynamics of the opera world, but that no artist can ultimately prevent his own popularity. See “Publikum und Popularität,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911), 61–90; here 63–64 and 77–78.

137 An earlier version of this statement (minus the first two sentences, i.e. the statement on Wagner’s anti-Semitism) can be found in the second volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 2: 372; in English, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 210–11 — the first text in which Nietzsche clearly distanced himself from Wagner.

138 Sander L. Gilman, “Heine, Nietzsche, and the Idea of the Jew,” in Golomb, Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, 76–100; here 79.

139 For a reconstruction of the turn-of-the-century debate on Wagner’s anti-Semitism, see Leon Botstein “German Jews and Wagner,” in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009), 151–97; here 162–78. For an overview of the reception of Wagner’s anti-Semitic essay, see Jens Malte Fischer’s excellent book Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2000), esp. 121–33; an overview of the essay’s different editions can also be found there (134–35). The Jubiläumsausgabe of Wagner’s Dichtungen und Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), edited by Dieter Borchmeyer, is the first edition to leave the essay out.

140 See Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s, 2.1:208, 232, 307, and 322. This is remarkable, because Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner’s anti-Semitism does not fit the patriotic and nationalist images of Nietzsche that Förster-Nietzsche had sought to create of her brother (see Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 47, 118, and 120).

141 See, for instance, the final line of the “Foreword”: “An intelligent people can only ever enter into a mésalliance with the ‘Reich’ . . .” (Mit dem “Reich” macht ein intelligentes Volk immer nur eine mésalliance . . .) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe 6:415; AC, 265.

142 “The Jewish musician mixes up the different forms and styles of all masters and all times” (der jüdische Musiker wirft . . . die verschiedenen Formen und Stil­arten aller Meister und Zeiten durch einander). Richard Wagner, “Das Judentum in der Musik,” in Jens Malte Fischer, Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik,” 141–96; here 161.

143 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, for example, 104, 125, 127, and 132.

144 Judith Norman, “Nietzsche and Early Romanticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002): 501–19; here 502. Regarding Nietzsche’s affinity for early Romantic thinking, see also Ernst Behler, “Nietzsche und die frühromantische Schule,” Nietzsche-Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch für die Nietzsche-Forschung 7 (1978): 59–96, especially 65 and 69, and Rüdiger Görner, “‘[. . .] das letzte grosse Ereigniss im Schicksal unserer Cultur’ Oder: Nietzsche ‘liest’ die Romantik,” in Die Lesbarkeit der Romantik: Material, Medium, Diskurs, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 83–102; here 100–101.

145 On the increasing role of anti-Semitism in Romanticism, see my essay “The Romantics and Other Cultures,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 147–61.

146 Dieter Borchmeyer and Jörg Salaquarda argue that Nietzsche was intellectually more indebted to Wagner’s thinking than is generally assumed; see their “Nachwort: Legende und Wirklichkeit einer epochalen Begegnung,” 1274, 1288, 1296, and 1298–99, in Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen einer epochalen Begegnung, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1994), 1271–1386. They also claim that Nietzsche’s break with Wagner was never entirely wholehearted (see, for instance, 1275, 1344, 1353, 1377, and 1383). While Borchmeyer and Salaquarda do allude to the role of Wagner’s anti-Semitism in Nietzsche’s estrangement from Wagner (see 1287, 1310, 1328–29, 1330–32, and 1365), the aspect of Wagner’s new political affiliations is categorically downplayed (instead, both authors seem to be convinced that purely personal dynamics played a decisive role in Nietzsche’s break with Wagner).

147 Ernst Decsey, “Stunden mit Mahler: Notizen,” Die Musik 10.18 (1910/11): 352–56 (Gustav Mahler-Heft); here 354.

148 See, for example, a passage on Wagner’s Tristan in Ecce homo (SW 6:289–90; AC, 93–94).

149 Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2006), 164–65; see also David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2007), 44, and Charles S. Maier, “Mahler’s Theater: The Performative and the Political in Central Europe, 1890–1910,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ, and London: Princeton UP, 2002), 55–85; here 69–75.

150 One example is Richard Dehmel, whom Mahler knew superficially (see Hillebrand, Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, 1:15–16, and 136).

151 See Richard Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze (bis 1842),” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 1:4–19; here 15.

152 Ernst Křenek, “Gustav Mahler,” in Walter, Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, 198. It would, however, be wrong to read a progressive political agenda into Křenek’s statement; Křenek was a supporter of the austrofascist “Ständestaat” (1934–38); see Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda: Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002), 92 and 96. Ironically, the “Ständestaat” was a period characterized by increased interest in Mahler’s music in the context of Austrian history.

Chapter 4

1 See Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 113. In English, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, rev. ed., ed. Donald Mitchell (New York: Viking, 1969), 89.

2 Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1957), 92. In English, Gustav Mahler: With a Biographical Essay by Ernst Křenek, trans. James Galston (New York: Greystone, 1941), 121.

3 This is reported in Donald Mitchell, “Mahler on the Move: His Seventh Symphony,” in Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955—2005 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007) 394–410; here 406.

4 See, for example, Peter Davison, “Nachtmusik I: Sound and Symbol,” 69 and 71, in The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler: A Symposium, ed. James L. Zychowicz (Cincinnati: U. of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, 1990), 68–73.

5 The essay can be found in Robert A. Kann, ed., Theodor Gomperz: Ein Gelehr­tenleben im Bürgertum der Franz-Josefs-Zeit (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974), 384–89. Gomperz published frequently in prominent newspapers and scholarly journals; his essay gives the impression of having been written for such a publication, but it is not clear whether it was published during his lifetime. On Gomperz’s essay, see also Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 210.

6 Michael Brenner, “Pre-Weimar Origins,” in The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1996), 11–35; here 30. George Mosse remarks that Jews are seen as being “devoid of spirituality and feeling” in nineteenth-century Germany. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970), 35.

7 Brenner, “Pre-Weimar Origins,” 29.

8 The questions Gomperz raises may have been triggered by Otto Weininger’s notorious text Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles), first published in 1903 — the year before Gomperz wrote his essay. Weininger, who was Jewish himself, indeed asks why the Jews have not been able to produce great men; like Gomperz, he sees Spinoza as one of the few exceptions. See Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, 9th ed. (Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1907), 430.

9 Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58.3 (2001): 201–30; here 207.

10 Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 604.

11 Frits Zwart, Willem Mengelberg, 1871–1951: Een biografie, 1871–1920, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999), 205.

12 See also Jens Malte Fischer, Der fremde Vertraute, 603.

13 The following is based on Eduard Reeser, Alphons Diepenbrock (Amsterdam: Bigot and van Rossum, [1936]), 21–38, and De muzikale handschriften van Alphons Diepenbrock (Amsterdam: G. Alsbach, 1933).

14 See J. van der Veen, “Diepenbrock, Alphonsus Joannes Maria (1862–1921),” in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland, vol. 1 (The Hague 1979); http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn1/diepenbrock (accessed 17 Jun. 2008).

15 Diepenbrock, “Schemeringen,” De Nieuwe Gids 8.2 (1893): 449–64; here 449.

16 Zwart, Willem Mengelberg, 196–97.

17 The following summary is based on Nietzsche, “Im grossen Schweigen,” in Morgenröthe, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980–99), 3:259–60; in English, in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 181.

18 “In Genoa at the time of evening twilight I heard coming from a tower a long peal of bells. It seemed it would never stop, resounding as though it could never have enough of itself over the noise of the streets out into the evening sky and the sea breeze, so chilling and at the same time so childlike, so melancholy. Then I recalled the words of Plato and suddenly they spoke to my heart: nothing human is worthy of being taken very seriously; nonetheless.” (In Genua hörte ich zur Zeit der Abenddämmerung von einem Thurme her ein langes Glockenspiel. Das wollte nicht enden und klang, wie unersättlich aus sich selber, über das Geräusch der Gassen in den Abendhimmel und die Meerluft hinaus, so schauerlich, so kindisch zugleich, so wehmuthsvoll. Da gedachte ich der Worte Platons und fühlte sie auf einmal im Herzen: alles Menschliche insgesamt ist des grossen Ernstes nicht werth; trotzdem.) Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 2:354; in English: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 198. See also Reeser, De muzikale handschriften van Alphons Diepenbrock, 24–25.

19 Diepenbrock, letter to Johanna Jongkindt, 17 Oct. 1909, quoted in Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland: Briefe (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1980), 31.

20 Mahler, letter of 8 Jun. 1910 to Alma (no. 303). GR, 423–25; here 424.

21 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 854–55.

22 Regarding the extent to which the first movement can be interpreted within traditional notions of structure, see John G. Williamson, “Mahler and Episodic Structure: The First Movement of the Seventh Symphony,” in Zychowicz, The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, 27–46; here 36.

23 De La Grange, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 852.

24 See Diepenbrock to Jongkindt, in Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland, 31–32.

25 Robert Musil, Tagebücher, vol. 1, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 386.

26 Herta Blaukopf, “Mahler an der Universität: Versuch, eine biographische Lücke zu schließen,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiß (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 1–16; here 5.

27 Paul Nathorp, “Vorwort,” in Adam. Ein Vorspiel. Hyppolytos. Tragödie, by Siegfried Lipiner (Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1913), 3–13; here 7.

28 See Pauline Micheels, “Gustav Mahler in Amsterdam (1903–1909),” in Mahler in Amsterdam van Mengelberg tot Chailly, ed. Johan Giskes and Ester L. Woudhuysen (Bussum and Amsterdam: THOTH/Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, 1995), 24–36; here 25.

29 On the history of Amsterdam’s Jewish neighborhood and the Breestraat, where Rembrandt’s house was situated, see Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2003), 14–16. Regarding the history of Rembrandt’s image as a philo-Semite, see 44–57.

30 Diary of H. de Booy, quoted in Micheels, Mahler in Amsterdam, 32 (German spelling corrected).

31 Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Knopf, 1999), 487–89.

32 Diepenbrock, letter to Jongkindt, in Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland: Briefe, 32.

33 Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 481–82.

34 See A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2005), 81–82.

35 Cf. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1965), 199. For a discussion of the immense impact of Langbehn’s book, see Stern, Cultural Despair, 197–227. In the following I will quote the fortieth edition: Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher: Von einem Deutschen (Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1892).

36 Stern, Cultural Despair, 200.

37 During the winter of 1889–90 Langbehn acted as Nietzsche’s guardian after his collapse (Stern, Cultural Despair, 143).

38 Stern, Cultural Despair, 146.

39 See Bernd Behrendt, “August Julius Langbehn, der ‘Rembrandtdeutsche,’” in Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung,” 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Julius H. Ulbricht (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), 94–113; here 99.

40 See Peter Ulrich Hein’s thesis that Langbehn (at least initially) goes to some lengths in his text to avoid alienating his Jewish readers. Hein, Transformation der Kunst: Ziele und Wirkungen der deutschen Kultur- und Kunsterziehungsbewegung (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1991), 66.

41 Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 43. For Michael Brenner, this passage shows that Jews have come to represent the “antithesis of the neo-Romantic ideals of the time” (Brenner, “Pre-Weimar Origins,” 30).

42 The following references are taken from Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 52–54.

43 “Rembrandt and Spinoza resituated . . ., in opposition to tradition, the center of their artistic and secular outlook into the individual and the world themselves” (Rembrandt und Spinoza verlegten, . . . der Tradition entgegen, den Schwerpunkt der künstlerischen und weltlichen Anschauung in das Individuum und die Welt selbst; Rembrandt als Erzieher, 53).

44 See Klaus L. Berghahn, Grenzen der Toleranz: Juden und Christen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 195–205.

45 See Peter Pulzer, “The Return of the Old Hatreds,” in Integration in Dispute, ed. Michael A. Meyer, vol. 3 of German-Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 196–251; here 241. For Pulzer, Langbehn plays a key role in the resurgence of political anti-Semitism in the 1890s.

46 See Mitchell, “Mahler’s ‘Kammermusikton,’” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 217–35; here 226–31.

47 Mahler, letter to Richard Strauss, May 1905; Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, Briefwechsel, 1888–1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf (Munich and Zurich: R. Piper, 1980), 95; see also Mitchell, “Mahler’s ‘Kammermusikton,’” 231.

48 Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 22–23, quote 22. The following quotes in the text are, unless otherwise indicated, from the section “Musikalisches” (Musical Matters), 22–23. Langbehn emphasizes the importance of this observation by returning to it much later in his book.

49 The following quotes are taken from Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 276–78, unless otherwise indicated.

50 See James Zychowicz, “Ein schlechter Jasager: Considerations on the Finale to Mahler’s Seventh Symphony,” in Zychowicz, The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, 98–106; here 98.

51 Diepenbrock, letter to Johanna Jongkindt. Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland, 32.

52 Diepenbrock, letter to Jongkindt. Reeser, Gustav Mahler und Holland, 31.

53 Peter Revers, “The Seventh Symphony,” in Mitchell and Nicholson, The Mahler Companion, 377.

54 See de La Grange, Triumph and Disillusion, 881; see also Zychowicz, The Seventh Symphony, 102.

55 De La Grange, Triumph and Disillusion, 877–78; Zychowicz, The Seventh Symphony, 103.

56 Revers, “The Seventh Symphony,” 377; see also Adorno, MP, 281; MPE, 137.

57 See Mahler’s statement, quoted in Josefine von Kralik’s diary: “Don’t many people do useless things? Play tarot; perform the ‘Merry Widow’!” (Thun die Leute nicht auch viel, was unnütz ist? Tarock spielen; die “lustige Witwe” aufführen!; diary entry quoted in GR, 426). Mahler, however, appears to have enjoyed a performance of Die lustige Witwe that took place during the winter when he was revising his Seventh Symphony (de La Grange, Triumph and Disillusion, 473–74).

58 See Marc Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE, and London: Nebraska UP, 1997), 117–22. Since Mahler was well aware of the Jewish traits of Mime (see the introduction in this volume) in the Ring des Nibelungen, the Jewish character of Beckmesser in the Meistersinger will not have escaped him.

Chapter 5

1 Richard Specht, Gustav Mahlers VIII. Symphonie: Thematische Analyse (Leipzig: Universal-Edition, 1912), 6; see also Specht, Gustav Mahler, 5th–8th ed. (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, [1918]), 252.

2 Engelbert Pernerstorfer and Victor Adler, for instance, became prominent leaders of the Social-Democratic Party; see McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), chapters 7 and 8 (182–237). Georg von Schönerer, in contrast, became a leader of the conservative, nationalist, and increasingly anti-Semitic pan-Germanic movement (165–66). There are indications that Mahler and Adler later in life felt affinity for each others’ goals (243–245). A preference for German over Austrian culture is quite typical in Vienna’s educated, cosmopolitan Jewish families, as Steven Beller has shown in Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 144.

3 See for instance Esteban Buch’s recent reconstruction of this tradition in Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), esp. chapters 1 and 2 (11–44).

4 Within the Pernerstorfer Circle, however, some members were more interested in aesthetics and others more in politics (McGrath, Dionysian Art, 87–99 and also 246; see also chapter 3 in this volume). Membership in the Circle did not necessarily mean, in other words, a whole-hearted subscription to a nationalistic and conservative political philosophy, even though this was paradoxically an important part of the group’s identity.

5 Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1828), 209 and 214–216. Further references to this work will be given in the text using page numbers alone. For a detailed discussion of Menzel’s text and its impact on nineteenth-century thinking, see Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Schiller vs. Goethe: Revisiting the Conflicting Reception Vectors of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Wolfgang Menzel,” Goethe Yearbook 13 (2005): 1–17.

6 See Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers, vol. 1: 1773–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 134.

7 Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland 1:135.

8 Among them Börne and Heine, as Sammons has shown; Heine was one of the first intellectuals to problematize his contemporaries’ preference for Schiller over Goethe. See Sammons, “Schiller vs. Goethe,” 6–7 and 9.

9 See Hans Joachim Kreutzer, Faust: Mythos und Musik (Munich: Beck, 2003) for a comprehensive overview of musical adaptations based on Faust.

10 See Hans Schwerte [= Hans Schneider], Faust und das Faustische: Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1962), chap. 5 (94–147); quote from 119.

11 Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 161–62; Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, 1:229 and 253.

12 The following summary of a nationalistic interpretation of Faust is based on texts by the famous and very influential literary scholar Heinrich Düntzer and by August Spieß. See Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 76 and 105.

13 Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 167.

14 Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 103; Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland 1:245.

15 Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland 1:245.

16 For more information on Gustav von Loeper’s biography and his Goethe editions, see Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 149.

17 The following is based on the “Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers,” in Faust: Eine Tragödie, by Goethe, ed. Gustav von Loeper (Berlin: Gustav Hempel, 1870), xxx. See also Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 150–51.

18 See Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 117, 191, 193, and 196.

19 See Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich: DTV, 2005), 357–504; here 400–402. See also Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 54–55, and Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland 1:242. Heine’s ambivalent attitude toward Goethe is discussed in Wilfried Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis Friedrich Gundolf: Juden als deutsche Goethe-Verehrer (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 14 and 16.

20 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1887–1889, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980–99), 13:411.

21 Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, Volks­ausgabe, vol. 9 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1911]), 61–127; here 66. The idea that Goethe, in contrast to Schiller, was unsuccessful as a dramatist, in particular also in Faust, can also be found in the work of Hans Pfitzner, “Der zweite Teil Faust ist ganz und gar Lesedrama,” in Werk und Wiedergabe, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Augsburg: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1929), 115–19; here 118).

22 Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner: Ein Musikanten-Problem, in Kritische Studienausgabe 6:9–54; here 18; AC, 238.

23 See Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis Friedrich Gundolf, 12; see also Barbara Hahn, “Demarcations and Projections: Goethe in the Berlin Salons,” in Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Columbia SC: Camden House, 2001), 31–43.

24 See, for instance, Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1884–1885, in Kritische Studienausgabe 11:472; and Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1885–1887, in Kritische Studienausgabe 12:90.

25 See Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis Friedrich Gundolf, 30–33. Among them was Albert Bielschowsky, whose Goethe biography Mahler knew; see Herta Blaukopf, “Bücher fresse ich immer mehr und mehr”: Gustav Mahler als Leser,” in Mahler-Gespräche: Rezeptionsfragen — literarischer Horizont — musikalische Darstellung, ed. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002), 96–116; here 102.

26 George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College P, 1997), 44.

27 For a critical discussion of the place of Goethe in German-Jewish culture see Erhard Bahr, “Goethe and the Concept of Bildung in Jewish Emancipation,” in Berghahn and Hermand, Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, 16–28; in the same volume Klaus L. Berghahn discusses Goethe’s very ambivalent views of Jews (“Patterns of Childhood: Goethe and the Jews” 3–15).

28 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 37; see also Memories and Letters, 26: “he was a bogus Goethe in his writing and a haggling Jew in his talk.”

29 See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 139.

30 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1884–1885, 11:688–89; and Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, in Kritische Studienausgabe 6:55–162; here 151; AC, 222.

31 For a description of the façade in the context of the architectural history of the Burgtheater, see Josef Bayer, Das neue k. k. Hofburgtheater als Bauwerk mit seinen Sculpturen und Bilderschmuck (Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1894), 69.

32 Such a monumental privileging of Goethe over Schiller in the nineteenth century is not uncommon. Rietschel’s Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar from 1859, for instance, shows Goethe as slightly taller than Schiller, something that in real life was most likely not the case (see Sammons, “Schiller vs. Goethe,” 1).

33 Detailed factual information on the history of these monuments can be found in Gerhardt Kapner, Die Denkmäler der Wiener Ringstrasse (Vienna: Jugend & Volk, 1969), 29–37 (page numbers in this paragraph refer to this work) and at the following website: http://www.suf.at/wien/ringstr_uebers.htm (accessed 24 Jan. 2010).

34 Kapner, Denkmäler, 36.

35 See Neue Freie Presse, 27 Aug. 1899; in the following I refer to pages 1 and 2. See also Beller’s analysis of this material in Vienna and the Jews, 152–53.

36 In the issue of Monday, 28 Aug., however, there was a detailed report on the Goethe celebration in the Hofoper, where Mahler performed Beethoven’s Egmont overture and Mozart’s Zauberflöte: “Das Haus war nur mäßig gut besucht. Diejenigen aber, die gekommen waren, hatten einen großen, ungetrübten Genuß” (2).

37 See Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt: Der Beethovenfries; Geschichte, Funktion und Bedeutung (Munich: DTV, 1980), 26. Alfred Roller would later collaborate with Mahler on his Wagner stagings at Vienna’s Court Opera.

38 The exhibition catalogue contained a detailed description of the frieze and the artist’s intention; the text is reprinted in Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt, 47–48.

39 A leading motive behind the establishment of the Secession was its desire to open up Vienna for art from outside Austria and to participate fully in European modernism. See Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (London: Phaidon, 2001), 23 and 26.

40 See Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt, 49–51. Klimt used Richard Wagner’s explanatory notes in his “Bericht über die Aufführung der neunten Symphonie von Beethoven im Jahre 1846 in Dresden,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtung­en, Volksausgabe, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1911]), 50–65.

41 Richard Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen 9:61–127; here 120; see also Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt, 49. (Wagner actually uses the term “our kingdom” [unser Reich].)

42 See Wagner, “Beethoven,” 66.

43 See also Klimt’s painting Nuda Veritas of 1899, which also quotes Schiller: “If you cannot please all through your deeds and work of art — do justice to a few. To please many is bad. Schiller.” (“Kannst du nicht allen gefallen durch deine That und dein Kunstwerk — mach es wenigen recht. Vielen gefallen ist schlimm. Schiller.”). The source is Friedrich Schiller, Votivtafeln, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 174–82; here 181.

44 Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2003), 435.

45 Michael P. Steinberg calls the second movement of Mahler’s Eighth “a kind of unstageable metaopera,” in The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), 214.

46 Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt, 48.

47 Siegfried Lipiner saw Goethe’s Faust stylistically as a model for a “new” form of literature. See Ida Schein, Die Gedanken- und Ideenwelt Siegfried Lipiners (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1936), 63. A copy of this dissertation can be found in the archives of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

48 “I was reading around in ‘Eckermann,’ like I usually do during the summer” (Ich las wie meistens im Sommer im “Eckermann”), Mahler writes to his old Hamburg friend Adele Marcus in August 1908 from Toblach (Br, 370).

49 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Le­bens (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 306.

50 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 219–20. For a detailed discussion of Goethe’s statements and his knowledge of musical history, see Kreutzer, Faust: Mythos und Musik, 59–61.

51 See Marc Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. 2nd ed. (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1997), 52–53.

52 Another source of reflection about a musical adaptation of Faust is Goethe’s correspondence with the composer Zelter. In a letter to Goethe of 21 Jun. 1829 Zelter harshly criticized Berlioz’s adaptation of Faust, because of its extreme use of orchestral instrumentation. It is likely that Goethe would have agreed with him. See Goethe, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter in den Jahren 1799 bis 1832, ed. Hans-Günter Ottenberg and Edith Zehm, 2 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1991), 2:1244.

53 “Übrigens werden Sie zugeben, daß der Schluß, wo es mit der geretteten Seele nach oben geht, sehr schwer zu machen war, und daß ich, bei so übersinnlichen, kaum zu ahnenden Dingen, mich sehr leicht im Vagen hätte verlieren können, wenn ich nicht meinen poetischen Intentionen, durch die scharf umrissenen christlich-kirchlichen Figuren und Vorstellungen, eine wohltätig beschränkende Form und Festigkeit gegeben hätte.” Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 489.

54 See Albrecht Schöne, Faust, vol. 2: Kommentare (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 779. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Der Montserrat bei Barcelona,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3: 1799–1818, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin: B. Behr, 1904), 30–57. (The text is dedicated to Goethe.)

55 The complete passage reads as follows: “Like the abyss of rock at my feet / Rests on a deeper abyss still, / Like thousands of streams flow brightly / Into the horrific foaming waterfall, / As straight as, through its own strong force / The tree’s stem rises into the sky, / So is the omnipotent love / That shapes and cherishes everything.” (Wie Felsenabgrund mir zu Füßen / Auf tieferm Abgrund lastend ruht, / Wie tausend Bäche strahlend fließen / Zum grausen Sturz des Schaums der Flut, / Wie strack, mit eignem kräftigen Triebe, / Der Stamm sich in die Lüfte trägt, / So ist es die allmächtige Liebe, / Die alles bildet, alles hegt”; vs. 11866–73). For my translations I have consulted the Faust translations of Stuart Atkins; in general, however, I provide a translation that follows the German text as closely as possible.

56 Scholarship has shown that Goethe based his concept of heaven on the works of the third-century theologian Origen (see Schöne, Faust: Kommentare 2:788–93). He learned about Origen from Gottfried Arnold’s book Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (Impartial History of Church and Heresy) published in two volumes in 1699 and 1700. There is no doubt that Origen’s ideas were still considered heretical within the theological framework of Goethe’s time. Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) was a theologian and church historian and was highly critical of the church as an institution. The Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie was also one of Goethe’s sources of knowledge about Spinoza. In the following, I will argue that Spinoza can be seen as a key figure for Mahler’s understanding of Faust.

57 See Schöne, Faust: Kommentare 2:804.

58 What “of it” (“daran”) exactly refers to, is not clear from the context (Alma blacked out one-and-a-half lines immediately preceding this quote); see Mahler, GR, 388.

59 “Gleichnis” is very hard to translate. Atkins uses the term “symbol” (Faust I & II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins, 305). I prefer “simile” because the German term “Gleichnis” emphasizes the aspect of similarity (not necessarily inherent to symbols) and not the aspect of a tradition of understanding that is specific for symbols.

60 See Goethe, Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 733. In the following, I will refer to this edition.

61 Floros speaks of a religion of art (Kunstreligion) in relation to the end of the Eighth Symphony. See Constantin Floros, “Die ‘Symphonie der Tausend’ als Botschaft an die Menschheit,” in A “Mass” for the Masses: Proceedings of the Mahler VIII Symposium Amsterdam 1988, ed. Eveline Nikkels and Robert Becqué (The Hague: Nijgh & Van Ditmar Universitair, 1992), 121.

62 In a letter written to Lipiner in the summer before the Eighth’s premiere in Munich (7 Jul. 1910), Mahler writes to Lipiner that he will certainly find some of his own ideas in the Eighth (see Br, 412).

63 Siegfried Lipiner’s dissertation file in the archive of the University of Vienna does not contain a copy of the dissertation. According to a hand-written note accompanying a letter from Lipiner’s widow, Clementine Lipiner, in this file, the copy of his dissertation that used to be part of the file was given to her after Lipiner’s death in 1911. Schein’s dissertation shows that in the 1930s this copy was still in the possession of Lipiner’s relatives.

64 The following summary is based on Schein, GSL, 83–84.

65 Robert Zimmermann also makes this point in relation to Goethe’s Faust in Über das Tragische und die Tragödie (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1856), 293. Zimmermann was one of Mahler’s university teachers and Lipiner’s main dissertation advisor; see Herta Blaukopf, “Mahler an der Universität: Versuch, eine biographische Lücke zu schließen,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiß (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), 1–16; here 13, and Siegfried Lipiner’s dissertation file.

66 See also Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 162 and 231.

67 See also Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 233.

68 See Israel, Radical Enlightenment, “Introduction,” 11; see also Goetschel, SM, 4 and 6; and Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 13 and 134. Spinoza, however, also played a prominent role in nineteenth-century scholarship on Goethe. Albert Bielschowsky in his popular two-volume monograph on Goethe which Mahler knew discusses Spinoza extensively in his chapter “Goethe und die Philosophie.” Bielschowsky, Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Werke, vol. 2, 10th ed. (Munich: Beck, 1906), 77–101). The only philosopher with a similar impact on Goethe was, according to Bielschowsky, Kant, even though Goethe also sought an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy that would confirm what he had learned from Spinoza (99).

69 See also Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 119.

70 See Alexander von Bormann, “Metaphysik der Unmöglichkeit? Zum Text von Mahlers VIII. Symphonie,” in Nikkels and Becqué, A “Mass” for the Masses, 92–99; here 95–96.

71 See Dietrich Türnau, Rabanus Maurus, der praeceptor Germaniae: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pädagogik des Mittelalters (Munich: J. Lindauersche Buchhand­lung, 1900), 51 and 60.

72 See Thomas Richter, Die Dialoge über Literatur im Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 13.

73 Bauer-Lechner, Fragmente: Gelerntes und Gelebtes (Vienna: Rudolf Lechner & Sohn, 1907), 95.

74 Letter from Goethe to Zelter, 12 April 1820. See Goethe, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter in den Jahren 1799 bis 1832, 596.

75 See Mathias Mayer, “Islamisiertes Christentum, poetisierte Religion: Goethes Übersetzung eines spätlateinischen Pfingsthymnus,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 May 2004, 35. To prove that Goethe thinks about the “Veni creator spiritus” in the context of a continuation of the West-östlicher Divan, Mayer refers to a letter of 11 May 1820 from Goethe to Zelter.

76 Von Bormann, “Metaphysik,” 95.

77 Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, in Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 12 (Munich: Beck, 1982), 472, fragment 762.

Chapter 6

1 For information on both essays, see the materials reproduced in Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), 287–90. Mahler’s poor performance at these exams may be partially explained by the fact that he was a day student: he prepared for his exams on his own, since he was already participating in classes at the conservatory in Vienna while still having to take these exams in Iglau. See Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 53–55. An overview of all exam topics can be found in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NJ, and New York: Doubleday, 1973), 50–51.

2 See Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 251–85.

3 Mitchell, The Early Years, 289.

4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994). Said’s ideas have been criticized for not recognizing Orientalism’s diversity and the specific cultural and historical settings in which interest in the Orient arose. See, for instance, Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, “Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World History,” in Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics (Lincoln, NE, and London: U of Nebraska P, 2008), 1–71; here 8–9, 18, and 22; and, with German cultural history in mind, Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), xviii–xxiii.

5 At a dinner with the board of the Concertgebouw in March 1906, Mahler caused a scene by defending Multatuli. See Pauline Micheels, “Gustav Mahler in Amsterdam,” in Mahler in Amsterdam van Mengelberg tot Chailly, ed. Johan Giskes and Ester L. Woudhuysen (Bussum and Amsterdam: THOTH/Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, 1995), 24–36; here 25. Max Havelaar is mentioned in Mahler’s letter to Alma dated 21 Oct. 1903 (Mahler, GR, 169).

6 In the chapter “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation” of his book Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991), Paul Mendes-Flohr points to a renewed interest around 1910 among Jewish intellectuals in Oriental languages and cultures (84–89); this can be documented, for instance, in Martin Buber’s writings.

7 See Marchand, German Orientalism, 158 and 160. According to this same logic the period around 1800 (Herder, Schlegel) represents the First Oriental Rennaissance.

8 See Manfred Wagner, “Wien grüßt den fernen Osten,” in Die liebe Erde allüberall: Proceedings of Das Lied von der Erde Symposium Den Haag 2002, ed. Robert Becqué and Eveline Nikkels (Den Haag: Stichting rondom Mahler, 2005), 20–33; here 27.

9 See Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001), 189.

10 Herta Blaukopf, “Kunstschau Wien 1908,” in Becqué and Nikkels, Die liebe Erde allüberall, 34–48; here 41.

11 Richard Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, 3rd ed., ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich: Atlantis, 1981), 224. See also Sander L. Gilman, “Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle,” in New German Critique 43 (Winter, 1988): 35–68; here 38–39.

12 Marchand, German Orientalism, 388; see also 392.

13 Herder, Ideen, 386 and 390.

14 Friedrich Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, in Kritische Frie­drich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 8 (Munich: Schöningh andThomas, 1975), 105–380; here 115.

15 Herder, Ideen, 390–97.

16 Schlegel, Über die Sprache, 161 and 163.

17 See Tuska Benes, “From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Philology and the Racialization of Salvationist National Rhetoric, 1806–30,” in The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: State U of New York P, 2006), 167–81; here 169–70. See also Andrea Polaschegg, Der andere Orienta­lismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 191.

18 On the genesis of the concept of an Aryan affinity of German and Indian cultures in the nineteenth century, see Benes, “From Indo-Germans to Aryans,” 175–77. Todd Kontje also discusses the dualistic construction of the Orient in German intellectual and cultural history; Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2004). 109–10). So does Marchand, German Orientalism, (61, and 126–27), who also points out that Schlegel’s division results in “lining up lighter peoples with Indo-European languages and casting darker peoples into cultural-linguistic outer circles” (127).

19 Kontje, German Orientalisms, 121–24; see also Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 368–71.

20 Letter to Voigt, 10 Jan. 1805, in Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 330.

21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, in Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1982), 7–210; here 127. On the importance of “traveling” for understanding Goethe’s attitude toward the Orient, see also Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 307–8.

22 Goethe, Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans, essay accompanying the poems in West-östlicher Divan, 42; see also 150.

23 Goethe, Noten, 183.

24 Goethe, Noten, 165.

25 Kontje, German Orientalisms, 119.

26 See Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, in vol. 8 of Werke: Zürcher Ausgabe, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Zurich: Diogenes, 1977), 348, 384, 406, and 430–31. In spite of his respect for the West-östlicher Divan, Schopenhauer is, however, critical of Goethe for selling out his ideals for worldly gain (see 365).

27 Friedrich Rückerts Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Conrad Beyer (Leipzig: Gustav Fock [1897]); Rückerts Werke, 2 vols., ed. Georg Ellinger (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, [1897]); and Friedrich Rückerts ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden. ed. Philipp Stein (Leipzig: Reclam, 1897). In addition, a one-volume selection was published: Friedrich Rückerts Werke: Auswahl in einem Bande, ed. Oskar Linke (Halle: Otto Hendel [1897]). See Rüdiger Rückert and Max-Rainer Uhrig, Friedrich-Rückert-Literaturen, 1813 bis 2007, MS Word document. [Rückert bibliography] http://www.rueckert-gesellschaft.de/bibliographie.html (accessed 16 May 2008). Regarding this “sudden and intense interest” in Rückert’s poetry in the late nineteenth century, see also Peter Russell, Light in Battle with Darkness: Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 30–31. One should add that this interest did not last beyond the final years of the nineteenth century.

28 See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002), 57 and 111.

29 Annemarie Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert: Lebensbild und Einführung in sein Werk (Freiburg: Herder, 1987), 15.

30 Schimmel Friedrich Rückert, 18.

31 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 151–52; also 391.

32 Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert, 72.

33 Benes, “From Indo-Germans to Aryans,” 179; see also 170.

34 See Leopold Magon, “Goethes ‘West-östlicher Divan’ und Rückerts ‘Östliche Rosen’: Zur Vorgeschichte der ‘Östlichen Rosen,’” in Friedrich Rückert im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen und der Nachwelt: Aufsätze aus der Zeit zwischen 1827 und 1986, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 310–30, esp. 310, 313, 316, and 318; see also Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert, 23.

35 Friedrich Rückert, “Zu Goethe’s west-östlichem Diwan,” in Oestliche Rosen, in Gesammelte poetische Werke, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: J. D. Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1868), 286–367; here 286–87.

36 Goethe, “Über Kunst und Alterthum: Mittheilungen im ersten bis dritten Bande,” in Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), section 1, vol. 41 (1902), 372–73; here 373. See also Magon, “Goethes ‘West-östlicher Divan,’” 310.

37 See Magon, “Goethes ‘West-östlicher Divan,’” 320-21; see also Helmut Prang, Friedrich Rückert: Geist und Form der Sprache (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963), 82–85.

38 Magon, “Goethes ‘West-östlicher Divan,’” 328.

39 For a concise definition of the pentatonic scale and its importance in musical history, see Jeremy Day O’Connell’s article “Pentatonic,” in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu (accessed 13 May 2008).

40 See Guido Adler, “Heterophony,” repr. in Mitchell, SSLD, 624–31; here 626 (originally published as “Über Heterophonie,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 14 [1908]: 17–27).

41 See Friedrich Rückert, Haus und Jahr, in Gesammelte poetische Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: J. D. Sauerländer, 1868), 4, where the poem is entitled “Verbotener Blick” (Forbidden Look). In the following I will discuss the songs in the order in which Mahler first published them in 1907 (see Mitchell, SSLD, 110). Mahler changed little about Rückert’s texts; an overview of his modifications can be found in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 787, 789–92, and 798.

42 See de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 788.

43 See Rückert, Haus und Jahr, 337. In his version, Mahler moved around some of the lines in the first stanza and replaced “friendship of the heart” (Herzensfreundschaft) with “love” (Liebe) in the last line.

44 See also in this context Hermann Danuser’s reading of “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” as a “rejection of a conventional mimetic ideal” (Absage an das tradierte Mimesis-Ideal). Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit, 2nd ed. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 60.

45 See Lutz Köpnick, “Goethes Ikonisierung der Poesie: Zur Schriftmagie im West-östlichen Divan,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1992): 361–89; here 361. See also Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 322–23.

46 Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert, 114.

47 Rückert, Liebesfrühling, in Gesammelte poetische Werke 1:281–639; here 567.

48 See Hubert Grimme, “Liebesfrühlings Entstehung,” in Wolfdietrich Fischer, Friedrich Rückert im Spiegel, 292–300, for a history of Liebesfrühling’s origins.

49 See Rückert, Haus und Jahr, vol. 2 of Gesammelte poetische Werke, 465–66. In contrast to Henry-Louis de La Grange’s claim (de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 794), the poem is not part of the Liebesfrühling collection.

50 See Stuart Feder, “Gustav Mahler um Mitternacht,” in International Review of Psycho-Analysis 7 (1980): 11–26; here 17–18.

51 See Stephen E. Hefling, “The Rückert Lieder,” 352, in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 338–65.

52 Rückert, Liebesfrühling, in Gesammelte poetische Werke, 1:572. That the song has often been seen as being very different from the other Rückert songs may also be explained by the fact that it was composed a year later, during the summer of 1902 (see de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 796).

53 The biographical background for these songs and their publication history can be found in the new critical edition of the text, Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder und andere Texte des Jahres 1834: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe “Schweinfurter Edition”, ed. Hans Wollschläger und Rudolf Kreutner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), commentary 7–12 and 565–66 (henceforth called “critical edition”). In the following I will refer to Rückert’s texts as Kindertodtenlieder and to Mahler’s songs as Kindertotenlieder (in line with the author’s and composer’s own spelling of the titles).

54 Henry-Louis de La Grange assumes that the second and fifth songs were composed in 1904 (de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 827).

55 See Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder: Aus seinem Nachlasse (Frankfurt am Main: J. D. Sauerländer, 1872), 311 (critical edition 377).

56 This depiction of the transition from life to death being accomplished through the climbing of a hill or small mountain anticipates the “mountain gorges” scene from Faust II, at the beginning of Mahler’s excerpt from that text in the second movement of the Eighth Symphony (see chapter 5).

57 See Reinhard Gerlach, Strophen von Leben, Traum und Tod: Ein Essay über Rückert-Lieder von Gustav Mahler (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1983), 88. See also Peter Russell’s comment that Rückert’s poetry, in spite of using imagery affiliated with the Christian tradition, does not promote a Christian worldview (Light in Battle with Darkness, 52; see also 41 and 46).

58 See Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht’s very detailed musicological analysis of the song’s final passage in Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich: Piper, 1986), 245–46. For Eggebrecht, the song articulates a “belief as desire to believe” (Glauben als Glaubenwollen; 246). Russell comes to a similar conclusion (92).

59 Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder (1872), 369 (critical edition, 451). While the song is situated late in Rückert’s posthumous collection, it alludes to the death of the child as a recent event (which has taken place in the night). One could say that Mahler, by making this into the first song of his cycle, reinstates the chronological order ignored by the editor of the 1872 edition of Rückert’s Kindertodtenlieder (see Russell, Light in Battle with Darkness, 35 and 45). The imagery of light and darkness can be found throughout the Kindertotenlieder, as Mitchell has shown (SSLD, 141–42).

60 Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder (1872), 70 (critical edition, 91).

61 Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder (1872), 59 (critical edition, 77).

62 Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder (1872), 341 (critical edition, 416).

63 In a manuscript version of the song, Mahler replaced the word “Haus” with “Schoss” (lap or womb); see Edward F. Kravitt, “Mahler’s Dirges for His Death: 24 February 24, 1901,” The Musical Quarterly 64.3 (1978): 329–53; here 335, 337, and 339. This is certainly interesting from a psychoanalytical perspective: it portrays, in line with Freud’s theories, death as a return to the mother’s womb (339). I do not, however, believe that Mahler’s use of the word “Schoss” in this context legitimizes a reading of the song as illustrating “a concept of life as eternal renewal mystically conceived,” as Kravitt posits (345). While one can say that the song illustrates life returning to its original state, the text, I would argue, offers no indication that this is a new beginning. The image of a return to the womb is also used by Nietzsche and in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; see Stephen E. Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2000), 118–19. The visit of the mothers (depicted as archaic matriarchal goddesses) is one of the key episodes in the second part of Goethe’s Faust (see vs. 6212–6306).

64 See E. Mary Dargie, Music and Poetry in the Songs of Gustav Mahler (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981), 329, and also Mitchell, SSLD, 142. Mahler’s view of nature in the songs based on texts by Rückert is therefore not different from, for instance, that in the Third Symphony: nature is chaotic and does not lend itself to the projection of a divine instance but rather illustrates the lawlessness of all life. In contrast to Dargie, I therefore also do not believe that the cycle’s conflicts are resolved in this final song (324).

65 See Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Young, 1953), 315–20 (Reik does not mention Mahler’s own near-death experience in February); Stuart Feder, “Gustav Mahler, Dying,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 5 (1978): 125–48; here 130–31, and “Gustav Mahler um Mitternacht,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 7 (1980): 11–26; here 14, 17–18, and 22; and Kravitt, “Mahler’s Dirges,” 333–39.

66 See Friedrich Rückert, Werke in sechs Bänden 3:196 (“Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder”) and 169 (“Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” which here has the title “Dank für den Lindenzweig”). Information regarding the timeline of these collections is on 187 and 152). In this same edition, “Um Mitternacht” is the very first poem of the first volume (see 1:39–40) at the beginning of a collection called “Pantheon.”

67 See Liebesfrühling, 1821, in Gesammelte Gedichte, vol. 1, 5th ed. (1834; repr., Erlangen: Carl Heyder, 1840), 221–480.

68 See, for instance, Kindertodtenlieder (1872) 150–51, 153, and 156–57 (critical edition, 194, 199, and 203); the lines “Have I also written poetry in vain, / Why then did I live?” (Hab’ ich auch umsonst gedichtet, / Wozu hab’ ich dann gelebt?) exemplify this creative crisis (151; critical edition, 194). Regarding Rückert’s crisis, see also Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert, 34.

69 See de La Grange, The Years of Challenge, 362 and 709–10.

70 See Feder, “Gustav Mahler, Dying,” 130, and “Gustav Mahler um Mitternacht,” 18.

71 See Dargie, Music and Poetry, 307; Russell, Light in Battle with Darkness, 46–47.

72 Schopenhauer, Aphorismen, 442.

73 Marchand, German Orientalism, 300.

74 See, for example, Schopenhauer, Werke 4:543, 589, and 737.

75 Schopenhauer, Werke 4:684–85.

76 Schopenhauer, Werke 4:543 and 596; see also 589–92. Insights like these may very well be the basis for a belief in reincarnation, occasionally attributed to Mahler (see de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 930–31), although one needs to add that Schopenhauer considers any attempt to capture this process in some form of religious system as being necessarily flawed.

77 Schopenhauer, Aphorismen, 743. See also Bryan Magee, “A Note on Schopenhauer and Buddhism,” in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, rev. ed. (Oxford and New York: Clarendon and Oxford UP, 1997), 340–45; here 345.

78 Richard Batka, “Gustav Mahlers ‘Siebente,’” in the Prager Tagblatt, 20 Sept. 1908, 16; English translation (slightly modified) from Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton, NJ, and London: Princeton UP, 2002), 322. See also Donald Mitchell, “Reception,” 44, in Facsimile Edition of the Seventh Symphony, by Gustav Mahler, 2 vols., ed. Donald Mitchell and Edward Reilly (Amsterdam: Rosbeek, 1995), Commentary volume, 31–74.

79 Mahler himself draws this conclusion as well in a conversation with Alphons Diepenbrock: since Strauss is an “utterly earthly human being” (ein durchaus irdischer Mensch) one would have to consider him Semitic, while he, Mahler, as “homo religiosus” — Mahler here is talking about his public image associated with the Second Symphony, I would argue — would have to be considered non-Semitic; see Diepenbrock, letter to W. G. Hondius van den Broek, 3 Nov. 1909, in Brieven en Documenten, vol. 6, ed. Eduard Reeser (’s-Gravenhage, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 164. In van den Broek’s reply he talks about Goethe’s interest in Spinoza as another example of the flexibility of these categories (166). Could this also have been part of the conversation with Mahler?

80 See Said, Orientalism, 180–90.

81 See Susanna Partsch, Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 74–75 and 78–79; see also Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 376–401.

82 See Richard Strauss, Salome: Drama in One Act after Oscar Wilde’s Poem, English and German; trans. Hedwig Lachmann (Berlin: Adolph Fürstner; New York: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905), 22.

83 Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, 224. See also Gilman, “Strauss, the Pervert,” 38–39.

84 Strauss, Salome, 19.

85 Strauss, Salome, 4, trans. modified.

86 Strauss, Salome, 13–15.

87 See Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58.3 (2001): 201–30; here 215–16; see also, by the same author, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2007), 59. The point of the scene is that the five Jews are unable to grasp the truth of the more advanced religion (Christianity). This stereotype of Judaism as primitive and of Jews as longing to be part of Christianity can also be found in an unpublished diary note by Strauss on the occasion of Mahler’s death. While Strauss calls this “a great loss” (ein schwerer Verlust), he responds rather negatively to Mahler’s Jewish background: “The Jew Mahler could still find elevation in Christianity. / The heroic Wagner as an old man descended to it because of Schopenhauer’s influence.” (Der Jude Mahler konnte im Christentum noch Erhebung gewinnen. / Der Held Richard Wagner ist als Greis durch den Einfluß Schopenhauers wieder zu ihm herabgestiegen.) Richard Strauss, quoted in Herta Blaukopf, “Rivalität und Freundschaft: Die persönlichen Beziehungen zwischen Gustav Mahler und Richard Strauss,” in Briefwechsel, 1888–1911, by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss (Munich and Zurich: R. Piper, 1980), 129–225; here 211.

88 See Gilman, “Strauss, the Pervert,” 56–58. Gilman’s reading is supported by Painter’s musicological analysis in “Contested Counterpoint,” 216.

89 See Painter, “Contested Counterpoint,” 217.

90 See Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940) 111–12; in English, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, 88–89.

91 Blaukopf, “Rivalität und Freundschaft,” 198.

92 See Mahler’s letter of 12 Jan. 1907 to Alma (Mahler, GR, 307). This was during the same visit that Mahler saw Strauss’s Salome twice.

93 For a comprehensive summary of these efforts, see Herta Blaukopf, “Rivalität und Freundschaft,” 186–88, and de La Grange, Triumph and Disillusion, 249–52.

94 Gilman, “Strauss, the Pervert,” 68.

95 See James L. Zychowicz, “The Lieder of Mahler and Richard Strauss,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, ed. James Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 245–72; here 264, and 268–69.

96 See Said, Orientalism, 99, for a discussion of this strategy of privileging a “classical” period over the present in Western thinking on the Orient. The poems that Mahler chose are from the Golden Age of Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), a period when Buddhism was very influential (see de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 4: A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911) (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 1305 and 1309–10; see also Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, 20th ed. (Kelkheim, Germany: YinYang Media, 2001), 107).

97 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 106–7, and 120.

98 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 148.

99 See Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe, 152; Memories and Letters, 123. Alma here appears to think that the collection had been around for some time. The exact time of publication of Bethge’s collection is not known; it was announced in a Berlin periodical on 5 Oct. 1907 but may have been circulating before that date (see de La Grange, A New Life, 1294).

100 See Hans Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, 1. Bethge mentions his sources in his afterword (103–4).

101 See Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2001), 61.

102 Der Merker: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Musik und Theater 27.1 November-Heft (1911): iii; see also Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 58.

103 See Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, 21–22. For a line-by-line overview of Mahler’s changes to Bethge’s texts in Das Lied von der Erde, see Stephen E. Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 120–31, and de La Grange, A New Life, 1333–34, 1340, 1345–46, 1352-53, 1358–59, and 1370–72. In the following, I will discuss only those changes that are relevant for my analysis.

104 Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 89.

105 Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, 107.

106 See Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986), 48.

107 Hefling, Lied von der Erde, 88 and 86.

108 Bethge’s title for the poem is “Die Einsame im Herbst” (The Lonely Woman in Autumn; 59). The poem is attributed to Tchang Tsi (ninth century), possibly incorrectly (see de La Grange, A New Life, 1336). Mahler’s changes, in comparison with Bethge’s version, are minimal.

109 However, as Mitchell notes, most songs do not specify any season, and the time of year must be inferred. This and the actual contexts in which the different seasons are mentioned in the text argue against making nature’s cyclical progression the core of the Lied’s message.

110 In Bethge’s text the poem is entitled “Der Pavillon aus Porzellan” (The Porcelain Pavilion; 23–24) and attributed to Li Tai Po. It immediately follows “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde.”

111 See Eveline Nikkels, “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” Friedrich Nietzsches Bedeutung für Gustav Mahler (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1989), 151.

112 For an alternative interpretation see Danuser, for whom the mysteriousness (“Rätselhaftigkeit”) of this moment indicates that the image of youth can only be illusory (Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 66).

113 See Arthur B. Wenk, “The Composer as Poet in ‘Das Lied von der Erde,’” Nineteenth-Century Music 1.1 (1977): 33–47; here 36–37.

114 The implication is, paradoxically, that precisely because art refuses to comment on society and is just aesthetic “play” it can have the social function described above.

115 Donald Mitchell, arguing from a musicological point of view, characterizes the third and fourth movements as being the most Oriental in Das Lied von der Erde (SSLD, 276 and 286). Similar observations are made by de La Grange (A New Life, 1342 and 1348); see also Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit, 228–29.

116 Based on Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, “Am Ufer” (26–27). The author is assumed to be Li Tai Po. In Bethge’s collection, the poem precedes “Der Trunkene im Frühling.”

117 It is possible to link this “sun” to the narrator’s desire in the second song to see the “sun of love” (Sonne der Liebe) shine again. Another similarity between both songs is the use of the word “Blüten” (blossoms or flowers) in both songs.

118 See Wenk, “The Composer as Poet,” 38.

119 Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 99.

120 See Bethge, Die chinesische Flöte, 28–29.

121 See de La Grange, A New Life, 1334.

122 See Wenk’s diagram (43); I disagree with Wenk’s view that the second and third stanzas of the second section should be attributed to the same first-person narrator. The line “I will never stray abroad” (Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen) in the third stanza is clearly meant to indicate that we are dealing with a narrator who is different from the friend wandering in the mountains (second stanza).

123 If one accepts this reading, however, it should noted that “the beyond,” here and in the Eighth Symphony, is a highly anthropomorphic construction; in order to imagine the “beyond,” humans necessarily rely on images from the “here and now.”

124 Here I disagree with Donald Mitchell’s otherwise extremely insightful analysis of the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde. Mitchell describes “Der Abschied” as an example of death “conquered through ecstatic acceptance” (SSLD, 355); I disagree, both on basis of the text and music, with the “ecstatic” part of Mitchell’s interpretation, which to me suggests some form of celebrative aspect. Certainly the music accompanying the natural imagery is meant to provide reprieve; but does this also go for the segment following it, the final section with its multiple repetition of the word “ewig”? The conductor Bernard Haitink, in an interview on Das Lied von der Erde, suggests that what the finale intends is more complex than consolation: “I don’t know if the end of Das Lied von der Erde is a consolation. I don’t know. It is just more than that. Humanity dissolves into the air and nothing is left. A sort of emptiness — which is very moving.” Frank Scheffer, Conducting Mahler, DVD (Paris: Idéale Audience, 2005), 1:01:43–1:01:59. In my view this is precisely the point: Mahler is searching for a philosophy of life and death that is decidedly postmetaphysical and heterophonic, and therefore more complex than any scenario that seeks to read some form of redemption into the end of Das Lied von der Erde. Haitink’s view is in line with that of Adorno, who opposes a pantheistic reading of the end of Das Lied and a reconciliatory reading in general (MP, 296; MPE, 154).

125 See de La Grange, A New Life, 1364–65; the complete poem can be found in de La Grange, Mahler 1:824-25.

126 See Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 110, and de La Grange, A New Life, 1363–64. The complete poem is reprinted in Mitchell, SSLD, 124 and in de La Grange, Mahler 1:831–32.

127 On Fechner’s dogma of the continued existence of the soul after death in relation to Das Lied von der Erde, see Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 116–17; Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2004), 150–51; and de La Grange, A New Life, 1382–84. Little is known about Mahler’s knowledge of Fechner or to what extent Mahler agreed with Fechner’s thinking. In the case of Das Lied von der Erde, it is important to remember that the idea of the existence of some form of striving, of will, embodied by nature and lasting beyond humans’ individual lives was extremely common in nineteenth-century German philosophy and was also embraced by Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (without, however, assuming some kind of spiritual similarity between man and nature). The assumption of Fechner’s importance for Mahler’s Lied von der Erde is often based on the similar imagery that both use. However, one needs to take into account that using natural imagery in order to design a philosophical ethics is extremely common in nineteenth-century German intellectual discourse in general, not only in relation to religious philosophy but also often in developing a secular philosophy of life as well. A concise summary of Fechner’s ideas as they relate to Mahler’s work and thinking can be found in Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute, 485–88; and de La Grange, A New Life, 1693–95.

128 See in this context also Hermann Danuser’s observation that Das Lied von der Erde ends with a dissonant accord (Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 110).

129 Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 84, 86, and 88.

130 See de La Grange, A New Life, 1326, 1342 and 1348.

131 Goethe, letter to Thomas Carlyle dated 20 Jul. 1827, in Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, section 4, vol. 42 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1907), 267–72; here 270. See also “Goethes wichtigste Äusserungen über ‘Weltliteratur,’” in Werke, vol. 12, ed. Erich Trunz, 361–64. The term “Weltliteratur” is also used in Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann, which Mahler knew well. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 362.

132 See Schimmel, who also discusses the above passage (Friedrich Rückert, 69–70), and, for instance, Robert Boxberger, “Rückerts Stellung zur Weltliteratur,” in Friedrich Rückert im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen und der Nachwelt: Aufsätze aus der Zeit zwischen 1827 und 1986, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 111–24. A discussion of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reception of Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur can be found in John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006), 46–72.

133 Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus points out that interest in the idea of Weltliteratur consequently faded in the later nineteenth century when the idea of competing national literatures became more prominent, even though it can be argued that the two ideas complement each other in productive ways. See Meyer-Kalkus, “World Literature beyond Goethe,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 96–121; here 111–12.

134 Schimmel, Friedrich Rückert, 96.

135 See Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 25.

Conclusion

1 See David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. (London: Royal Music Association, 1985), 54–71. According to Berio, Sinfonia was inspired by a 1967 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein and was subsequently commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. See Thomas Schäfer, Modellfall Mahler: Kompositorische Rezeption in zeitgenössischer Musik (Munich: Fink, 1999), 125.

2 Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words, 39.

3 Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2006), 6 and 136.

4 Berio, Remembering the Future, 82. Interestingly, Berio bases his theory of semantic openness in music on Umberto Eco’s semiotic study Opera aperta; in English, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989).

5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 263.

6 See also Joshua Cohen’s provocative essay “Purist of the Self: Did Mahler Get the Biographer He Deserves?” Harper’s Magazine, July 2008, 88–94: “Any true biography or program intending to describe Mahler’s ‘world-era’ should engage with the Holocaust, which sounded the last discordant cadence of Mitteleuropean culture” (94).

7 See Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002), 116. The piece performed was the Second Symphony.

8 See Johan Giskes, “Van triomf naar tragedie (1920–1942),” in Mahler in Amsterdam van Mengelberg tot Chailly, ed. Johan Giskes and Ester L. Woudhuysen (Bussum and Amsterdam: THOTH/Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, 1995), 57–72; here 71–72. Performances included the First and Fourth Symphonies, Die Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and excerpts from other works.

9 For examples see Hilmes, Witwe im Wahn: Das Leben der Alma Mahler-Werfel (Munich: Siedler, 2004), 241 and 286. See also Hilmes, Im Fadenkreuz: Politische Gustav-Mahler-Rezeption, 1919–1945. Eine Studie über den Zusammenhang von Antisemitismus und Kritik an der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 177–78.

10 See Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 56–60.

11 Hilmes, Witwe im Wahn, 282.

12 Regarding Alma’s close ties to Schuschnigg, see Oliver Hilmes, Witwe im Wahn, 276–78; Bruno Walter discusses his friendship with Schuschnigg in his autobiography, Theme and Variations: An Autobiography, trans. James A. Galston (1946; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 317 and 319. The paradox underlying Schuschnigg’s regime was that he was “never quite sure whether to oppose Nazism outright, or compete with Hitler for the loyalty of Austria’s fascist and German nationalist elements, while reaching some modus vivendi with the Third Reich.” Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 224–25.

13 Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 72–74.

14 See Hilmes, Witwe im Wahn, 279–80; for a more detailed analysis of the discussions about the Mahler monument, see also Im Fadenkreuz, 200–213.

15 Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 57; Hilmes, Im Fadenkreuz, 190.

16 Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild, 79 and 86. Křenek at the time published an essay that was very critical of Walter’s views of “modern” music. See Im Atem der Zeit: Erinnerungen an die Moderne, trans. Friedrich Saathen and Sabine Schulte (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1998), 903–4. In Walter’s case, one could say, his “classical” reading of Mahler mirrored the cultural priorities of the regime for which it was performed. Willem Mengelberg’s far more radical readings of Mahler’s scores — emphasizing the music’s contrasts, discontinuities, and dissonances (see “Introduction,” n. 4) — however did not keep him from collaborating with the German occupiers after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.

17 Walter, Theme and Variations, 303–4; see also Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2001), 233.

18 Hilmes, Witwe im Wahn, 288–89.

19 For example, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 58–61 and 94–95.

20 For a recent critical analysis of this discourse in German cultural and intellectual history, including a discussion of current scholarship on the topic, see, for example, Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 2002), 7–11 and 19–20.

21 Michael P. Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2007), 8.

22 See Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58.3 (2001): 201–30; here 201–2. The page numbers in parentheses in the text in this paragraph refer to this work. Karen Painter works out these ideas in more detail in her recent book Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2007), in particular 51–68.

23 In Remembering the Future Berio speaks of Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s neoclassicism as being “very different sides of a musical journey that wants to exorcise and at the same time come to terms with memory and diversities. . . . The seeds of this conflicting relationship with memories and diversities are also present in Mahler. Breaking conventional stylistic codes, he solitarily developed within himself a musical discourse made of contrasting yet complementary forces where, in the same breath, trite melodic signals and compelling ideas, though ‘institutionally’ incompatible with each other, interact” (73–74). The Stravinsky piece that Berio has in mind here is Agon, with its wide range of references (75). Elsewhere Berio states that Adorno has problems in “dealing with diversities” (57), meaning that his theories are not equipped to deal with the trajectory of twentieth-century musical history Berio envisions.

24 For an impression of the diversity of ideological responses to modernism among Jewish artists and intellectuals see, for example, Leon Botstein, Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der deutschen und österreichischen Kultur, 1848 bis 1938 (Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), 136–48. See also Steinberg’s critique of the “derivation of critical modernism from an essential Jewish ‘identity,’” (Judaism Musical and Unmusical, 254n42). For an earlier discussion of this issue, see Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1978), for example, 101, 131, 153, 157–59, and 161.

25 For a recent critique of the use of this term in German-Jewish cultural history, see Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical, 3.

26 Sander L. Gilman interprets masochism in the context of conflicting cultural expectations as the “acting out of the conflict felt between the claims lodged against the individual and the ability of that individual to counter these claims completely.” “Preface,” in One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, ed. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), v–viii; here v–vi.

27 Morten Solvik, “Mahler’s Untimely Modernism,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 152–71; here 171.

28 See Berio, Remembering the Future, 24, 45. Independently of Berio, this dialectical formula of characterizing modernism’s double relationship with time has also been picked up by Patrizia C. McBride in a recent volume on the legacies of modernism. See “Introduction: The Future’s Past — Modernism, Critique, and the Political,” in Legacies of Modernism. Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950, ed. Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žagar, 1–13. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

29 See in this context, for instance, the increased emphasis on musical “Germanness” in writings on music after the First World War, which has been identified by Pamela M. Potter in Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1998), for example, 203–4.