This is not a book like other books about Gustav Mahler. It is different in that it does not approach Mahler’s oeuvre from a musicologist’s perspective, but rather focuses on his interest in and use of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Reading Mahler is meant as a companion to Mahler’s music that helps its audiences understand its literary and cultural roots. Mahler’s view of German cultural history is of great importance for understanding his music in the context of its time. Only if we reconstruct this history and Mahler’s perspective on it will the true polemical points underlying Mahler’s compositions become clear. The goal of this study is therefore not a comprehensive view of Mahler’s entire oeuvre. Not all of Mahler’s symphonies, for instance, contain literary, philosophical, or cultural references that can be reconstructed. While the ambitions of this book are modest, my claim is that the perspective offered in this book will challenge and perhaps even change our view of Mahler’s music.
Much has been said from a musicological viewpoint about Mahler’s use of musical forms and content in relation to musical history. The assumption, implicit or explicit, is often that Mahler’s interest in literature and culture merely mirrors his musical preferences. Someone with traditionalist musical preferences will probably like a figurative painting more than an abstract one. But does music history simply mirror other parts of cultural history, or is it rather that one can make us see the other in a different light? Literature and the visual arts in Vienna around 1900 underwent an intriguing period of self-reflection and renewal that manifested itself, for instance, in a critical and highly eclectic attitude toward their own past. What if Mahler’s strong interest in German cultural history does not simply affirm traditions but rather seeks to take traditions apart and to reassemble them according to different priorities? If that is the case, interpreting Mahler’s work in its cultural contexts may shed some new light not only on its underlying intentions but also on our current ways of looking at his work and life. Or a cultural reading of Mahler can point to innovative or critical aspects of his music that have hitherto gone unnoticed.
My book does not claim to show a complete picture of the intellectual and cultural landscape in which Mahler’s work originated, but rather fragments of that picture. Others will be needed to complete it. Texts and images can help us understand Mahler’s work and grasp some of the issues underlying it without giving us necessarily definitive answers. In the following, I will not pretend to be a musicologist; rather, I intend to raise questions from the perspective of a literary and cultural historian. In addition to offering a companion to the literature, philosophy, and paintings in Mahler’s music, this study aims to contribute to an increasingly lively dialogue between musicologists, intellectual historians, political scientists, scholars in Jewish studies, and others who are interested in Mahler’s life and works.
Such a dialogue is highly desirable. While Mahler’s music is omnipresent and the man himself has become something of a cultural icon, and in spite of the fact that Vienna around 1900 has become the object of rather prolific scholarly fascination, I still believe that too little is known about the precise cultural contexts in which Mahler’s works originated. The popularity of Mahler’s work today is immense. His symphonies are frequently performed on concert stages; famous conductors like to celebrate milestones in their own careers or of their orchestras by performing a Mahler symphony, and there is a seemingly endless stream of new (or reissued) Mahler performances on CDs. But what exactly intrigues us about this music? Nobody who is acquainted with or knows his music is neutral about it. Dislike for Mahler’s music is as old as the music itself, as recent scholarship has documented.1 On the other hand, Mahler enthusiasts are exceptionally devoted to his work. But is it the musical material alone that intrigues us?
Leon Botstein has argued recently that one of the most dominant stereotypes about Mahler today is that his music expresses our deepest, most personal emotions; his works are seen as a highly complex and ambivalent representation of “the inner experience of life” that includes not just the positive but also the negative.2 That Mahler’s music is perceived to be so highly personal may, to some extent, explain the radically divergent responses that Mahler’s music evokes. For some, Mahler’s music may be too personal, while others may enjoy exploring their emotions through his music. Elaborating on Botstein’s analysis, I would argue that it is part of our contemporary perception of Mahler’s music that emotions are given a sense of importance that points beyond the subjective, even though their basic subjectivity is never questioned. Because of its highly abstract nature and the fundamental, irrevocable ambiguity of any attempt to assign non-musical meaning to it, music seems particularly well suited to accommodate a residual longing for meaning beyond the purely subjective that still exists in postmetaphysical times such as the early twenty-first century. Given that much about music relates to feelings, it is perhaps one of the last places where our metaphysical yearning can find shelter despite our “rational” knowledge that we live in a time without common values.
In addition to its appeal to our emotions and desire for values, Mahler’s Jewishness can be seen as a third reason underlying the contemporary attention to his music. To explain Mahler’s contemporary popularity, Botstein speaks of the “post WWII romanticization of the acculturated European Jewish cosmopolitan intellectual and artist” from before 1945.3 Mahler stands for a tradition, in other words, that was at once largely lost in the Holocaust and long ignored by mainstream European culture. By speaking of it in terms of a “romanticization,” Botstein indicates that there is something questionable about this newfound interest in Mahler; it is not necessarily based on an accurate picture of the man or his work.
As we ask ourselves why we find meaning in Mahler’s music, a more important question to ask is who exactly “we” are in this context. Mahler’s reception has followed quite divergent trajectories within different national contexts and sometimes even within one national context. The two men who have been most important for making Mahler’s music known in the United States, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, represent widely disparate ways of looking at Mahler’s music. Bruno Walter had worked as an assistant conductor under Mahler and was his friend. After Hitler’s invasion of Austria in 1938 he was forced to go into exile. Walter saw Mahler’s work as the culmination of Western music and of German music in particular.4 His interpretations of Mahler’s works were cautious; they emphasized the unity of Mahler’s scores, their intrinsic balance, and their aim for harmony that was consistent, as he saw it, with the tradition in which they had originated. Bernstein, by contrast, who like Mahler was a prominent conductor and a prolific composer, emphasized in his performances Mahler’s contradictions, moments of dissonance, ambiguities and ironies, and the music’s emotional extremes. Both men stand for very different views on Mahler’s music and, to some extent, on the issue of who Mahler was as a person.
This should suffice to show that our perception of Mahler’s music is at least in part the product of historically and culturally specific expectations that we associate with his work. Although the enormous attention paid to Mahler’s work is of course a positive thing, we should perhaps be somewhat suspicious of this attention. That Mahler’s music is — among other things, I would argue — about emotions is clear, but do its audiences really understand the emotional narrative that it is telling? If we want to adopt the hypothesis that Mahler’s music hints at values in a time in which most values are being debunked or seriously discredited, then we will also need to study the conditions under which the values promoted by Mahler are still possible. It is rather surprising to me that one of the most knowledgeable Mahler scholars believes that Mahler’s works are the product of a deep belief in Christian dogma.5 Such a reading completely ignores the critical attitude toward tradition that I believe manifests itself in all of Mahler’s music. In the following, I will argue that Mahler in his work is deeply influenced by modernity and its acknowledgement that any form of normativity can only be subjective, and that falling back on old, dogmatic metaphysical frameworks is not an option. Finally, if Mahler’s Jewishness is part of the attractiveness of his works — the fact that his music represents a legacy of German-Jewish culture of which so much is irreparably lost since the Shoah — then we are obliged to ask under which historical conditions Jews in Germany and Austria could participate in German-Austrian culture, and to what extent their works mirror the problems and dilemmas of Jews who were cultural participants. The cultural approach that I propose in this study will seek not only to answer the question of how Mahler’s Jewishness influenced his music, but also to determine what the consequences of this insight are for us and for our attitudes toward cultural history, no matter what traditions we may belong to ourselves.
I am, of course, only the latest in a line of scholars to have asked these questions. But I want to ask them in a way that is different from the approach adopted in other studies on Mahler. It has, in the words of Leon Botstein, become “increasingly difficult to untangle the historical Mahler from the massive overlay of posthumous reception.”6 What I propose as a strategy for getting a clearer picture of the historical Mahler is to look at his literary and cultural interests, in particular his image of German literary and cultural history and his own place in it. Tradition is never static but is rather in a constant state of flux. Traditions often have a legitimizing function; they serve specific interests in the here and now, and the parties representing those interests do not necessarily aim at a historically accurate account of events or at a perspective that reflects the diversity inherent to all cultural history. There are periods in which the desire to locate, or rewrite, one’s own national cultural history is more pronounced than in others. From 1870 to 1914 Western Europe in general underwent a particularly lively period of inventing national traditions.7 Germany and Austria were no exception. Germany’s unification in 1871 forced Germans to reflect upon and commemorate what they had in common — to invent traditions — but in Austria it also sparked a debate about the extent to which it wanted to be part of Germany or to go its own way. The invention of tradition can rely on specific historical events but can also revert to elements of “mythology and folklore”; intertwined with this, the creation of enemies inside or outside the nation can serve to establish national unity, as it did in the case of Germany.8 Because tradition consists not of historical facts but of cultural constructions, it is easy to see how literature, music, and the other arts can not only play an important role in the construction of tradition but also be useful as a means for studying the dynamics underlying the creation and institutionalization of traditions as frames of reference.
And yet little attention has been paid to the patterns behind the literary, philosophical, and other cultural references in Mahler’s music apart from a superficial identification of some sources. There is no doubt that Mahler himself is at least partially to blame for this. Mahler sometimes made quite substantial programmatic statements about his orchestral work, which he invariably retracted thereafter, sometimes almost immediately after making them. Such anti-programmatic/programmatic statements are often seen as a nuisance; many would argue that they unnecessarily complicate access to his works. Scholars are therefore often inclined to ignore Mahler’s warnings against reading his music as a representation of a clear and fixed set of ideas. It is important to take this anti-programmatic impetus of Mahler’s aesthetics very seriously. I will argue in the following chapters that Mahler’s unwillingness to pin himself down on a specific set of principles, be they musicological or philosophical, is a constitutive element of his aesthetics. At the core of his creative work is a profound feeling of ambiguity toward representation. While Mahler himself has often addressed the issue of musical programs,9 the most elaborate attempt to explain the anti-programmatic agenda underlying Mahler’s music is a letter that Bruno Walter, presumably at Mahler’s request, wrote to the musicologist Ludwig Schiedermair in December 1901. Mahler “rejects in the most energetic way every program” (perhorresziert aufs energischste jedes Programm), Walter states.10 That seems to be a very clear and unambiguous statement. Music itself needs to be at the center; what music tells us cannot be stated in words; at best they offer a “bad translation” (schlechte Übersetzung) of what music wants to communicate (49).
In spite of this, according to the same letter by Walter, words or images can nevertheless help us to understand music: “The possibility exists to point to the region from which such sharply contoured musical expressions come by means of a fitting image” (Es besteht die Möglichkeit, die Region, aus der so scharf umrissene musikalische Äußerungen kommen, durch ein passendes Bild anzudeuten; 50). The word “image” in this context is not to be understood in a visual sense, I would argue, but rather as any type of material that comments on music from a nonmusical perspective. Such material (words, images) can help us understand what music is about, even though it is just an approximation at best. The fact that Mahler did not see his music as an unmediated expression of a text — as an illustration of something situated beyond the realm of music — does not mean that texts or images are irrelevant when it comes to understanding the meaning of Mahler’s music. A composer may, again according to Walter, be able to produce “a great number of images, of which the essence is related to his work” (eine ganze Anzahl von Bildern, deren Wesen mit dem seines Werkes verwandt ist) without thereby being programmatic (51). Mahler’s anti-programmatic stance is not meant to discourage listeners from formulating the free associations they have when listening to his music; his listeners should not reduce it to one message. While throughout its development Mahler’s music propagates diverging ways to deal with the problem of “art without a program,” this interest in a multitude of associations remains something constant. It shows Mahler’s affinity with the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and its interest in appropriating materials from all kinds of different sources.
From Walter’s letter one can draw the conclusion that Mahler’s anti-programmatic impulse should not keep us from discussing texts (or images) in relation to his music. Mahler’s interest in literature was quite sophisticated. Mahler’s friends and intellectual companions (Gesprächspartner) consistently stated that Mahler was well acquainted with German literature and well versed in German intellectual history. The texts Mahler uses in his music are chosen quite deliberately. I am interested in the ways in which Mahler uses references to literature, philosophy, and the visual arts both within his music and in statements about his compositions. I propose to reconstruct what these references tell us about Mahler’s thinking about his own art, and about the way in which Mahler saw German culture as a whole, including its past, present, and future. Mahler’s literary interests in particular were oriented toward literary history rather than toward contemporary literature.11 But it would, in my opinion, be incorrect to describe these interests as conventional for that reason. Mahler’s interests in these areas are unorthodox and driven by a critical impulse, a spirit of rebellion. This is mirrored in Mahler’s conceptualization of German culture. “Culture” does not function in Mahler’s view as a monolithic whole, in the sense of a clearly defined canon — “tradition” understood in a very narrow sense — but rather as heterogeneous, pervaded by conflicts and tensions. The “cultural” approach I propose here is not new to Mahler studies; one does find frequent references to Mahler’s literary and cultural interests in scholarship on Mahler. Rarely, however, are these interests at the core of an analysis; they are primarily used to illustrate musicological points or as part of a musicological analysis.
For our contemporary view of Mahler in general and his relation to German culture in particular, Adorno’s monograph Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy), first published in German in 1960, has been a landmark resource. Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was trained in philosophy, musicology, and sociology, and studied composition in the 1920s with Alban Berg in Vienna. Because of his Jewish background and his left-leaning political sympathies, he went into exile in 1934, returning to Germany in 1949. As a member of the Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule), he became one of the most influential cultural critics who fought for a reinterpretation of German culture in the light of Germany’s fascist and anti-Semitic past. There are two aspects of Mahler’s music that Adorno sees as problematic and that nevertheless structure his interpretations. One of the central ideas encountered in all of Adorno’s essays on Mahler is that Mahler works with musical materials and forms that are archaic: “Because his material was obsolete, the new not yet set free, in Mahler the antiquated, what had fallen by the wayside, has become a cryptogram of the sounds as yet unheard that followed it” (MPE, 126; Weil sein Material veraltet, das Neue noch nicht befreit war, ist bei Mahler das Veraltete, am Wege liegen Gebliebene zum Kryptogramm der noch nicht gehörten Klänge danach geworden: MP, 270). Outdated form and vocabulary stand in the way of innovation: “A taboo is placed on novelty” (MPE, 6; Ein Tabu liegt über dem Neuen: MP, 155). This is of course a problematic diagnosis; it is only valid within the historical development of Western music as Adorno sees it. While Adorno sees the lack of formal innovation as an aspect of Mahler’s style that is his conscious choice, such an assessment comes dangerously close to the stereotype promoted by anti-Semites that Jewish composers were not able to produce anything new, but instead copied what was already there — a reproach that can be found in the literature about Mahler well into the postwar period.12 Adorno, however, does not deny a critical dimension to this use of the outdated. This explains the importance Adorno attributes to moments of fracture or breakdown in Mahler’s music. But because Mahler’s music makes it clear that the “obsolete” is no longer functional and is therefore to be understood ironically, it points to the necessity of a new musical language. Especially in the last chapter of his monograph on Mahler, Adorno tries to interpret Mahler’s innovations in Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth as prefigurations of those by composers who came later, in particular Berg, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky (MP, 293, 300, 304, and 307; MPE, 151, 157–58, 162, and 164).
A second problem that Adorno identifies in Mahler’s music is the role of popular music, the fact that Mahler breaks down the barriers between high and low art. Adorno speaks of a “reactionary element” (MPE, 61; reaktionäres Moment: MP, 209) in Mahler’s music. By this he means the naive aspects of Mahler’s music: the presence of “folk music” (MPE, 31; Volksmusik: MP, 180, trans. modified) or what Adorno calls “vulgar music” (MPE, 50; Vulgärmusik: MP, 200): the posthorn, the ubiquitous military music, and so on. For Adorno, such elements are further proof of Mahler’s formal asynchronicity, the obsolescence of his materials. They are also problematic because they are prime examples of the commodification of music; they suggest that music can easily create collectivity. The presence of such naive elements in Mahler’s music runs the risk, for Adorno, of continually compromising what his music intends to express, which is a critique of such a naive understanding of music, of reading more into music than what is produced in the here and now (MP, 153; MPE, 5). Adorno maintains a strict separation between “low” and “high” art and finds any mixture of the two problematic. The reactionary element is for Adorno always present in Mahler’s music, and at times it triumphs over its critical, progressive dimension, for instance in the Eighth Symphony (MP, 283; MPE, 138).
Leon Botstein has made the provocative observation that Adorno’s concept of culture may have more in common with that of Mahler’s enemies (well into the Nazi era) than one would expect.13 Mahler himself once said, as Alfred Roller has reported, that the “anti-Semitic papers” of his time were “the only ones who still have any respect for me” (die antisemitischen Zeitungen sind . . . die einzigen, die vor mir noch etwas Respekt haben).14 Of course what Mahler’s critics saw as negative — the disruptive potential of Mahler’s art in relation to their vision of the German national cultural tradition — was given a positive interpretation by Mahler (and later by Adorno). Mahler wanted to be subversive, and Adorno is very much interested in working out this rebellious element in Mahler. And yet the fact that Adorno refers to Mahler’s achievements mostly in negative terms — only rarely or not at all does Mahler develop an advanced musical language; he instead deconstructs an older musical language — may also be read as an indication that Adorno is never really able to transcend the specific concept of culture he has in mind. While it would not be correct to say that Adorno’s concept of culture is in any way naive, in his musicological writings he does emphasize historical patterns of development of musical material or its “historical ‘movement.’”15 The decisive difference between earlier, idealistic models of musical history and Adorno’s version is that Adorno emphasizes the “emancipation of the Subject as a process of ‘demythologization’ of the material.”16 Adorno describes this development as a process of increased rationalization of the musical material, which leads to more value being placed on dissonance and atonality. Musical history will eventually debunk the ideological functions music has played in the service of creating collectivity. At the same time, however, there is also a longing for earlier (diatonal and more “subjective”) modes of music making. In spite of this dialectical tendency in musical history, Adorno postulated the existence of an end point where the ideological function of music, more precisely of tonality and its mimetic suggestion, is recognized and abandoned. In the works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky this end point realizes itself in exemplary forms, as is clear from Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music), which juxtaposes analyses of both of these composers. In the end, their works express the inability of music to create a metaphysical substitute for a lost collectivity (even though Stravinsky is less clear on this point than Schoenberg). With that, on the one hand Adorno offers a radical counterreading of cultural history that denies any of the idealistic functions culture once performed. On the other hand, in some respects it remains quite uncritical. In the end, it is still culture that articulates this message. Culture, in other words, still plays a primary role in man’s understanding of his relation to the world.
In some respects Mahler is for Adorno, and despite the latter’s respect for the composer, a questionable case. One could say that Adorno’s ideology, to some extent, stands in the way of his appreciation of actual works of art, even though he also seems, at times at least, to be willing to question at least part of his interpretative model in favor of Mahler’s actual music production. My reservations about Adorno have to do with the premises of Adorno’s work, the structure behind his thinking. Leon Botstein has stated that after Adorno the elements of “criticism and resistance” present in Mahler’s work and Adorno’s interpretation of it vanished from public perception.17 This may be true, but I would argue that Adorno himself is also to blame, at least partially. Criticism and resistance remain very abstract categories in Adorno’s analysis of Mahler. In spite of the range of Adorno’s knowledge and interests, the image of Mahler that emerges from Adorno’s essays remains remarkably anemic and colorless. Mahler, in Adorno’s view, leaves us with the impression of a person with a masterly but very technical interest in musical structures and ways to manipulate them, but certainly not as a full-fledged intellectual with broad literary and cultural interests who may also have been, at least to some extent, aware of the ways in which society was changing around him. This image cries out for correction. In spite of my great respect for the not only highly original but also very detailed and complex writings by Adorno on Mahler, I wish to make three main objections to his analyses.
Adorno, in spite of a sophisticated model of historicity that combines insight into historical development with a respect for the individuality of musical works that may contradict general patterns, sees cultural development as linear and closely tied to formal innovation. Formally, the use of dissonance and atonality are the most important markers for Adorno of a musical piece’s place in musical history. It is questionable whether Mahler indeed relies on “outdated” forms and materials to the extent Adorno suggests. It is also important to stress that Adorno offers one specific way of looking at musical history. If one were to use not tonality but, for instance, heterogeneity of forms and materials as a defining criterion, Mahler’s music would have to be considered among the most advanced of his time. Paradoxically, Adorno believes that Wagner is, in terms of his place in musical history, more progressive than Mahler in some respects, because Wagner’s innovative development of musical form does play with dissonance, at least from time to time (in other respects Wagner is highly reactionary).18 Mahler’s music, in Adorno’s view, does not participate in the linear development of formal means at the disposal of the composer (MP, 167; MPE, 19); in fact, like Stravinsky after him, he intentionally works “archaic” elements into his musical vocabulary. In Mahler’s music, the individual dreams of the “irresistible collective” (unaufhaltsamen Kollektiv); at the same time, his music expresses the impossibility of the individual’s identifying with the collective (MP, 182; MPE, 33).
Adorno radically downplays the importance of text for Mahler. This is surprising, because Adorno’s own cultural interests were very broad, and he was quite active as a literary critic as well. It is an interesting phenomenon that literary and cultural approaches dominate in scholarship on Wagner,19 while for Mahler, as I have already stated, attention is paid to literary and cultural aspects but is generally subsumed into a musicological approach. This is quite clear in Adorno’s work, as he admits: “For musicians, words happen to be vehicles for their compositions” (Für Musiker sind nun einmal Worte Vehikel ihrer Kompositionen).20 To phrase it another way: words are tools to communicate what is at stake in the music; their value is thus purely instrumental. By this, in my view, Adorno does not mean that in a specific work words serve to illustrate merely what the music communicates (words mirror the music), but rather that in the text the same developments and conflicts are articulated as in music. This in turn implies that an analysis of the text merely confirms what the music has already told us. But is this really the case? One of the reasons why Wagner is and always has been so much a part of the public sphere, I would argue, is because of his textual production — the texts of his operas, but also his essays and journalism. Because of Wagner’s texts, we are forced to look at his works in their relationship to the German cultural tradition and his place therein, on the one hand, and the ways in which art and politics, more specifically Wagner’s art and its political legacy, are interconnected on the other. Paying attention to the text in Mahler’s works may also mean reclaiming Mahler for the public sphere; it forces us to ask difficult questions that go beyond our purely subjective, non-discursive enjoyment of his music. The text forces us to acknowledge the historicity of our experiences and of our ways of experiencing the world. The text has the potential to function as a form of cultural memory.
Surprisingly, Adorno is mostly silent about the “Jewish Question” in Mahler’s work and life. This is astonishing because Adorno was, of course, well aware of the anti-Semitic undercurrent in German-speaking cultural history. His book on Wagner is quite explicit not only about Wagner’s anti-Semitism but also about Wagner’s tendency to use and abuse the Jews surrounding him whenever it suited him.21 In Adorno’s book and essays on Mahler, one can find references to the anti-Semitic reception of Mahler (MP, 151; MPE, 3). Adorno, however, has little to say about what Mahler’s Jewishness meant for his activities as a composer in Vienna around 1900. In a passage on Das Lied von der Erde Adorno summarizes his views on Jewish aspects of Mahler’s music. The oriental setting in Das Lied functions, according to Adorno, as a “cover for Mahler’s Jewish element” (MPE, 149; Deckbild von Mahlers jüdischem Element: MP, 291). Such a statement suggests that Mahler attempted to think through his Jewishness intentionally in his music, albeit indirectly. But Adorno does not pursue this line of thinking. He argues that there is very little evidence for the inclusion of Jewish folk melodies in Mahler’s work, but the music does nevertheless contain a more abstract Jewish aspect that Adorno acknowledges is hard to grasp on a conceptual level. In particular, Mahler’s late style is characterized by an unfamiliar element that irritates Western audiences: “the shrill, sometimes nasal, gesticulating, uproarious aspect” (das Grelle, zuweilen Näselnde, Gestikulierende und durcheinander Redende) appropriates “that quality of Jewishness that provokes sadism” (MPE, 149; jenes Jüdische, das den Sadismus reizt: MP, 291, trans. modified). Such statements raise more questions than they answer. One may wonder whether Adorno’s characterization of Mahler’s late style (as shrill, nasal, gesticulating, uproarious) is accurate. Adorno’s characterization also evokes strong associations with anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish speech (mauscheln). The separation between the familiar and the unfamiliar in Mahler’s music also seems highly arbitrary. Since musicology does not seem to be able to help us further on this issue, could a cultural approach shed light on it?
Adorno is not alone in his hesitancy in discussing Mahler’s Jewishness; it may be seen as part of a trend in postwar literary and cultural studies, in particular in the first two decades after the Second World War. Carl E. Schorske, in his seminal work Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981), acknowledges the enormous importance of Jews in Vienna’s cultural life but interprets their artistic activities as independent from their ethnic background.22 In Schorske’s opinion, Freud, Klimt, Mahler, and Schnitzler first and foremost responded to the failed political liberalism of their fathers by embracing an ideal of culture that was detached from political power. To understand such an approach, which sidesteps ethnic and racial issues, it is important to realize that the discourse of race in German-Austrian culture was not introduced, but was certainly popularized enormously, by the Nazis. Through their instrumentalization of anti-Semitism, particularly in the realm of culture, they broke with a long German tradition that emphasized “aesthetic immanence”: the idea that art was to function independently of other areas of society such as politics. To insist on discussing art in terms of race and ethnicity after the demise of the Third Reich might appear, in particular to scholars who had lived through the Third Reich themselves, possibly in exile, as an act that assigned importance to a reprehensible mode of thinking. Besides, if Mahler himself did not conceive of his own music as “Jewish,” at least not in public, then why should we do so?
While Schorske’s importance for scholarship on fin-de-siècle Vienna has been generally acknowledged, other scholars have started to reevaluate the methodological presuppositions underlying his research.23 The problem is not so much that Schorske does not pay attention to anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna (he does),24 but rather that he appears to assume that culture at the time remained unaffected by it. It is important to see that when ethnicity and race are introduced as categories for cultural analysis, our image of fin-de-siècle Vienna changes as a result. Around 1900, the ideal of “aesthetic immanence” increasingly came under fire. It is harder to maintain the view that turn-of-the-century art and culture were in essence apolitical if one takes into consideration the Jewish background of men like Freud, Mahler, and Schnitzler, on the one hand, and the increasingly anti-Semitic environment surrounding them on the other. In Reading Mahler, I will show that for Mahler his Jewishness was of importance, even though he said little about it in public. My argument is that there is a critical potential in his music that one misses if one overlooks Mahler’s Jewishness, or, to phrase it another way, the way Mahler was perceived as a Jew in the public sphere of Vienna around 1900.
Political anti-Semitism was on the rise in fin-de-siècle Vienna. This development in the political domain was paralleled by the great importance attributed to Wagner’s legacy in the Viennese cultural scene. In the literature on Mahler, whether cultural or musicological, remarkably little is said about the issue of Mahler’s relationship to Wagner as a person and to the cultural agenda he stood for, and yet it raises difficult questions. Wagner’s attractiveness to young composers can be partially explained by the fact that Wagner provided, musically speaking, in the words of the composer Ernst Křenek “the most progressive idiom available” for its time.25 The fact that Wagner was seen as an outlaw by the musical establishment may have furthered such an identification with him by a new generation. Furthermore, Wagner’s essays offered a complex agenda, incorporating literature, philosophy, and a cultural program with a clear political vision. His operas were a genuinely new form of synthetic art combining music, literature, drama, and the visual. And yet, there was also Wagner’s anti-Semitism. There is no question about the anti-Semitic tendencies in Wagner’s theoretical writings and personal communications, even though there are scholars in German culture who have long attempted to ignore or downplay them.26 This component of Wagner’s thinking, of course, also problematizes Mahler’s undeniable admiration for Wagner’s work. One might even reproach Mahler — of course very much in hindsight! — for ignoring Wagner’s anti-Semitism.27 I do not believe that he did, however. Mahler was not only aware of the problematic sides of Wagner’s political and cultural agenda but sought to counter them with an alternative agenda of his own.
Mahler’s stagings of Wagner’s operas, for instance, were not uncritical. In their legendary and pathbreaking cooperation, Alfred Roller, one of the founding members of the Secession, and Mahler developed a concept that moved away from Bayreuth’s “fussy realism” and instead aimed, through an “innovative use of color and light,” for an experience that allowed for a more abstract vision of what was happening on stage, a synthesis of “the real and the ideal.”28 One could interpret Mahler and Roller’s staging of Tristan at the Vienna Court Opera in 1903 as the first break with the traditional naturalism that had dominated the productions of Wagner’s operas.29 This critical attitude is also clearly seen in other areas. From his recently published correspondence with Anna von Mildenburg, we know that Mahler was not exactly excited to go to Bayreuth.30 With this in mind, what do we make of the fact that Mahler, before accepting his job in New York, explicitly stipulated that he did not want to be forced to perform Parsifal?31 Against the wishes of Wagner’s heirs, Parsifal had been performed in New York in 1903 (and before that under Mengelberg in Amsterdam). Mahler was clearly hoping to be able to perform Wagner in Bayreuth and did not want to do anything to harm that chance. But does this necessarily imply that Mahler is in full agreement with Wagner’s cultural agenda? As a musical director, Mahler did not follow all of Wagner’s ideas. But there is also a fundamental difference between Mahler’s work as a conductor and his identity as a composer — a question that is not often addressed in current research. It is interesting, for instance, to read Mahler’s decision to concentrate on symphonic forms, often with a strong vocal element, in the context of Wagner’s statement that, after Beethoven’s Ninth, choral symphonies had no future.32 This suggests that the differences between Wagner and Mahler are clearer when one focuses on the latter as a creative artist and not solely as a conductor.
Despite the silence in the literature on Mahler’s relationship to Wagner, the scholarly consensus appears to be that Mahler was an admirer of Wagner and his works and that their relationship was largely untroubled. But are there any (biographical) indications that this relationship was problematic? In 1872 Guido Adler, Felix Mottl (who was sixteen at the time), and Karl Wolf had founded the Wiener Akademischer Wagner Verein (Vienna Academic Wagner Society) to promote Wagner’s work in Vienna in general and at the Vienna Conservatory in particular.33 Mahler had joined the society in 1877 but gave up his membership in 1879 together with his friends Anton Krisper, Rudolf Krzyzanowski, and Hans Rott.34 Hugo Wolf stayed on as a member. The exact reasons why Mahler and some of his friends decided to leave but Hugo Wolf did not are not known. The political agenda of fierce German nationalism and the anti-Semitism associated with Wagner as a cultural icon in Vienna around 1880 may very well have had something to do with it.35 Around the same time that Mahler renounced his membership in the Wagner Society, his relationship with Wolf started to cool as well, until the two were barely on speaking terms.36 Wolf had started to translate his admiration for Wagner into a philosophy of life. In his letters starting in 1881, Wolf articulates an unprecedented hatred for Jews and for composers such as Brahms who, for him, personified an anti-Wagnerian program, and Wolf’s visit to see Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1883 reinforced his anti-Semitism.37 There is some anecdotal evidence that Mahler was aware that Wolf thought about art in racial terms. Once when Wolf complimented Mahler on his songs, Mahler responded by saying: “We now have surpassed Mendelssohn” (Ja, ich glaube, dass wir jetzt Mendelssohn eingeholt haben);38 “we” clearly refers here to Mahler’s Jewish background, and Mendelssohn’s name stands for an outdated artistic model.
Mahler’s break with Vienna’s Wagner Society is one clear indication that Mahler experienced at least part of Wagner’s legacy as problematic, especially where its political agenda was concerned. However, one could argue that such political forms of appropriation of Wagner did not concern Wagner’s art itself but only the use that was being made of it. Following this line of argumentation, one would have to distinguish between Wagner’s operas as complex and many-layered creations that are in essence not political, and the politically and racially motivated use that is being made of these works of art. Such a strict separation between “pure” art and its time-bound reception is of course highly artificial and thus problematic, and, moreover, is not supported by Wagner’s own essays, which emphasize the political implications and racial agenda of his operas. There is also evidence that Mahler viewed anti-Semitism not as something that was constructed by Wagner’s disciples but that was inherent to his operas.39 In the book she authored on her friendship with Mahler, Natalie Bauer-Lechner refers to her conversations with Mahler in the context of the September 1898 rehearsals of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. Mahler was upset with one of his singers, who was scheduled to perform the role of Mime in Siegfried. Mahler reproached him for playing the role too much as a parody instead of a straightforward characterization; he also chided the singer for his “Mauscheln” — a stereotypical Jewish and therefore deficient way of speaking that had long been part of the anti-Semitic vocabulary.40 In that context Mahler says a few things about what exactly Wagner intended with Mime:
Although I am convinced that this figure [Mime] is the embodied persiflage of a Jew, as intended by Wagner (with all the traits which he gave him: his petty cleverness, greed, and all the complete musically and textually excellent jargon), that should not be exaggerated and dished up so thickly here, for heaven’s sake, as it was by Spielmann — especially in Vienna, at the “k.k. Court Opera,” it is clearly laughable and a welcome scandal for the Viennese!
I know only one Mime (we all looked at him anxiously) and that is me! You will be surprised to see what lies in the part and what I could make of it!”
[Obwohl ich überzeugt bin, daß diese Gestalt [Mime] die leibhaftige, von Wagner gewollte Persiflage eines Juden ist (in allen Zügen, mit denen er sie ausstattete: der kleinlichen Gescheitheit, Habsucht und dem ganzen musikalisch wie textlich vortrefflichen Jargon), so darf das hier um Gottes willen nicht übertrieben und so dick aufgetragen werden, wie Spielmann es tat — noch dazu in Wien, an der “k.k. Hofoper,” ist es ja die helle Lächerlichkeit und den Wienern ein willkommener Skandal!
Ich weiß nur einen Mime (wir sahen gespannt auf ihn): und der bin ich! Da solltet ihr staunen, was alles in der Rolle liegt und wie ich es zutage fördern wollte!” (GME, 122; not in RGM)]41
Is Mahler here repressing the anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s opera? I would argue that he is not; it is very clear to Mahler that Mime is intended by Wagner to personify an anti-Semitic stereotype. I would read Mahler’s emphasis on the fact that he himself is meant (“that is me”/“der bin ich”) as a statement that such stereotypes are not part of an archaic mythological imagery but concern the “here and now.” Yet, as a conductor, newly appointed at the Court Opera House, Mahler chose not to emphasize this aspect of Wagner’s opera in order to avoid a scandal. It is important to see that this is a conscious choice Mahler makes that bespeaks the pressures under which he had to work at the Court Opera and in Vienna in general, where his Jewishness was, from the outset, a topic of controversy. It would be wrong, in my opinion, to believe that Mahler did not care about Wagner’s anti-Semitism or that he unconsciously decided to repress this aspect of Wagner’s work; the above quote clearly shows that he was aware of it and that he did care. I hope to show in this book that in his own creative work Mahler takes issue with the cultural/political agenda underlying Wagner’s works, including its anti-Semitic aspects. In comparison to Wagner’s agenda, Mahler’s work can be understood as a counterreading of the German cultural tradition, a reading that, among many other things, is also a critique of Wagner’s idea of a German national culture.
Even while acknowledging the importance of Mahler as a conductor for the dissemination of Wagner’s operas, it is hard to refute the claim that Mahler as a composer made choices that were quite different from the models Wagner promoted in theory and practice. Among Mahler’s student friends, Siegfried Lipiner (1856–1911) stood out as a great admirer of Wagner (whom he had also visited in Bayreuth). And yet Lipiner was aware that Wagner’s trajectory through German musical and cultural history was only one option among many. He was in particular critical of the connection between text, image, and music in Wagner’s concept of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk), and he explicitly questioned the tendency to see Wagner as the only possible artistic model or trajectory for cultural history, while simultaneously paying tribute to Wagner’s unique role in German music:
The interaction of music and poetry in dramatic form may be legitimate in an extraordinary artistic phenomenon like Richard Wagner, who masters both forms of art equally well and for whom music cannot lose its transcendental sense. Whether, however, a symphony by Beethoven is not a more perfect, greater creation than the most splendid works of Wagner — who can decide? Unquestionably, however, his opinion that only through a unification of all arts could the one true work of art come into being was a fundamental mistake.
[Das Zusammenwirken von Musik und Dichtkunst im Drama mag in einer phänomenalen Kunst-Erscheinung wie Richard Wagner gerechtfertigt sein, der beide Künste ebenbürtig beherrscht und bei dem die Musik ihren übersinnlichen Sinn nicht verlieren kann. Ob aber eine Beethovensche Symphonie nicht immer noch eine vollendetere, größere Schöpfung bleibt als die herrlichsten Werke Wagners — wer kann’s entscheiden? Doch fraglos ein Grundirrtum war seine Meinung, daß nur aus einer Vereinigung aller Künste das wahre einzige Kunstwerk hervorgehen könne!]42
Lipiner’s statement shows that one could respect Wagner and yet at the same time favor an alternative trajectory for musical history. His opinion is also relevant here because it reflects a choice that Mahler himself made (in spite of his high regard for Wagner): in his own creative work, leaving aside some early projects that never materialized,43 Mahler decided to focus not on opera but on the symphony.
There are other differences between the musical trajectory Mahler chose and that of Wagner, in particular if we focus on the issue of “text.” Wagner’s music is highly programmatic. Not only does the text in his operas explain what the music is about (and vice versa), but he also built up an elaborate essayistic framework that comments in detail on the meaning of his compositions. Speaking from the perspective of a literary scholar, one may describe Wagner’s operas as offering its audiences a closed narrative: a plot with a clear beginning and a clear end, connected by a chain of events that the audience is supposed to reconstruct. With very few exceptions (Das klagende Lied), Mahler’s musical works offer open narratives. Textually speaking, there is no clear plot in his compositions; there is no clear beginning or end marked by text or within a text. This even applies to the First Symphony, even though, as I will show in the first chapter, it plays with the model of the Bildungsroman. Because of Mahler’s use of narrative ambiguity and irony, it is often not even possible to distill a single unambiguous message out of his symphonies or song cycles.
All of this shows that Mahler’s relationship with Wagner as a historical person, as the composer of some very influential operas, and as a theorist of German culture was a complex one and by no means without ambivalence. We can only understand Mahler’s relationship to Wagner and to the agenda of German national renewal through art that Wagner advocated (especially in his theoretical writings), if we take into account Mahler’s Jewishness. At the core of Wagner’s cultural agenda is the idea that German culture needs to be cleansed from foreign influences: this means not just the French and Italians, but especially the Jews, the foreigners dwelling within German culture. Anti-Semitism is not at the margins of Wagner’s essayistic work: it is at its center. It is not limited to essays such as “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Jewishness in Music, 1850/69), which long played a marginal role in the literature about Wagner, but it is part, in one form or another, of many other writings as well, among them “Religion und Kunst” (Religion and Art, 1880), an essay that is one of the more central texts in Wagner’s theoretical work. In Vienna around 1900, anti-Semitism was not an abstract cultural issue. In 1897, the year in which Mahler returned to Vienna to work at the Court Opera, Karl Lueger — who was the leader of the Christian Social party and who had run for mayor of Vienna on an openly anti-Semitic platform — was finally appointed to the position of Mayor by Emperor Franz Joseph, who had refused to do so earlier, after he had been elected for the fifth time.44 Lueger’s appointment shows unambiguously that anti-Semitism had become a powerful political force in turn-of-the-century Vienna.
Within Vienna fin-de-siècle culture, Mahler’s Jewishness was therefore an important factor. As a Jew working in the German(-Austrian) culture industry around 1900, he had only a limited number of options available to him. Many Jews identified with the Enlightenment ideal of assimilation.45 Jews were to be tolerated and given civil rights, provided they would renounce or at the very least downplay their Jewish background. Mahler’s conversion to Catholicism, shortly before starting his tenure at the Court Opera, should be understood in this context. To realize the attraction inherent to this idea of Jewish assimilation at the time, it is important to see that it was linked to the promise that every human being would only be judged as an individual, and not as the member of a specific ethnic group — clear signs of progress. Culture was an important platform for the assimilation of Jews into Western European society. Austrian Jews tended to identify primarily with German culture; in their eyes German culture stood for progress; it was associated with tolerance, civilization, and order; Germany was seen as a nation of “poets and thinkers.”46 In this respect, Mahler’s path is remarkably similar to that of other prominent Jewish intellectuals of his time, such as Freud, Schnitzler, and Kafka. All these men saw themselves as representatives of German culture, and yet, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, they sought to establish a Jewish presence within German culture as well. At times this Jewish identification with German culture took the form of overt German nationalism.47
In his student days, Mahler was a member of a group of intellectuals, the so-called Pernerstorfer Kreis (Pernerstorfer circle), that was heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Wagner, and that combined an interest in art and philosophy with a political tendency toward German nationalism.48 Some of the members were more interested in the circle’s cultural ambitions, others in its political dimension, which was particularly pronounced in 1878, when Mahler joined the group.49 The circle’s affinity for the politically conservative cause of German nationalism can be partially explained as the rebellion of (Jewish) sons against the liberalism of their fathers, which to them seemed naive and remarkably ineffectual.50 The Pernerstorfer Kreis therefore had strong critical motives; it saw itself as an anti-establishment group. This may to some extent explain the diverse political impulses to which it gave rise. Members of the group ended up representing very different political movements in later years; some of them became involved in conservative politics, but Victor Adler, a prominent member, became leader of Austria’s Social Democratic party.51 In hindsight, identifying with the conservative agenda of German nationalism may seem naive for Jews like Mahler, but one has to remain mindful that for some this identification may have been primarily cultural, and only secondarily a political matter, and may therefore have appeared quite harmless at the time.52 It is important to keep this episode of Mahler’s intellectual development in mind, even though there are good reasons to believe that Mahler later felt an affinity for a progressive political agenda.53 In addition to the political aspect, there is another reason why the legacy of the Pernerstorfer Kreis is important for understanding Mahler. It is one of the decisive characteristics of Mahler’s intellectual development that he viewed German culture holistically — that is, as a unified whole — and was never interested in any regional or ethnic particularism. His literary and philosophical interests (Goethe, Jean Paul, and Nietzsche) are an indication of this; the same goes for the texts he worked with in his compositions (Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Klopstock, Rückert, and of course, again, Jean Paul and Nietzsche).
It is in the context of this holistic view of German culture that one must interpret the importance of the tradition of Jewish-German culture for Mahler. In his everyday interactions, but also in explaining his artistic goals, he tended to avoid references to his Jewish background. His hesitancy to take a position against, or even to refer to, Wagner’s anti-Semitic ideas is to be understood in this context. Yet, as I will argue in the following chapters, Mahler’s work is not an example of assimilation. While the idea of a German national culture is very important for him, his aim is not to immerse himself in it, even though this is one of the predominant stereotypes about him. It would be wrong to see Mahler as someone who passively subjugated himself to the ideas of German Bildung and culture. Mahler’s literary and philosophical preferences alone are indicative of his intellectual independence. Jean Paul and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name two prominent examples, not only represent a cosmopolitan thread in the fabric of German culture, but they also quite explicitly see themselves as critics of the prevailing trends in German culture and society. Even Mahler’s reading of Goethe focuses on that author’s cosmopolitan agenda.
Simultaneously, it must also be said that Mahler is not interested in establishing an independent Jewish cultural canon that is diametrically opposed to the assimilationist approach. Specifically, the decade between 1893 and 1904 was a period characterized by a “revitalization of a distinct Jewish culture” in German-speaking countries.54 The interest in different subcultures coincides with an increase in nationalist tendencies in German culture. Michael Brenner has made the interesting observation that this revival of Jewish culture did not focus on a revival of “traditional Judaism” but rather attempted to “integrate selected aspects of this tradition into the framework of a modern secular culture” (21). One cannot speak of Mahler’s music as an example of a Jewish cultural revival. Nevertheless, the motives underlying Mahler’s creative works may have something in common with those seeking a revival of Jewish culture. Not only is Mahler interested in a specifically modern cultural agenda, but he is also highly aware of the nationalist connotations of German culture and he consciously positions his works vis-à-vis the nationalist agenda accompanying the idea of a German national culture as it manifests itself in his time. When he refers to his Eighth Symphony as “a gift to the nation,” as I will discuss in chapter 5, he is clearly invoking the national discourse surrounding music.
While Mahler rarely addressed his Jewish background, I do not believe that he repressed his Jewishness. His attitude toward his Jewishness is maybe best described by Alfred Roller’s statement that “Mahler never hid his Jewish origins. But he had no joy from them” (Mahler hat seine jüdische Abstammung nie versteckt. Aber sie hat ihm keine Freude gemacht).55 To some extent Mahler’s “Jewish identity” was something that the outside world constructed for him, and not something that Mahler himself felt he needed. Given the very public nature of Mahler’s job in Vienna, repressing such identity politics was impossible.56 It may also be significant in this context that a statement on Wagner’s anti-Semitism such as the one reported by Natalie-Bauer-Lechner regarding the actor playing Mime in Siegfried most likely was part of a private or semi-private conversation.
But if Mahler did not want to repress his own Jewishness, how are we to interpret this public silence on anti-Jewish trends in the cultural discourse surrounding him? One could argue that he had no other option than to remain silent on the issue, at least in public. Had he chosen to address the issue openly, this would have had immediate consequences for his position of music director of the Court Opera. But what does this mean for Mahler’s creative works; does he reflect his Jewishness in them or not? The question of the Jewish aspect of Mahler’s music has been examined primarily on the basis of musicological deliberations; against such an appropriation, however, one could echo the argument of Talia Pecker Berio, who stated that music is “too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to a channel for the expression of ethnic and national sentiments and affiliations.”57 What I propose in the following is to follow a cultural, text-centered approach that attempts to do at least some justice to these complexities.
By focusing on the relevance of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts for Mahler’s creative work, I hope to lay bare the critical dimension inherent in these works. Mahler’s use of text in his symphonies is unusual in the symphonic tradition, in relation to which he positions himself as a creative artist (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is the only major exception). Text is one of the defining features of Mahler’s work. To make it part of music — either through the integration of song, or through extramusical deliberations — is also a polemical and emancipatory move. Because music without words or images is primarily a nonrepresentative form of expression, it could serve as an easy way for Jews to assimilate into German culture.58 Mahler’s use of text in his symphonies indicates that he wishes to take issue explicitly with the German cultural tradition. This explicit engagement with German cultural history assumes different shapes in his music.
In the first section of this book, which discusses his first four symphonies and the Wunderhorn songs, I show how Mahler seeks a critical reading of German cultural history. He identifies a crisis at the core of German culture, in particular where its normative ambitions are concerned, but nevertheless remains within the boundaries of that cultural tradition. In the second section, which deals with the Seventh and Eighth symphonies, the Kindertotenlieder and other Rückert songs, and the Lied von der Erde, I show how Mahler gradually develops an interest in alternatives to German culture, in what this culture perceives as its “others.” Mahler’s notion of alterity, however, is still deeply embedded in, and yet not identical with, what the German intellectual tradition understood the concept to be. In his interest in the “other side” of German culture, Mahler articulates an investment in cultural diversity beyond the German tradition that prefigures but is nevertheless very different from current notions of cultural diversity. I go on to argue that Mahler’s relationship with German culture is largely a rational one. Mahler actively seeks to reflect its normative dimensions; it is not that his thinking and music are articulations of discourses beyond his grasp. It is impossible to understand the dynamics underlying Mahler’s relationship with German culture without taking into account Mahler’s Jewishness and the role of anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle culture. It is at the core of the aforementioned “critical potential” in Mahler’s creative works.
The crisis informing Mahler’s earlier works is, to some extent, the crisis of modernism in general. In modernism, in Patrizia McBride’s words, an “awareness” articulated itself “about the insufficiencies of established ways of thinking the human, of conceptualizing individual and collective experience, as well as an anxiety about the disastrous effects that could ensue if the admittedly inadequate categories currently being deployed were to be dismissed.”59 It is precisely in this sense of crisis that the relevance of modernism lies for understanding the later twentieth century. But how did Mahler relate to the crisis of modernism? It has become commonplace to view Mahler as a nostalgic modernist, as someone who mourned the loss of tradition, of the old certainties, and whose view of the past was mostly melancholic. This is essentially the vision that informs Adorno’s essays. In his monograph on Mahler, Ernst Křenek, in contrast, mentions surrealism and the avant-garde as being more appropriate frames of reference for his creative efforts.60 Drawing parallels between Mahler’s music and surrealism may strike one, from our current perspective, as out of place; nevertheless, Křenek makes some very interesting points. Mahler’s relation to tradition is eclectic; he chooses symbols that seem to be “outworn, obsolete” and appear to be quotations, and yet in their context in Mahler’s music they achieve an aura of “grandeur and monumentality.” His music very much lives off the (emotional) effects of these obsolete symbols in the listener. Yet while his symphonies contain plenty of “extra-musical associations,” many of which can be traced back to popular culture, they nevertheless refuse a precise program. With such observations Křenek points to the liberties Mahler takes with tradition; one could call it a certain “playfulness.” When I use the word “playfulness” in this context, I do not mean to suggest that Mahler’s music is not intended seriously, but rather as a mode of expression that wishes to change the ways we see tradition and the way it has constituted what we view as reality.
This artistic freedom in relation to tradition is typical not only for surrealism but for the historical avant-garde in general. Peter Bürger’s definition, in his classic study on the avant-garde, emphasizes that the avant-garde artist views the “totality of artistic means” that cultural history has produced as available in creating a new work of art.61 It is interesting to note in this context that critics at the time had already noticed that Viennese fin-de-siècle artists were far less afraid of using past traditions than was the case for their Berlin contemporaries, for example.62 Bürger also notes that the historical avant-garde is capable of self-reflection and self-critique and has a desire to break down the boundaries between art and life.63 All these tendencies can also be found in Mahler’s work. (Mahler’s interest in the Wunderhorn folk songs is certainly an example of the desire to bring art and life together.) Vienna around 1900 was of course a place where exciting artistic innovations were happening. Mahler’s proximity to the aesthetic philosophy of the avant-garde is not, or is not primarily, based on a conscious identification with the most innovative artists (the “avant-gardists”) of his day — Klimt and Kokoschka for instance, although there are some interesting connections (see chapters 3 and 5) — but rather through a shared view of tradition (see chapter 5). Mahler’s use of the melody of Bruder Martin for the third movement of his First Symphony is not much less daring than the exhibition of a urinal in a museum by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, I would argue. Of course, looking at Mahler in connection with the historical avant-garde is only possible in hindsight; in connection with twentieth-century German and Austrian art history, the term “avant-garde” is in general adopted for a group of artists who started to become active in the years around the First World War. However, it is a plausible perspective. For one thing, it makes us aware that Mahler certainly intended to provoke his audiences.
I am not going to claim that Mahler’s works in every aspect prefigure the characteristics of the historical avant-garde as discussed by Bürger. What I am suggesting, however, is that we keep some of the characteristics of that avant-garde in mind when thinking of Mahler’s place in Western culture. Leonard Bernstein, by the way, did not reintroduce Mahler solely to American audiences. Mahler’s breakthrough in Vienna during the 1960s and 1970s must, to a large extent, be attributed to him as well. Mahler was reintroduced to Austrian audiences by someone from the “outside,” a Jewish-American who also happened to be a composer with avant-gardist traits (for example, an interest in tearing down the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture). This reintroduction of Mahler in Vienna began with the performance of Das Lied von der Erde in April 1966 by the Wiener Philharmoniker under the direction of Bernstein, and included a complete recording of Mahler’s symphonies on video in the 1970s and a highly symbolic tour to Israel in 1988, during which Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (“The Tragic”) was performed.
Bernstein’s arduous rehearsals of Mahler’s works with the Wiener Philharmoniker are well documented.64 At least in part, this can be explained through the performance styles of Bernstein’s predecessors in Vienna. The kind of Mahler to whom the musicians and audiences of the Vienna Philharmonic were accustomed stood in stark contrast to Bernstein’s agenda. Bruno Walter, the most prominent among Bernstein’s predecessors, could because of his personal relationship with Mahler be assumed to be in possession of an authentic view of the composer’s works; in his approach, he emphasized the stylistic unity of Mahler’s scores and thereby their “classical” lineage. Walter’s performances, one could argue, sought to make Mahler’s music acceptable by performing it in a very balanced, measured way and thus taking the provocative angle out of this music for an audience accustomed to the classics. Leonard Bernstein, in contrast, not only paid far more attention to the music’s emotional content, but above all stressed the music’s inherent contradictions. Bernstein clearly offered an avant-gardist’s view of Mahler, but not that of an avant-garde mostly occupied with formal procedure and innovation, but rather as a representative of an avant-garde that made the point that music does not just have to be beautiful but can also be violent, exuberant, provocative, uncanny, ironic, or banal. Furthermore, Bernstein’s insight into the heterogeneous nature of Mahler’s musical textures was at least in part due to a certain ethnomusicological sensitivity that not only recognized but also sought to articulate in performance the diverse range of stylistic sources in Mahler’s music. One can argue that Bernstein also reacquainted Austrians with their own cultural roots. These roots included Jewish music making as well, even though Bernstein simultaneously was also very hesitant — generalizations make him uncomfortable, he states — to mark certain aspects or elements of Mahler’s music as “Jewish.” For Bernstein, the Jewishness of Mahler’s music is associated with its stylistic heterogeneity and translates into a fundamental ambiguity of the music’s content.65
Bernstein conducting Mahler in front of the Vienna Philharmonic little more than twenty years after the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War was a highly symbolic event in many respects, and all the parties involved were well aware of this. What was less clear or at least, I would argue, what remained largely unreflected upon was that Bernstein’s engagement with Mahler was also very much a statement about what culture is and what it does. Bernstein’s struggle with the Vienna Philharmonic over Mahler was also (among many other things) on a fundamental level a clash between very different concepts of culture. While German cultural history always had been heterogeneous, both regarding the artifacts it produced and the different motivations with which individual artists created art, attempts had been made throughout German intellectual history to define “culture” in ways that would clearly set it apart from other European (or non-European) traditions. “Culture,” according to this line of thinking, had unified German-speaking countries long before its political unification in 1871. It provided national cohesion in the realm of literature and the arts at a moment when, in reality, political unification was not possible. After the French revolution of 1789, “culture” was also increasingly seen as a superior German alternative to the political bloodshed in neighboring France. This ideal of “culture” was homogenous or homogenizing in that it emphasized a common base for all Germans within the realm of their ethnic tradition. “Culture” was also seen as something apolitical or, in the words of Wolf Lepenies, “a noble substitute for politics”66 (in particular for the social experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France), although this argument turned out to be highly ambiguous, since culture was, on the one hand, supposed to be giving guidance to politics, while, on the other hand, the argument could also be made that politics should be enforced in order to protect culture.67 This view of culture is still very much alive in modernism, which is one of the main targets of Lepenies’s analysis.
But the potential for reading German culture differently — for, in other words, a more heterogeneous and political reading of the German cultural tradition — was always there. In an exemplary way, this is made visible by Bernstein’s performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on 23 and 25 December 1989 at the West-Berlin Philharmonie and the East-Berlin Schauspielhaus with a multinational cast of performers in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November that year.68 In his performances Bernstein diverged from the score regarding one crucial aspect: in the symphony’s final movement with Schiller’s “Ode an die Freude” (Ode to Joy) at its center, he replaced the key term “joy” (Freude) with “freedom” (Freiheit), giving the piece a decisively political (rather than aesthetic) message. Bernstein’s action is a prime example of a critical appropriation of the German cultural tradition, a form of appropriation that raised fundamental questions about the functioning of art in German history. “Freedom” in this context could stand for many things: at that moment it certainly referred to a political goal, but Bernstein’s change of vocabulary could also be interpreted as a call to look at one’s own history differently. By substituting “Freiheit” for “Freude,” Bernstein took up a mid-nineteenth-century debate on the question of whether Schiller had originally intended to write a more political version of the poem, one that thematized “freedom” and not “joy.”69 Bernstein’s substitution was a critical act; it was meant to have his audience rethink what their tradition and Beethoven’s music, as part of it, were about — very much unlike Simon Rattle’s performance of the same symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, but with its original text, the “Ode to Joy,” at the site of the former concentration camp Mauthausen on 7 May 2000, celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation.70
It is possible to reconstruct German cultural history — or any national cultural tradition for that matter — critically or uncritically. It is also possible to think that one is doing something critical while one in reality is doing something very uncritical. For Bernstein, working with Mahler was clearly one possible path of working through German musical and cultural history critically. In Bernstein’s view, that meant more than just identifying a “Jewish” element in Mahler’s music: it meant developing a sense of awareness of the many different traditions and narratives present in Mahler’s music and of its critical potential vis-à-vis German culture. Reading Mahler tries to do something similar, but with a focus on the texts that are important for Mahler’s music. Mahler’s texts are highly ambiguous and diverse, and it is precisely in this ambiguity and diversity that a critical impulse resides, something that is especially clear when we look at Mahler’s music as a reflection on the historical and cultural conditions that shaped it. If we want to do justice to Mahler’s place in German-Jewish culture beyond the kind of naive romanticization that has been problematized by Leon Botstein, we need to do justice to Mahler’s text. Interpreting Mahler in the context of German literary and cultural history means reconstructing what was, but also what could have been, and what is perhaps still relevant today.