Mahler’s First Symphony has come to be associated with a little-known novel by the German author Johann Paul Friedrich Richter — commonly known as Jean Paul — entitled Titan, which was first published in four volumes between 1800 and 1803. This association between symphony and literary text is intriguing but quite problematic. The assumption that the two works are somehow connected is based on a handful of rather contradictory references. In spite of the fact that the works are mentioned in relation to each other frequently, and that “Titan” has become the First’s unofficial title, the exact connections between novel and symphony are only rarely explored. Today Jean Paul’s novel is largely forgotten, and even among specialists very few have read its more than 1,000 pages.
Mahler himself did not exactly help things with his conflicting statements about the symphony’s (nonexistent) program. In a letter of 20 March 1896 to the critic Max Marschalk Mahler comments that he had added the references to Jean Paul to the notes accompanying performances of the First in an attempt to satisfy audiences’ request for programmatic explanations of his symphony (Br, 169). He did not address the issue of whether Jean Paul’s novel had in fact been important for its genesis. Indeed, the program notes accompanying the symphony’s first performance in Budapest in 1889 do not contain any references to Jean Paul’s novel or to any other literary or philosophical framework.1 This may, however, be explained by the fact that this performance was for an audience whose primary linguistic and cultural environment was not German. Mahler may, in other words, have avoided references to the novel because he could not assume that his audience had any knowledge of Jean Paul’s works, which were not part of the German literary canon.
Natalie Bauer-Lechner writes in her memoirs on Mahler that he did not intend his symphony to be associated with Jean Paul’s Titan, but that others were responsible for this association:
[Audiences] connected his “Titan” with Jean Paul’s. But all he had in mind was a powerfully heroic individual, his life and suffering, struggles and defeat at the hands of fate, “while the true, higher resolution comes only in the Second Symphony.”
[So brachte man ihm seinen “Titan”, mit dem Jean Paul’schen in Verbindung. Er hatte aber einfach einen kraftvoll-heldenhaften Menschen im Sinne, sein Leben und Leiden, Ringen und Unterliegen gegen das Geschick, “wozu die wahre, höhere Auflösung erst die Zweite bringt.” (RGM, 157; GME, 173)]
But why would audiences associate a symphony by Mahler with a novel that was little known around 1890? No doubt Bauer-Lechner in her statement reiterates a version of what Mahler had told her, even though she appears to contradict Mahler’s own statements. Her account of Mahler’s ideas has strongly influenced contemporary thinking on the First (and Second) symphonies. And rightfully so: the above statement alone contains a number of important insights into the First. However, if Mahler did not intend his symphony to be associated with Jean Paul’s Titan, he should have avoided the many references to Jean Paul in early scores of the symphony and in the program notes accompanying its early performances.
Bruno Walter, in sharp contrast to the statements by Mahler and Bauer-Lechner discussed here, claims in his biographical essay on Mahler that a connection between the First Symphony and Jean Paul’s Titan was intended. Walter and Mahler discussed Jean Paul and his novel Titan frequently, we are told, and using the title Titan to designate the First is meant as a homage to Jean Paul. The third movement of the First, the Funeral Procession (Trauermarsch) that was originally meant to be the fourth movement when the symphony still consisted of five movements, is according to Walter based on the figure Roquairol, one of the principal characters in Jean Paul’s Titan.2 The same association between Roquairol and the “Trauermarsch” is made in Bruno Walter’s letter of 6 December 1901 on Mahler’s anti-programmatic programs (see “Introduction”). In this letter, however, Walter is more careful about the connection: the content of the movement “could appear to be related to the image of Roquairol from Jean Paul’s novel” (könnte . . . als dem Bilde des Roquairol aus dem Jean Paul’schen Roman verwandt erscheinen).3 However, Walter makes it clear that other associations are possible as well, for instance with the images of Callot, in particular his popular depiction of the dead hunter accompanied to his grave by animal musicians. Walter, in other words, attempts to retain the (programmatic) Titan connection while simultaneously maintaining Mahler’s anti-programmatic stance.
Mahler’s hesitancy in formulating an explicit literary or philosophical program for his symphonies is clearly grounded in the era’s aesthetic debates about the extent to which music should be autonomous or rather define itself in relation to other forms of art (see my introduction to this volume). In the case of the First Symphony, however, evidence exists that Mahler had psychological reasons for suppressing its “program.” He reportedly referred to this work as a very personal piece that could only be understood by those who were familiar with what was going on in his life at the time.4 Certain statements by Bruno Walter after Mahler’s death regarding the genesis of the symphony support this, as I will discuss further hereinafter. Such contradictory explanations are typical for Mahler’s anti-programmatic programmatic art, and we will encounter them frequently in subsequent chapters. In spite of these contradictions, I believe that it is productive to follow Mahler’s idea (at one point in the symphony’s genesis) that studying Jean Paul’s text can yield helpful insights into his First Symphony or can at least help us gain an impression of some of the literary and intellectual traditions that informed it (or that Mahler associated with it). Even though we should be cautious and not, for instance, equate Mahler’s intentions with those of Jean Paul in his Titan, there is a characteristic ambiguity in the hero of Jean Paul’s novel that we also find, for instance, in Bauer-Lechner’s statement about Mahler’s First (even though she claims that there is no connection between the works).
In his symphony, Mahler narrates a story that in some ways resembles a Bildungsroman — a genre built around a male hero preoccupied with finding love and a position of social responsibility, who goes through a learning process that eventually develops into a philosophy of life.5 Upon closer examination, however, this seemingly straightforward narrative evoked by the symphony’s “title” falls apart. The story that Mahler wants to tell his audiences in his symphony is not about a conventional hero but rather about a sort of anti-hero who is very much like the main character in Jean Paul’s novel Titan, which was very critical of the idea of Bildung (often translated as “self-cultivation”6). It is very significant that, in Bauer-Lechner’s version of Mahler’s program for the First Symphony, the hero does not win but loses — a fact often overlooked by scholars. Jean Paul’s Anti-Bildungsroman resists formulating a normative ideal for its hero. In fact the novel is skeptical toward any attempt to find unambiguous norms (in, for instance, religion, nature, or love), a skepticism that is mirrored in Mahler’s symphony and is expressive of a notion of crisis that both have identified at the roots of German culture. Both Jean Paul’s novel and Mahler’s First Symphony seek to make this notion of crisis productive by experimenting with open forms of narration. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the story that is told is characterized by digressions, contradictions, intentional obscurities, and fundamental ambiguities. It is this openness that calls for the participation of the recipient in making sense of text and music. Finally, we find in the music (as in Jean Paul’s novel) a mode of temporality that insists on the continued relevance of aspects of our past for our present, even if history, or the dominating construction thereof, decided to discard those aspects. Mahler reads German cultural history critically. This critical reading is only possible if we in turn read Mahler’s symphony in the context of German literary and cultural history.
It is sheer historical coincidence that both Jean Paul and Richard Wagner spent the last years of their lives in Bayreuth. Around 1900 Bayreuth, with its Festival Hall and Wahnfried, Wagner’s residence, had become a popular destination among nationalistic Germans. Wagner was the icon of middle-class German culture. The fact that Jean Paul’s grave was also located in Bayreuth was mostly forgotten; not many knew where it was.7 A few authors and critics, among them Alfred Kerr,8 commented on this marginalization of Jean Paul in comparison to Wagner and its possible interpretation as the victory of nationalism over cosmopolitanism. It is unlikely that Mahler knew of these writings, but he was certainly aware of the fact that Jean Paul’s status in German culture was very different from that of Wagner.
Jean Paul is a pseudonym for Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825). As a homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he chose the pen name Jean Paul.9 When Richter adopted this pseudonym in 1792, Rousseau had come to be perceived, in spite of his death in 1778, as one of the intellectual forefathers of the French Revolution and therefore as a radical and controversial author. Most other German authors, for that reason, sought to dissociate themselves from the French Revolution (and Rousseau). But there are other reasons why Jean Paul is an anomaly in German literary history. He was a satirical and humoristic author with an interest in popular literature — a rarity in German literary history. Even though Jean Paul achieved fame overnight with his novel Hesperus (1795), which also put an end to his financial worries, he remained an outsider in German literature until the end of his life. This was at least partially due to his political radicalism. Jean Paul was a relentless critic of contemporary society, and his works were exceptionally harsh in their condemnation of institutions such as the church and the government.
One can see how Jean Paul became an identificatory figure for Mahler. Mahler’s childhood was certainly not as harsh as that of Richter, who had grown up in great poverty with only modest prospects for success in society, but it is well documented that Mahler, especially in his student days, also had to live off very little at times.10 Both were outsiders in German culture, albeit for very different reasons. Jean Paul’s literary narratives resemble Mahler’s musical narratives: Jean Paul’s interest in humor and satire, in combination with philosophical musings and a deep interest in nature, can also be found in Mahler’s music. There is no doubt that Jean Paul anticipated Mahler’s philosophical interests. One characteristic of Jean Paul’s psychology as an artist was a seemingly unquestioning belief in his own artistic talents; the same can be said of Mahler. It is remarkable that, as we can read in surviving autobiographical documents, Jean Paul does not simply deny the harsh realities of his youth but manages to turn them into their opposite: the idea of a happy and privileged childhood.11 According to Alma, Mahler likewise never acknowledged the poverty of his childhood home.12
Titan is representative of Jean Paul’s oeuvre in many respects. With its four volumes, two “humoristic” supplements, and a sort of philosophical treatise called a “supplement to the first humoristic supplement,” it is a very long novel. Jean Paul attacks the double standards of the upper classes — Titan is a critique of both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie or middle class. It can also be read as a Bildungsroman in search of philosophical answers about the relationships between men, women, their fellow human beings, and the world around them. It documents a fundamental crisis in this relationship. The novel depicts a world without values; metaphysics has come to an end and nothing speaks for the existence of a better world anymore.13 Yet most characters are not satisfied by an exclusive focus on the here-and-now. Because of this crisis — the notion that nothing matters any more, an insight that would later be called “nihilism” — Jean Paul can accurately be called a precursor to Nietzsche. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within Romanticism a radical current developed whose advocates believed in the purely subjective nature of all knowledge and therefore, in many respects, anticipated Nietzsche’s diagnosis of German culture eighty years later (see chapter 3). While Nietzsche ultimately seeks to embrace this new lack of values, Jean Paul’s characters suffer from this crisis. Their identities, as we will see, are deeply affected by the crisis of values articulated in Titan. Virtually all of the main characters in the novel are profoundly insecure about who they are and what they want to be, while “death,” as a symbol of the futility of all that is on earth, seems to be the only certainty left.
By 1888, when Mahler composed the First Symphony, the general public had largely forgotten Jean Paul.14 Working with Jean Paul’s Titan at the end of the nineteenth century meant rehabilitating a neglected author. More importantly, one could argue that Mahler’s focus on Jean Paul allows for an against-the-grain rereading of German literary history. Jean Paul’s novel was often seen as being in opposition to the “classical” tradition of Goethe and Schiller. The roots of this perceived opposition can in fact be found in Goethe’s work. In 1797 Goethe published a satirical poem about Jean Paul in which he compared him to a Chinese man looking at ancient ruins in Rome. The Chinese man is fundamentally unable to understand or appreciate antiquity’s greatness; Goethe draws a parallel between him and someone who is ill and who views something he sees as pathological, not realizing that his own illness prevents him from recognizing what is healthy.15 Later in life, Goethe was more appreciative of Jean Paul’s work, even though he still considered him an outsider. While working with oriental texts in the context of his West-östlicher-Divan project, he once characterized Jean Paul’s style as “oriental” because the heterogeneous nature of his narratives made the strangest of connections and combined elements that did not belong together, even though Jean Paul was ultimately able to synthesize his materials into a unified whole.16 In some of his later works — the West-östlicher Divan, but also the second part of Faust — Goethe embraces an eclectic style of writing that moves far away from the classical norms of unity and simplicity to which he and Schiller had earlier aspired.17 Some literary critics saw similarities between Titan and Goethe’s Faust; the principal characters of the two texts are seen as kindred spirits,18 but readers must have also noticed the similarly heterogeneous and eclectic nature of both texts.
In addition to its stylistic characteristics, there may have been another, less obvious reason why Goethe described Jean Paul’s work as “oriental.” What makes a novel like Titan stand out in comparison to the work of contemporaries like Goethe and Schiller is that it pays attention to Jewish life. Jean Paul’s portrayal of Jews in Titan is generally respectful. The statement in Titan, for instance, that 12,000 Jews did not design the coliseum that they built19 may have a specific rhetorical function within an argument, but it also shows an awareness and appreciation of Jewish contributions to Western culture that is atypical for the period in which Jean Paul wrote his novel. Another example is the portrayal of the “Jewish peddler” (Schnurrjude)20 early on in the novel (81) — a wandering merchant, collecting and buying hair in the villages (for a wigmaker in the city?) whose collection has been set on fire by local children. Jean Paul belongs to a small group of non-Jewish authors in German literary history who actively engage with Jewish life.21 At a young age Jean Paul avidly learned Hebrew.22 A motivating factor for Jean Paul’s interest in Jewish culture and Orientalism may have been his close friendship with the Jewish merchant Emanuel Samuel in Bayreuth; not much is known about this relationship, but one of Jean Paul’s early biographers emphasizes its importance for Jean Paul’s knowledge of Jewish and Oriental culture.23
Because Jean Paul’s Titan is little known (even among Mahler scholars) and its complex aesthetic and philosophical aims were unquestionably a major influence on Mahler, I will discuss the novel here in some detail. The most obvious continuity between Mahler’s First Symphony and Jean Paul’s novel is the main heroic figure, the Titan character. I have already quoted Bauer-Lechner’s statement that Mahler “had a powerfully heroic individual in mind” (Mahler hatte einen kraftvoll-heldenhaften Menschen im Sinne) when composing his First Symphony. The section of Bauer-Lechner’s memoirs in which she reports this is based on a letter she wrote much earlier to the Vienna music critic and friend of Mahler Ludwig Karpath, on 16 November 1900. There is no doubt that the letter was written at the request of Mahler himself. Bauer-Lechner’s letter to Karpath tells us something more, something left out of the memoir, that makes Mahler’s Titan figure much more complex. In clarifying the heroic character of the symphony’s main figure, Bauer-Lechner writes:
The First is still altogether written from the standpoint of a young man, unarmed and defenseless against all attacks, who experiences and suffers in the most direct way.
[Die Ite ist noch ganz vom Standpunkte des unbewehrten (— wehrlos allem Ansturm preisgegeben —) unmittelbarst erlebenden und erleidenden jungen Menschen aus geschrieben.] (RGM, 237 and 239, trans. modified; not in original German edition)
While the memoir emphasizes Titan’s active attributes, the letter in contrast points to his passivity and suffering. Reading Bauer-Lechner’s clarification, one could say that Mahler’s hero is more of an anti-hero, and that it is at the very least questionable whether he determines his own fate through his own actions.
This ambiguity is also typical of Albano, the main character in Jean Paul’s Titan. Jean Paul himself speaks occasionally of his “Anti-Titan” when referring to the novel.24 Albano is, one could say, very impulsive, a character trait that is described in the text as “warm-bloodedness” (warme Seele; 183); in other words, he is a typical Romantic hero in that he believes that emotion and intuition should guide his actions, not rational deliberations. Equally characteristic of Albano is his strong focus on the here and now. This is particularly clear in his relation to his first love interest, Liane, to whom he says that he is “happier” than she because he “believes in a long life here” on this earth (ich bin glücklicher als du, denn ich allein glaube an unser langes Leben hier; 390). Albano is a modern hero: he believes in creating his own values in the here and now instead of relying on models passed down by previous generations. He is no classical hero representing a set of given ideals, and he is certainly not a hero who can be expected to represent Jean Paul’s own philosophy of life. The attitude of the narrator toward his “hero” is one of deep irony. Titan is not a Bildungsroman but rather an Anti-Bildungsroman, even though many “classical” Bildungsromane are also critical of their protagonists.25
This fundamentally ironic attitude toward Albano is also seen in the many contradictions in the way Albano is characterized. In spite of his down-to-earth philosophy of life, he is attracted to the deeply religious Liane, who tends toward mysticism and lives for what lies beyond; Albano’s realism feels drawn to Liane’s idealism. Albano’s fascination for and eventual friendship with Roquairol, the novel’s main antagonist, represents another inconsistency: Albano is a deeply moral person who believes in sincere emotions; Roquairol — who is introduced to the reader as he attempts to gain Linda de Romeiro’s heart by (ineptly) reenacting the suicide scene in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther) (The Sorrows of Young Werther) — is the exact opposite: he is dishonest and manipulative. The strongest argument for claiming that the narrator is treating Albano ironically is the fact that, up until the end of the novel, Albano is almost completely ignorant of his own family background and the future tasks connected to it. Many of his statements and insights are therefore to be taken with a grain of salt.
The passive nature of Titan’s main character means that secondary figures in the novel play relatively important roles. Their narrative function is to clarify the main character’s development to the reader by offering contrasts with it. Roquairol is the son of a government official and the brother of Liane, Albano’s first love interest. Roquairol is as focused on the here and now as Albano claims to be, but while Albano is driven by high moral standards in his actions, Roquairol is not. He is indifferent toward the moral implications of his actions. There is a decidedly aesthetic dimension to his way of life; he plays with emotions, his own and those of others.26 He is always looking for new opportunities to live out his fantasies.27 This is seen not only in his seduction of Rabette, Albano’s adoptive sister, and his subsequent abandonment of her, after which she is psychologically a broken woman with no future in society, but also in his rape of one of Albano’s later love interests, Linda de Romeiro, while pretending to be Albano (494). Roquairol, in his own words, does “not believe in anything anymore” (ich glaube nichts mehr; 486).28
Albano and Roquairol’s interactions with the world represent divergent responses to a worldview that could be characterized as post-metaphysical or modern. There is no doubt that Titan portrays a world in which people have lost their sense of orientation. Philosophically, the crisis at the core of Jean Paul’s Titan manifests itself as a lack of values, or, to be more precise, as the modern world’s inability to provide a substitute for the old metaphysical systems. However, the metaphysical crisis in Titan also has a psychological dimension. Titan is rich in psychology, in particular where it concerns knowledge of psychosomatic phenomena, that to a degree anticipates Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Like Roquairol, Albano sometimes suffers from overexuberant emotions, an excess of feelings and fantasy.29 Albano remedies this situation by cutting himself and thus causing “pain and even small bleedings” (Schmerzen und sogar kleine Verblutungen; 4). Albano’s masochism, to use Freud’s terminology,30 is the logical consequence of a new philosophy of life that emphasizes one’s inner development and the cultivation of one’s emotions, but that does not provide any kind of social sphere where this inner development could find a productive outlet. One could speak in this context of a psychopathology of modernity: these symptoms are the direct result of uncertainties typical of a post-metaphysical age. But does Titan offer a form of therapy for remedying these time-bound ailments?
The novel makes it clear that religion is not an effective form of therapy. Despite the novel’s rather severe criticism of the church as an institution, not all forms of religious experience are entirely without merit. On the one hand, Liane demonstrates that some forms of religious experience are still possible in a post-metaphysical world. In her case, religion takes the shape of a nearly total withdrawal into herself, an extreme mysticism. On the other hand, however, the novel demonstrates that such religious mysticism is not viable; Liane’s mystical experiences almost exclusively center on death and dying as the central aspects of her inner life. Her obsession with mysticism is connected to her own death, which appears to result from a sheer inability to live, from a physical breakdown caused by overwhelming negative emotions. Bruno Walter, strangely enough, claimed that Jean Paul’s work, in particular Titan, brought him back to Christianity.31 This is a highly intriguing remark, especially since it makes one wonder about Mahler’s influence on Walter here. If Liane can be seen as a model of religious experience at all, then only as a very masochistic one.
Nature seems to offer a more plausible form of therapy, albeit an imperfect one. Rousseau is mentioned repeatedly (136, 694) with at least some respect, but it is made clear that his criticism of civilization and advocacy of nature have been reduced to a fashionable construction of the rich. This is particularly clear in the description of Lilar, one of the settings of the novel, which is described as a “play with nature and bucolic poem of the romantic and at times deceptive fantasy of the old ruler” (Lilar ist das Naturspiel und bukolische Gedicht der romantischen und zuweilen gaukelhaften Phantasie des alten Fürsten; 202). Attempts to construct such a utopian realm are as flawed as any other metaphysical fabrication. And yet nature is not entirely without value. It is false to say that nature represents a fixed normative order or provides man with some sort of moral code. However, nature — or more accurately the experience of nature — can have intrinsic value, as the following description by Titan’s narrator makes clear:
Grand nature! When we see and love you, then we love human beings more warmly, and when we must mourn or forget them, you remain with us and pose before our teary eye like a greenish mountain range in the red evening sun.
[Hohe Natur! wenn wir dich sehen und lieben, so lieben wir unsere Menschen wärmer, und wenn wir sie betrauern oder vergessen müssen, so bleibst du bei uns und ruhest vor dem nassen Auge wie ein grünendes abendrotes Gebirge. (23)]
This passage describing Albano’s arrival at Isola bella and his experience of nature’s awakening is located at the end of the first book of Titan; Mahler depicts this scene musically at the beginning of his First Symphony, as I will show below. After the passage quoted above, the narrator describes a soul that has lost its initial idealism, unquestionably anticipating Albano’s later development. However disillusioned one may be, nature will always be there and can have a consoling function (23). The function ascribed to nature here is primarily aesthetic and psychological. Nature does not offer us an objective “order of things” in the sense of a hierarchy that tells us how to organize our lives. The importance of nature is rather located in the psyche of the individual32 and is to some extent indicative of the individual’s ability to deal with the world. The interaction of humankind with nature is highly relevant for Jean Paul in that it is symptomatic of one’s relation to the world. Roquairol’s remark in his farewell speech, just before his suicide, that he does “not even appreciate beautiful nature anymore” (nicht einmal die schöne Natur mag ich mehr; 747) clearly refers back to the quote above; it is indicative of his problematic relationship with the world in general.
Titan suggests that love, as well as nature, can have a therapeutic function, even though the novel strongly resists an idealization of love. Albano’s first lover, Liane, dies; Linda de Romeiro, his second lover, is raped by his former friend Roquairol and disappears into a convent. Only his relationship with Idoine shows some promise. One could say that these three women are instrumentalized in the interest of the “hero’s” development, a situation that is not atypical for a Bildungsroman; Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), the archetype of the genre, is structured along similar lines. Here too, however, Jean Paul does not reproduce the rules of the genre uncritically. In the end, “love” is for Jean Paul not about the realization of the self, the finding of personal fulfillment in being with a specific partner, but about a way of relating to the world around us. After losing Liane and Linda, Albano has learned that “compassion” (Mitleiden; 761) is perhaps more important than love. Such a criticism of “romantic love” at least partially explains why Albano’s image of Idoine remains strangely detached throughout the novel. She is not his real love in the sense that she is the person for whom he has the most intense feelings (the latter is obviously Liane). As Albano’s last love interest, however, Idoine offers a sort of synthesis of utopian moments in the novel. Marriage to Idoine would end existing rivalries between his family and hers. At a moment when Albano is in deep despair over Liane’s death, Idoine, who can pretend to be Liane’s spirit since there is a strong resemblance between them, appears to him to wish him peace. After that a healing process begins (549–50). Albano’s relationship with Idoine has, in other words, a clear religious dimension. Idoine’s Arcadia project, a model village where people live in harmony with nature, is an attempt to realize Rousseau’s philosophy of nature in a more realistic and societally productive setting than Lilar’s world of fake nature (461–62). Finally, through their physical similarity, Idoine reminds Albano of his first, “real” love, Liane. Idoine, therefore, synthesizes the different utopian elements in the novel.
I mention the semi-utopian elements in Titan in such detail because they all play a significant role in Mahler’s intellectual landscape. The texts used in Mahler’s music are full of references to religion, nature, and love. It is important, however, to emphasize that in Jean Paul’s world there are no real utopian realms but only memories of past utopias: there is an element of ambiguity inherent to these projects that has been there from the beginning and simply cannot be ignored. Jean Paul’s writing is characterized by a basic questioning of normative claims; his version of Romanticism emphasizes notions of crisis not unlike Mahler’s. In his groundbreaking study on Mahler, Adorno states that “Mahler’s Romanticism negates itself through disenchantment, mourning, long remembrance” (MPE, 47; Mahlers Romantik negiert sich selbst durch Entzauberung, Trauer, langes Eingedenken: MP, 196). One could counter this observation by arguing that an element of negation is already inherent in the version of Romanticism on which Mahler bases his work: there is no naive Romanticism in Mahler that remains unaware of it own fallacies. From the outset, the intellectual agenda informing Mahler’s music displays a fundamental skepticism toward the metaphysical. Mahler’s literary source for his First Symphony, its “program,” does not try to reconstruct a utopian past no longer available in the present; there is no such nostalgic longing for a past presence in Jean Paul’s Titan. To phrase it in philosophical terms, Jean Paul’s Titan confronts its readers with the paradoxical insight that despite the basic unreliability of metaphysical projects, humankind cannot live without some form of substitute for metaphysics. The question it asks is: how can humanity find anything of value in a post-metaphysical world?
In contrast to the prototypical Bildungsroman, understood in a traditional sense, Jean Paul’s Titan does not suggest that an emancipatory program toward a future of human autonomy is possible. The orientation shared by Jean Paul’s novel and Mahler’s music is that they turn not to the future but to the past. In the words of one contemporary Jean Paul scholar: “The secret telos of the novel [Titan] is a present that simultaneously is also memory” (Das geheime Telos des Romans ist eine Gegenwart, die zugleich Erinnerung ist).33 Albano is the personification of this type of memory; in contrast to Roquairol, who only lives in the present,34 Albano is able to live in the present and the past. The novel offers only memories of utopia, or to be more precise “a quotation-like memory of projections that were once thought, but that are nothing but fictions” (zitathafte Erinnerung an Projektionen, die schon einmal gedacht wurden, aber allein Fiktionen sind).35 The kind of memory Jean Paul aims for in Titan is not a historical memory — a reconstruction of the facts that constitute history — but a form of memory that incorporates lived experience, emotions, and the lessons and hopes derived from them; one that also incorporates literature and other arts as testimonies of one’s experience. This makes Jean Paul’s novel into a Bildungsroman that is very different from its classical model. The novel documents a profound crisis and offers no easy solutions to it. Moreover, history is not something that has to be overcome in order to make a better future possible; history is precisely where hope is still possible.
To arrive at a more precise understanding of the connection between Jean Paul’s novel and Mahler’s First Symphony, it is helpful to look at some of the notes accompanying early versions of Mahler’s score and the program notes for some of the early performances, in particular two concerts in Hamburg in 1893. Initially the symphony had five movements; in the following I will consistently refer to this original version, even though it is only rarely performed today. The reason for my choice is that Mahler’s programmatic statements that connect the symphony to Jean Paul’s work almost exclusively refer to the symphony in its original, five-movement form.
Bruno Walter, in his explanations of the (anti-)programmatic aspects of this work, states that Mahler is not interested in representing actual events of his life but rather in evoking a specific mood or frame of mind — Walter literally speaks of a certain “disposition of his soul” (Stimmung seiner Seele) — combining memory and a feeling that is present in the here and now, resulting in thematic clusters that are an organic part of Mahler’s compositions.36 Walter speaks of a vision emphasizing organic unity and closure in Mahler’s music that perhaps tells us more about Walter than about Mahler; it is a well-known fact that Walter’s musical preferences focused on the classical, with its emphasis on harmony and linearity, and not the modernist tradition, with its preference for contrasts, fragments, and open-endedness. Nevertheless, Walter’s deliberations tell us something essential that could easily be overlooked. They offer a key for understanding the relation between music and the images associated with it. Only if we pay attention to the “mood” that Mahler’s music attempts to evoke are we able to understand the references within it.
At times, Jean Paul’s novel also seeks to suggest very specific “moods” or “emotions.” One reason why I believe that Mahler’s First Symphony is indeed based on Jean Paul’s Titan is that the idea underlying the first movement, the articulation of nature’s awakening, has a clear parallel in the novel’s opening scenes, specifically the passage depicting Albano’s arrival at night at Isola bella, the island on which he had spent the earliest years of his childhood. In order to experience the awakening of the coming day more purely — as a listening experience! — Albano has himself carried up the mountain blindfolded (20–22). In the novel, this event is also described as the advent of spring (20). The fact that the first movement portrays, according to Mahler’s programmatic notes of 1893 (see appendix), the awakening of nature from its winter slumber in itself explains a certain mood that the listener will recognize. When Mahler revised the programmatic notes he had written in Hamburg (1893) for the Weimar performance of this symphony, one year later (1894), he explicitly referred to “the awakening of nature in the very early morning” (das Erwachen der Natur am frühesten Morgen) in connection with the first movement;37 this ties Mahler’s program into Jean Paul’s text even more closely.
A clear correlation between symphony and literary text also exists for the second movement. To Bauer-Lechner, Mahler has characterized the second movement, the “Blumine” movement, which was later dropped from the symphony, as “sentimentally indulgent” (sentimental schwärmerisch), as a “love episode” (Liebesepisode), but also as “youthful folly” (Jugend-Eselei) of his hero (RGM, 158; GME, 173). Following the arrival scene described above, we find the novel’s hero behind the palace on Isola bella, intoxicated by the smell of blooming orange trees. He is opening his veins to find relief from his overwhelming emotions — a habit, we are told, he took up as a child (34–36). Suddenly Don Gaspard, the man whom Albano assumes is his father, appears. The scene that follows can certainly be characterized as a love episode in that Albano’s meeting with his presumed father is followed by a profound declaration of the love of the son for his father: “Let me bleed, I want to die with you, if you die” (Laß mich bluten, ich will mit dir sterben, wenn du stirbst; 38). Considering the fact that Albano’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted, it is hard for the reader to take this seriously; neither does Don Gaspard, who appreciates the sentiment but wants to take care of practical things first: “All good and well, but put a bandage on first” (Recht gut, verbinde dich aber; 38). Later on Don Gaspard reproaches Albano for being in “too romantic” a mood that day (du bist leider heute zu romantisch; 39). Albano’s love for his “father” is therefore to be taken with a grain of salt; the text does express an ambiguity quite similar to the one that Mahler, according to his programmatic notes, had intended for his original second movement. Whether the movement does in fact express the ambiguity that Mahler aimed for in his programmatic explanations in a way that was recognized by audiences is another question. Mahler himself seems to have doubted it; there are indications that he considered it too sentimental.38
Little information is available regarding the intended program for the third movement. In the program notes of October 1893, this scherzo is only accompanied by the somewhat enigmatic description “Under full sail” (Mit vollen Segeln). Of some help is the subtitle for the first section of the symphony, comprising the first three movements, in the same program: “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces” (Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornstücke), a reference to Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs.39 While the first two movements in the original five-movement structure clearly depict positive moods, albeit not without irony, as I have shown, and indeed evoke associations with flowers and fruit — that is, they could count as “Blumen-” and “Frucht[stücke]” — one could argue that the third movement is pessimistic in tone (and therefore a “Dornstück”). The chronology of the first book of Jean Paul’s Titan is helpful here. After the encounter with his “father,” Albano goes out into the night and encounters a figure dressed in black bearing a depiction of a skull on his chest, who introduces himself as a “father of death” (ein Vater des Todes; 48). The mysterious figure, who resembles a monk and at the end of the novel is revealed to be a brother of Don Gaspard, announces the imminent death of Albano’s sister in Spain and asks Albano to follow him into a boat, a gondola, onto the lake (this may explain the nautical imagery in Mahler’s program notes). On the lake a mysterious voice tells Albano to love the figure that will appear to him, after which a female figure rises halfway out of the waves (49). The monk adds that, on the upcoming Day of the Ascension, his sister will announce the name of his bride to him from heaven.
The three aforementioned events in the first book of Titan foreshadow the fortunes of the principal character and are therefore highly significant for the plot line of the remainder of Titan. Albano’s search for the bride promised to him by the mysterious monk is a major structural element in the novel. A literary reading of Mahler’s program underlying the first three movements of his First Symphony makes it possible to discern a developmental model. Not unlike the psychoanalytic theory of Mahler’s contemporary Sigmund Freud, the development of the individual is tied to the relationships he develops with his primary caregivers. In the first movement, the protagonist is totally alone and, as it were, in complete unity with the world around him. In the second movement, a parental figure appears, the “father,” who becomes the primary object of the hero’s emotions and is also seen as a source of knowledge about the world. The third movement then articulates the transition from this parental relationship and its accompanying hierarchies to a relation of equals or partners; the hero is promised a future love object and the realization of his sexual identity. Albano’s sister functions here as a transitional figure. On the one hand, she is part of the parental world; on the other, she points to a realm beyond that constrictive world, a realm of freedom and autonomy. It is important to recognize that the three movements discussed here also concern the emotional development of the individual at the center of the symphony; they narrate a Bildungsroman. The cognitive and sensual awakening of the principal character (first movement) is followed by the experiences of love (second movement) and death as irrevocably intertwined with love (third movement). The third movement is particularly important here, since it articulates the end goal of this development. Death and love are intertwined in an unexpectedly productive way here; it is as if only the recognition of death makes it possible for the hero to love.
Mahler abandoned his programmatic explanations for the First Symphony with the Berlin performance on 16 March 1896; he also shortened the symphony from five movements to four by dropping the second, “Blumine,” movement.40 At the same time — in his letter of 20 March 1896 to Max Marschalk, discussed above — he downplayed the importance of Jean Paul’s Titan for this work. The conventional wisdom contends that he had had enough of the speculations that his programmatic statements had engendered. Indeed, his letter to Marschalk suggests this, when he states that the titles and explanations give only “incomprehensive” (nicht erschöpfend) and (therefore?) “not even correct” (nicht einmal zutreffend) accounts of the symphony’s content, and seem to have led audiences in the wrong direction (Br, 169). It is interesting that Mahler does not deny the relevance of Jean Paul’s Titan for the symphony here, but rather points out that extramusical elements can lead to only a partial understanding of the (far more complex) music. Keeping the (literary) Bildungsroman sketched above in mind, another explanation for Mahler’s abandonment of the Titan program arises: without the original second movement, “Blumine,” the story of the hero’s youth and development traced by the music made little sense anymore; in fact, it is no longer possible to distinguish the developmental sequence originally underlying the first three movements.
While Mahler’s programmatic statements about the first three movements of the original version of the First Symphony are sparse, there is an abundance of information for the fourth movement — so much so, in fact, that Bruno Walter, as I have already shown at the beginning of this chapter, repeatedly used this movement as an example for explaining Mahler’s stance on programmatic music. Mahler himself also wrote an extensive explanation for this movement in the program notes for the Hamburg performance on 27 October 1893 (see appendix). There he refers to an engraving by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592/3?–1635), “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession,” to explain his intentions. Mahler calls Callot’s engraving the “stimulus” or “inspiration” (Anregung) behind the movement and claims that it is simultaneously relevant for its interpretation. He is interested in the ambiguity expressed by Callot’s engraving. It depicts a funeral procession for a hunter staged by his prey: the hunted woodland animals who also are responsible for the procession’s music. The music that these animals produce is a medium for widely diverging emotions — sadness, perhaps, but especially joy — and this fundamental ambiguity is exactly what interests Mahler. The funeral march is nothing but a parody of ritualized grief, and in fact is more genuine in its celebration of life. It lives off a tension between what a specific social occasion demands the musicians to feel and what they really feel. Interestingly, a connection also exists between Jean Paul and Callot. In 1814, the German author, composer, conductor, and music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann published a collection of novellas entitled Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner). Jean Paul wrote the preface to this collection,41 in which he claims that Hoffmann’s novellas are not written in “Callot’s manner” at all; nevertheless, he appreciates their ironic and satirical aspects and their aim to save serious art from abuse by those who think they know better than its creator. Most of the preface is in the form of a fictitious review, supposedly copied by Jean Paul from a prominent literary journal. The result is that the reader is also left with a profound feeling of ambiguity regarding Jean Paul’s exact intentions.
Bruno Walter adds an important additional piece of information to Mahler’s program for the fourth movement of the First Symphony in his biographical essay on Mahler, in which he states, as I have already noted, that the funeral march of the First is influenced by the figure of Roquairol in Jean Paul’s Titan. This is a cross-reference to Jean Paul’s novel Titan that we can be reasonably sure originates from Mahler. There is no description of Roquairol’s funeral in Titan. There are, however, two passages in which “death” is thematized with a sense of ambiguity that is highly reminiscent of the ambiguity associated with Callot’s “Hunter’s Funeral Procession.” First, there is Roquairol’s suicide attempt in the second book of Titan — the event that actually introduces Roquairol to the reader. Roquairol believes himself to be very much in love with a friend of his sister’s, Linda de Romeiro. Around 1800, the impossible love of Werther for Lotte in Goethe’s best-selling epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) provided the quintessential model of the unhappy love affair. Jean Paul refers to this in Titan. One day Roquairol encounters Linda at his sister’s, and “unfortunately” she is “coincidentally dressed like Werther’s Lotte” (Zum Unglück ging sie zufällig als Werthers Lotte gekleidet; 97). Roquairol immediately demands her love, and when she refuses, goes home, dresses up like Werther, and brings back a pistol. Roquairol, “half-drunk from Lotte’s charms, from Werther’s sufferings, and from punch” (halb trunken von Lottens Reizen, von Werthers Leiden und von Punch), threatens to kill himself and eventually — after Linda’s fifth or sixth refusal — pulls the trigger but only nicks part of his left ear (97). A similarly staged scene, but with a very different outcome, can be found later in the novel in book 32,42 and this is the second passage of relevance here. After Roquairol concludes that Linda will never love him and only loves Albano, he decides to seduce and rape her. Exploiting Linda’s night blindness, Albano’s temporary absence, and the similarity between his voice and Albano’s, he seduces her and rapes her, all while maintaining the illusion that he actually is Albano. Soon thereafter, he invites his friends and acquaintances to a performance of a play that he has written incorporating many of his life’s important moments in a veiled manner that is nonetheless recognizable to his audience. At the end of the play, and in the audience’s presence, he commits suicide (755).
Both passages are characterized by an ambiguity very similar to the one found in Callot’s “Hunter’s Funeral Procession.” On the one hand, we are asked to take what happens very seriously; on the other hand, doing so is impossible. Both Roquairol’s suicide attempt and his actual suicide are highly staged events. The Werther scene in book 2 of Titan is, of course, meant to manipulate Linda into at least admitting feelings for Roquairol that she does not have. In relation to Roquairol’s actual suicide in book 32, Don Gaspard remarks that Roquairol was in debt to his regiment and was afraid of an official investigation with the pending change of government (755–756). His behavior toward Linda alone does not motivate his suicide. Both passages have a highly satirical undertone. The first passage discussed criticizes the kind of public madness evoked by Goethe’s Werther, in particular the culture of irrationalism to which it led. The satirical function of the passage describing Roquairol’s actual suicide becomes particularly clear when the response of the audience and other actors is taken into account. The initial response to Roquairol’s death comes from an actor, Bouverot, who asks who is going to pay him now (755). One of the members of the audience uses the occasion to launch a lengthy aesthetic discourse.
In his text Jean Paul uses musical means to underscore the fundamental ambiguity underlying the scene of Roquairol’s suicide. This is one of the few passages in Titan where Jean Paul works with concrete examples of existing music. Roquairol’s play starts with the “eternal overture from Mozart’s Don Giovanni” (die ewige Ouvertüre aus Mozarts Don Juan; 46). The sequence of events that result in Roquairol’s shooting himself is introduced by the wedding music (Hochzeitsmusik) from Don Giovanni, suddenly interrupted by frightened screams instigated by Roquairol (752). These references to Don Giovanni are highly significant; they, too, underscore the fundamental ambiguity of what happens onstage. The passage in Don Giovanni to which Jean Paul’s text refers is the end of act 1, where Don Giovanni organizes a ball at his castle, ostensibly in honor of the farmer couple Zerlina and Masetto, who will be married that day. In reality, however, he hopes to use the occasion to seduce Zerlina and other women present. Don Giovanni’s plan fails when Zerlina starts to scream — this is the moment to which Jean Paul’s text alludes — when he tries to drag her out of the ballroom and the other guests, among them Donna Elvira and Donna Anna (also seduced by Giovanni), come to her aid, confront Don Giovanni with his misdeeds, and threaten to expose him to the world.43 Of course, Roquairol is afraid that his crimes will be exposed; the allusions to Mozart’s opera therefore provide a better insight into his psyche. It also allows Jean Paul to emphasize the ambiguity of Roquairol’s character and actions. When Jean Paul wrote this, performance practice sought to deemphasize the demonic aspects of Don Giovanni, and there was a tendency to interpret it as a sort of comedy.44 Jean Paul offers a major exception to this interpretation and his view was to gain support later, in particular through the efforts of his friend E. T. A. Hoffmann. Roquairol’s presentation of his ultimate demise, in itself a tragic event, as a sort of comedy — even though a failed one — is consistent with his philosophy of life (and is prefigured by that of Don Giovanni): if one lives one’s life not believing in anything, death is no tragedy. Of course, Don Giovanni manages to escape the scene of his public humiliation; for Roquairol this is no longer an option.
Reading Mahler’s First Symphony in conjunction with Jean Paul’s Titan yields intriguing questions. For instance, how does the First Symphony’s fourth movement (in its original design), with all its ambiguities, relate to the narrative of the earlier movements, in particular the third? The first three movements suggest a Bildungsroman, culminating in the third movement, where the experience of death is constitutive for the emotional development of the symphony’s hero. It is only the awareness of death’s reality that makes the protagonist realize the importance of love. The fourth movement makes a radical break with such an interpretation. Whether one follows the model of the Callot engraving, the figure of Roquairol in Titan, Jean Paul’s vision of Goethe’s Werther, or Mozart and da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, only one conclusion is possible: death is pointless and life goes on. Death is not a learning experience but confirms life’s lack of meaning, its lack of a metaphysical center. Death is the end of something and not the beginning of something new. Humor does nothing to soften the experience of death but emphasizes life’s purposelessness. Mahler’s First Symphony does not in the end offer a program of Bildung but, having dallied with one, demolishes it.
The fifth and final movement of the original version of the First Symphony fits into this interpretation. Here again, Mahler’s programmatic explanations are sparse. It is possible to read the motto of its final movement, “Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso,”45 in connection with Jean Paul’s Titan. Mahler’s heading for the fifth movement (which later became the fourth movement) is an indirect quote from Titan; it refers to the “Road from Tartarus to Elysium” (Weg aus dem Tartarus ins Elysium; 203), a sign placed between the two sections of the artificial garden complex belonging to Hohenfließ, the commemorative cemetery and the idyllic nature park, to help travelers find the road from one section to the other. In relation to Jean Paul’s Titan, Mahler’s choice of motto is highly appropriate; both terms, “Inferno” and “Paradiso,” properly describe the two poles delimiting the hero’s growth into adulthood. Albano’s intense experiences of love are followed by equally intense experiences of loss. Liane, his first love interest, dies after she has been forced to abandon her love for Albano. Linda de Romeiro, his second great love, disappears into a convent after being seduced and raped by Roquairol. And yet the motto of the fifth movement also leaves open an important question: will Albano eternally, so to speak, be tossed back and forth between experiences of love [Paradiso] and death [Inferno] or is he on the road from “Inferno” to “Paradiso”?
Jean Paul’s text does not allow for a clear answer to this question. The novel appears to end on an optimistic note. Albano’s relationship with the idealistic Idoine promises to end political rivalries. However, the funeral arrangements for Albano’s brother Luigi are taking place at the same time, and we know that every earlier romantic relationship in Albano’s life has ended in disaster. The end of Mahler’s First Symphony is similarly ambiguous. In his conversations with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler commented that he intended his hero to be victorious, but that his victory over fate is only possible in death (GME, 175; not in English edition). The final movement of the symphony also presents its listeners with memories of earlier stages of the hero’s development: the nature scenery of the first movement and its associations with the hero’s innocence and happiness.46 These references to innocence lost are not integrated into the turmoil but remain apart from it. The melodies that dominate the symphony’s last movement articulate a wide range of emotions: bright and triumphant, but also dark and threatening. To phrase it another way, the symphony insists on the conflicted nature of the traumatic events at its heart and does nothing to even them out or smooth them over.
In Jean Paul’s Titan, Albano does not die at the end, but his fate is very much linked to that of his alter ego, Roquairol, who does die and thereby enables Albano to live. Mahler, in inventing an alternative ending for his symphony, follows the spirit of Jean Paul’s novel: death and love are irrevocably interwoven; neither one is thinkable without the other. The end of Mahler’s symphony, in other words, is as ambiguous and paradoxical as Jean Paul’s novel. What may seem like a victory can also be a defeat. The possibility of a Bildungsroman is fundamentally called into question. Like Jean Paul’s Titan, Mahler’s First Symphony may end with a utopian vision, but it is a vision that cannot make the reader forget about the price to be paid for such a “happy ending.”
Thus far I have used Mahler’s references to literature and the visual arts in his programmatic statements as a means for working out the thematic structure of the First Symphony. These references allow us to describe certain developmental patterns at the roots of the music more clearly (but do not exhaust its semantic or emotional content). References to texts and images helped us understand certain subtleties of the music that are, or should be, highly relevant for the performance practice of the piece. In the case of the First Symphony, however, such references also allow for something else: they make it possible to establish a link between Mahler’s music and his biography.
One of the literary texts other than Jean Paul’s Titan that I mentioned above in my analysis of the fourth movement of the First Symphony is Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther. The reference to Goethe’s Werther in Jean Paul’s Titan is especially interesting when we consider that Bruno Walter, seemingly in passing, refers to the First Symphony as Mahler’s Werther: “The First Symphony I would like to call Mahler’s Werther; in it, a heartbreaking event is acted out by means of art” (Die Erste Symphonie möchte ich Mahlers Werther nennen; in ihr wird ein herzzerreißendes Erlebnis künstlerisch abreagiert).47 As is often the case with the information that Walter provides about Mahler and his works, whether certain data originate from Mahler or Walter himself is not entirely clear. Walter suggests that the characterization of the First Symphony as Mahler’s Werther is his own invention, but how does he come to this observation? Does he base it on information provided by Mahler himself?
Mahler’s correspondence, along with the memoirs by Natalie Bauer-Lechner and Alma Mahler, shed some light on the “heartbreaking” event Walter writes about. Mahler composed this symphony during his tenure as second conductor in Leipzig (1886–88), reportedly in only six weeks. At the time, he was deeply in love with Marion von Weber, the wife of the grandson of Carl Maria von Weber and mother of three children.48 There is a striking similarity between Mahler’s “affair” with Marion and Werther’s relationship with Lotte in Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Both men had a “good” relationship not only with the woman they loved herself but also with her husband and the children involved (in the case of Werther, Lotte’s younger brothers and sisters; in the case of Marion von Weber, her children). In comparison to her husband, Marion is clearly the more artistically gifted one, as is made clear in Natalie’s notes (GME, 175; RGM, 159). It is also beyond question that Marion von Weber reciprocated Mahler’s feelings to some extent but in the end decided against breaking with society’s norms and values and stayed with her husband. According to Alma, Gustav and Marion decided to elope, but in the end did not.49 The veracity of this claim is unclear, but it would have been a move truly worthy of Goethe’s Werther.
There are a number of pieces of information that tie the First Symphony directly to the “affair” with Marion von Weber. From Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s memoirs, we know that Mahler composed the symphony during a period of six weeks in Leipzig, while he was in close contact with the Webers (in very similar fashion, Goethe had claimed that he had written his Werther in only four weeks50). According to Bauer-Lechner, when Mahler had finished the first movement at around midnight, he went to the Webers and played it for them on their piano. Afterward, they went walking in the Rosental (GME, 175; RGM, 159). The close connection of the symphony’s origins to the Weber family is confirmed by another source. According to the Dutch conductor and Mahler friend Willem Mengelberg, who visited Marion von Weber in 1907, she was at the time in possession of an early version of the score, including the “Blumine” movement, the second movement in the original design, which then bore the heading “In happy times” (In glücklicher Stunde). It also contained the personal dedication “To M., on the occasion of M.’s birthday” (An M. zum Geburtstage von M.).51 Since this information is from a letter by Mengelberg to his wife drafted immediately after the visit, I assume it is correct, even though the scores he discusses are now lost.
Such biographical tidbits are interesting, but how do they help us understand the First Symphony? There is, of course, quite a discrepancy between the characterization of the second movement as an expression of unambiguous happiness in the original score in the possession of Marion von Weber and the words “youthful foolishness” (RGM, 158; Jugend-Eselei: GME, 173), which Mahler later used in characterizing the movement to Natalie. Such contradictory classifications of the movement are interesting, because they give insight into the nature of Mahler’s creativity and ultimately help us to understand the symphony. Clearly, Mahler went through a very intense emotional period when creating this work. This was also a period of enormous, previously unexperienced creativity for Mahler, especially taking into consideration the fact that he composed the whole symphony in only six weeks. Mahler’s contradictory subsequent characterizations, in particular with reference to the “Blumine” movement, can be read as a sign that the psychological function of the symphony had changed over time for him. In its first stage, the symphony was clearly intended to be a “declaration of love.” But thereafter, Mahler’s compositional work on it was guided by the need to shake off his younger, “naive” self.
The fact that Mahler spent so much time and energy on explaining the fundamental ambiguity underlying the fourth movement, and in so many different ways, indicates that it was very important to him to have this second aspect, the abandonment of youthful naiveté — the heading for the first part of the symphony, consisting of the first three movements, was originally “Aus den Tagen der Jugend” (From the Days of Youth; see appendix) — recognized by his audiences. Jean Paul’s Titan, with its highly ironic attitude toward its main protagonist and its abundance of satirical and parodic elements, also helped Mahler to gain perspective on the original emotional core of his work. In this context it is interesting that Mahler, in a letter of 20 March 1896 to Max Marschalk mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, states that the titles and explanations for the symphony were something he invented “afterward” (nachträglich; Br, 169). Were these inventions really meant only to facilitate the audiences’ understanding of the symphony, as the letter suggests, or were they part of Mahler’s working through his own feelings and gaining perspective on his own emotional life at the time, a process that had already started with the bitter/humoristic fourth movement? In a third stage, Mahler takes out the “Blumine” movement, his testimony to happy hours, maybe even a declaration of his love for Marion von Weber, and he rejects all of the programmatic statements that had previously accompanied the symphony. The usual explanation for Mahler’s dropping of the second movement is that he was not satisfied by it on a musical level. The above suggests that Mahler may have had emotional reasons for doing so; the movement reminded him of something in his life that he wished to forget. Jean Paul’s Titan helped him with this because it, too, is a text about lost dreams, about utopian projects from the past that no longer function in the present.
These insights into the biographical circumstances in which the First Symphony was composed and the multi-layered process through which it achieved its final form lead us to another question: to what extent is this work, in its original five-movement form, intended to be therapeutic? To what extent, in other words, is its music meant to help the composer work through the emotions evoked by his liaison with Marion von Weber? The attempt to overcome certain emotions is clearest in the fourth movement. In the end, it is Jean Paul’s satirical account of Werther — note the ubiquitously recognized humoristic element in the fourth movement of the symphony — that allows Mahler some perspective on his own feelings. However, “humor” is only a phase in Mahler’s symphony. The final movement does not offer reconciliation but rather articulates a confrontation between strongly divergent emotions, as the motto of the movement discussed above also indicates. This is not the symphony of a man who has worked through his emotions and mastered them; it is the music of a man torn by extreme contradictory impulses who, not unlike the main character of Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werther, sees death as the only means to end the conflict he faces. If Bruno Walter was right in saying that the First Symphony is Mahler’s Werther, then it must be added that it is a symphony that, in the end, does not resolve its many conflicts but rather insists on their irreconcilability.
Mahler’s references to Jean Paul’s Titan in the context of his First Symphony make it possible to read this symphony in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. However, neither Jean Paul’s Titan, Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werther, nor Mozart and da Ponte’s Don Giovanni — to name the texts that can be assumed to have played a role in the First’s origins — offer a traditional narrative of self-cultivation. Goethe’s text ends with its protagonist’s demise; in Mozart’s opera and Jean Paul’s Titan the protagonists survive but it is difficult to be optimistic about their future.52 Mahler, in his symphony and his statements about it, emphasizes the ambiguity of his hero’s victory in the symphony’s last movement. Like Jean Paul’s writings, Mahler’s art presents a counterreading of sorts; his engagement with the German cultural and intellectual tradition is highly critical, and his works are intended as statements about the society in which he lives, even though the cultural framework he uses to make them may no longer be familiar to us. Mahler’s symphony reproduces a form of temporality also constitutive for Jean Paul’s novel by insisting on the present importance of those hopes and dreams that could not be integrated or were discarded. Precisely because the music insists on the relevance of what was cast aside for the present, it does not fall victim to an easy melancholy that does nothing but mourn what is lost.
Nineteenth-century scholarship has been important in shaping our current view of the Bildungsroman as a novel of self-education that traces its hero’s development, his self-realization, through love and work. Even though the term Bildungsroman can refer to eighteenth-century writing — Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon (History of Agathon, 1766/67), Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre — the concept originated in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century scholars were interested in the normative potential of this type of novel; as its goal they saw the integration of the individual into the collective.53 The Bildungsroman was seen as a specifically German genre.54 While battling reality, its hero finds love and friendship, learns from experience, and eventually finds himself and his task in life. In essence it is a very optimistic genre, to paraphrase the views of one prominent nineteenth-century scholar.55 The problem with this view is that very few Bildungsromane actually meet its criteria. This is certainly the case for the Romantic generation (among them not only Jean Paul but also Novalis and Tieck); more specifically, newer research has emphasized that even a text such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the prototypical Bildungsroman, is upon closer examination quite critical of the concept of self-cultivation.56
Mahler’s First Symphony is not an attack on the Bildungsroman understood in the traditional (nineteenth-century) sense. Rather, Jean Paul’s Bildungsroman functions as a catalyst for Mahler to rethink issues of memory and the relationship between past and present in individuals’ lives. In line with Jean Paul’s novel and its critical appropriation of the legacy of the classical generation (Goethe, Schiller), Mahler emphasizes the elements of crisis inherent in this tradition. His intention is to produce the musical equivalent not of a closed text but rather of an open narrative57 (that happens to be at odds with traditional, nineteenth-century models of reading the Bildungsroman). By a “closed” text, I mean a text with a linear approach to chronology, little ambiguity about the possibility of the hero’s achieving his goals, and a clear ideological message at the end. A text is “open” when it breaks through linear narratives, its protagonists (and antagonists) are portrayed ambiguously, and the text is without a clear ideology. Jean Paul and Mahler both had an essentially “open” concept of art. This explains the significant stylistic resemblance between Mahler’s symphony and Jean Paul’s novel. Both unite very heterogeneous materials and produce art characterized by a certain eclecticism.58 Just as Jean Paul’s text unites very different narrative styles — psychological, philosophical, anthropological, medical, essayistic, humorous, satirical, and parodic, to name a few — Mahler’s symphony unites very diverse musical styles. Humor, satire, and parody are important stylistic means for both artists, but they are not these artworks’ final word. They make room for what could be call an insight into the fundamental ambiguities of life. Heterogeneity is a stylistic marker of Titan and Jean Paul’s work in general. It is also one of the defining features for all of Mahler’s oeuvre (with the possible exception of his very early cantata Das klagende Lied).
By aiming for an open work of art, Mahler also sets parameters for the reception of his music. There is a connection between the openness of Mahler’s text and the necessity, in Mahler’s eyes, of the audience’s collaboration in constructing the narrative underlying his symphonies and its message. It is in this context that we are to understand Mahler’s anti-programmatic programs. While there are some arguments in favor of reading a temporal element into the anti-programmatic logic of Mahler’s music (initially he endorsed programs for his music, later he rejected them), I have argued in this chapter that both impulses, Mahler’s anti-programmatic considerations and his desire for a program, are simultaneously present. As we will see in relation to Mahler’s Third Symphony, Mahler still developed programmatic statements after renouncing all programs. Mahler’s and Walter’s programmatic statements in relation to the First Symphony, at the very least, do make it clear that there is not one program or one precise set of images or concepts underlying Mahler’s symphony, but that his music is instead meant to evoke a multitude of textual references and images, and the emotions that come with them. The clearest example of this is the fourth movement with its references to a variety of texts and images. Mahler may have intended the programmatic statements discussed above to be received in a playful way. His objections to audiences’ suggesting specific literary references in his music are well documented. But did he object to their speculating about his music, or was he simply criticizing their attempts to reduce the multiple references in his music to one specific reading? In relation to the Seventh Symphony, one of Mahler’s Dutch friends, the composer Diepenbrock, complained that Mahler “tells” him “something different every time” ([h]ij zegt . . . telkens wat anders)59 about the intentions behind his music. In view of the widely variable programmatic explanations of his music that we know of, this appears to be an accurate assessment. No doubt the same held true for different people; Mahler seems to tailor the message behind his music in different ways in order to appeal to different intellectual partners. Could this have been the case because Mahler hoped that his educated listeners would actually look for and find different things in his music?
The fact that the First Symphony can be associated with a broad variety of images and texts is a constitutive element for the aesthetic program underlying this symphony. To borrow a term from psychoanalysis, the symphony wants to set into motion a process of “free association” in its audiences.60 If we take seriously the openness of Mahler’s art, this means that the associations we have when listening to his music can take us into the realm of literary and intellectual history, into cultural and musical history, into Mahler’s biography, and in the end also into our own time and our own lives. This is the ultimate consequence of the freedom of association that Mahler strives for. If we embrace an aesthetics of reception of this type, one that is at once programmatic and anti-programmatic, we have to face the fact that Mahler’s music tells a different story to each listener.
Title page of the First Symphony, January 1893:
SYMPHONY (“Titan”)
in 5 Movements (2 Parts)
by
GUSTAV MAHLER
Part I: “From the Days of Youth”
1. “Spring without End”
2. “Blumine”
3. “Under Full Sail”
Part II: “Commedia humana”
4. “Funeral March in the Manner of Callot”
5. “Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso”
[SYMPHONIE (“Titan”)
in 5 Sätzen (2 Abteilungen)
von
GUSTAV MAHLER
I TEIL: “Aus den Tagen der Jugend”
1. “Frühling und kein Ende”
2. “Blumine”
3. “Mit vollen Segeln”
II TEIL: “Commedia humana”
4. “Todtenmarsch in Callots Manier”
5. “Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso”]
Program notes from the performance of 27 October 1893:
TITAN, a Tone Poem in Symphony Form
PART I
“From the Days of Youth,” Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces
1. “Spring without End”(introduction and allegro comodo).
The introduction portrays the awakening of nature from its long winter sleep.
2. “Blumine”(andante)
3. “Under Full Sail”(scherzo)
PART II
“Commedia humana”
4. “Stranded” (a Funeral March in “the Manner of Callot”).
The following serves as an explanation of this movement: the author received the external stimulus for this piece of music from a parodic image that all children in Austria know well: “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession,” from an old fairy-tale book for children: the animals of the woods accompany the coffin of the deceased hunter to his grave; hares carry the little flag, in front a band of bohemian musicians, accompanied by music-making cats, toads, blackbirds, and so on, and stags, does, foxes, and other four-legged and feathered animals of the woods escort the procession in comic poses. At this point this piece is conceived as the expression of an at times ironic and humorous, at times uncanny and brooding mood, after which then immediately
5. “Dall’ Inferno” (allegro furioso)
follows, as the sudden outburst of desperation from a deeply wounded heart.
[TITAN, eine Tondichtung in Symphonieform
I TEIL
“Aus den Tagen der Jugend,” Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornstücke
1. “Frühling und kein Ende”(Einleitung und Allegro Comodo).
Die Einleitung stellt das Erwachen der Natur aus langem Winterschlaf dar.
2. “Blumine”(Andante)
3. “Mit vollen Segeln”(Scherzo)
II TEIL
“Commedia humana”
4. “Gestrandet” (ein Todtenmarsch in “Callots Manier”).
Zur Erklärung dieses Satzes diene Folgendes: Die äussere Anregung zu diesem Musikstück erhielt der Autor durch das in Oesterreich allen Kindern wohlbekannte parodistische Bild: “Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis,” aus einem alten Kindermärchenbuch: die Thiere des Waldes geleiten den Sarg des gestorbenen Jägers zu Grabe; Hasen tragen das Fähnlein, voran eine Capelle von böhmischen Musikanten, begleitet von musicirenden Katzen, Unken, Krähen etc., und Hirsche, Rehe, Füchse und andere vierbeinige und gefiederte Thiere des Waldes geleiten in possirlichen Stellungen den Zug. An dieser Stelle ist dieses Stück als Ausdruck einer bald ironisch lustigen, bald unheimlich brütenden Stimmung gedacht, auf welche dann sogleich
5. “Dall’ Inferno” (Allegro furioso)
folgt, als der plötzliche Ausbruch der Verzweiflung eines im Tiefsten verwundeten Herzens.]61