Jean Paul was not exactly forgotten around 1900, but his texts, while of interest to some, were clearly not part of the German literary canon. This was not the case, however, for the poems collected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano were prolific German authors, belonging to the second Romantic school affiliated with the city of Heidelberg. While the first generation of Romantic authors (Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, and Wackenroder) was primarily a protest generation, the second generation, partially influenced by the French occupation of large sections of the German states, was characterized by a nationalistic, conservative, and religious turn; many of these Romantics converted to Catholicism. Des Knaben Wunderhorn is the most comprehensive and best-known collection of German folk songs and was first published in 1806 (volume 1) and 1808 (volumes 2 and 3). The songs experienced a renaissance much earlier than Jean Paul’s works, around 1870; interestingly, this coincided with Germany’s national unification.1 And yet one should not exaggerate their popularity; first-edition copies of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for instance, were still available from the publisher in 1900.2
While the subtitle of the collection is “Alte deutsche Lieder” (Old German Songs), Achim von Arnim refers to the songs in an essay accompanying the first volume as “Volkslieder.”3 It was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) who had invented the term “Volkslied”; in fact, Volkslieder was the title of a collection of songs that he edited almost three decades before von Arnim and Brentano published their collection.4 Herder’s introduction of the “Volkslied” concept into cultural history is significant for two reasons. By using this term, Herder initiated the study of what today is called “world music” or ethnomusicology,5 a discipline guided by the idea that music should be studied in its global diversity and local contexts. Simultaneously, however, the early-nineteenth-century interest in “Volkslieder” is undeniably linked to a surge of nationalism in Germany. Des Knaben Wundernhorn is one of the first texts documenting this turn toward the national that typified second-generation Romantics. One could say that this interest in folk songs in early-nineteenth-century Germany was, on the one hand, guided by descriptive interests (an inventorying of available materials and the knowledge contained in them), while, on the other hand, it is marked by a prescriptive dimension (this material is meant to represent the “real” Germany). The latter motivation made the Wunderhorn collection into fascinating material for those pursuing a German-nationalist agenda.6 It is precisely this tension between a descriptive and prescriptive component that, in my eyes, makes Mahler’s songs so compelling. Mahler shows that a close reading of traditional German folk songs — the tradition some conservative cultural critics sought to mobilize — brings to light narratives that are clearly at odds with a reactionary idealization of the past. The seemingly naive folk songs collected by von Arnim and Brentano in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are documents of crisis; they record what is problematic in German culture and society. Here too, Mahler is driven not by lighthearted nostalgia but by a critical agenda.
To better understand the literary and cultural functions of the “Volkslieder” collected under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn, it is useful to consider briefly the history of the term “Volk.” As a concept, “Volk” did not gain a political dimension until Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) began to give it a privileged position in his writings on literary and cultural history. Trained as a philosopher and theologian, Herder is now primarily known for his writings on cultural history and anthropology. His interest in the concept “Volk” can be explained by his desire to free German literature from classicist models and from foreign influences (in particular that of the French, who were a major force in eighteenth-century German culture).
Within Herder’s work, “Volk” is a central but ambiguous concept. A first ambiguity: to whom or to what does Herder refer in using the term “Volk”? Herder used the concept in a much broader sense than did those who preceded him, and historians have argued that the term “Volk” in Herder’s writings is equivalent to “nation” and “no longer” refers to “a social group within or beneath the nation.”7 Such a statement is not entirely incorrect, but it is somewhat misleading. The concept of “nation” was, around 1800, largely an abstract one for Herder, since what is now Germany then consisted of many small, largely autonomous states. It could be said that Herder was referring to the essence of a nation in using the “Volk” concept. When using the term, he meant at once a language community and an idealized notion of what one might call the “common man,” so the term for Herder is not entirely free of the original social associations that connected it to the lower classes. His idea of culture was profoundly anti-elitist. Herder was interested in culture as a basic manifestation of human activity. He saw language and culture as means through which humans created identity. The most decisive feature uniting the members of a “Volk” was, for Herder, the fact that they share a language and, as a consequence, a literary and cultural tradition. Language builds community: “A people is not in possession of an idea if it does not have the word for it” (Ein Volk hat keine Idee, zu der es kein Wort hat).8 Only through the ability to articulate an idea can it be part of memory, tradition, and the wisdom of humankind, Herder states in the same context.
There is a second ambiguity underlying Herder’s use of the concept “Volk,” one that is related to the first one. For Herder the term had both descriptive and prescriptive dimensions, and it is not always easy to distinguish between the two. The poetry of different nations, according to Herder, was “always and in every language the quintessence of the mistakes and perfections of a nation, a mirror of its views, the expression of its highest aspirations” (in jeder Zeit und Sprache war sie der Inbegriff der Fehler und Vollkommenheiten einer Nation, ein Spiegel ihrer Gesinnungen, der Ausdruck des höchsten, nach welchem sie strebte).9 Literature offers a source for studying the belief systems of a people from an anthropological perspective. Herder acknowledges that the knowledge thus gained may be both positive and negative and believes that comparing the literatures of different nations can be instructive (575). And yet one of Herder’s main interests in studying folk literature was strengthening Germany’s cultural presence in Europe.10 The above quote shows how close the descriptive and prescriptive dimensions of literature can be: literature mirrors the nation in its virtues and vices, but it also advances certain ideals for it.
Behind Herder’s curiosity about popular forms of writing there is a clear interest in rethinking the function of literature. It is in this context that we must read Herder’s repeatedly addressed concern that literature has lost its public function — that literature is no longer the organic part of society it once was (see, for example, 70, 71, and 305). What Herder envisions in order to counter this trend is a return to the foundations of literature in the “Volk.” While Herder emphasized the national characteristics of language and culture, it is not correct to say that he was a nationalist. He accepted the legitimacy of cultural differences; one could characterize his approach as being genuinely comparative. For Herder, no single nation is privileged over another.11 It should, however, also be clear from the above that Herder, despite his cosmopolitanism with roots in the Enlightenment, offered an interesting model for nationalistic and conservative intellectuals well into the Third Reich, although constructing such an agenda based on Herder’s writings is only possible through a one-sided reading of his work. Not simply Romanticism but the nineteenth century in general made use of certain ambiguities inherent to the “Volk”concept from the very beginning of this discourse in Herder’s writings.12
Versions of these ambiguities return in Achim von Arnim’s essay “Von Volksliedern” (On Folk Songs), a text of which Mahler was most certainly aware, since it appeared as an afterword for the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. In this essay, too, the notion of “Volk” functions as a critique of existing cultural institutions. The author is critical of the fact that in German literary and cultural history the theater had become the location of a national revival;13 this exclusive focus on the theater was at the expense of interest in folk songs. Moreover, according to von Arnim, governments suppressed interest in folk songs because they feared social unrest (388, 390). But to whom was von Arnim exactly referring when he used the concept “Volk”? Folk songs have survived among the lower classes and farmers (389, 391), but they cannot really count on von Arnim’s sympathies. It is highly interesting that von Arnim finds travel to be a necessary prerequisite for the type of folk literature in which he is interested; he specifically mentions Gypsies, wandering craftsmen, soldiers, and (traveling) students (393–94). They carry with them a form of knowledge that is a precondition for folk literature. Paradoxically, it is knowledge of the world that can bind a person to her or his fatherland, and poetry in particular can establish such a bond (394–95). Von Arnim’s essay here mirrors the great importance the Romantics in general attributed to poetry.
In view of the subsequent nationalistic appropriation of the Romantics’ ideas, this is of course a very provocative notion. Von Arnim, it seems, was not interested in a narrow-minded nationalism that sought to block out the outside world but rather aimed for a cosmopolitan sense of national identity (represented by certain figures of mobility) that quite consciously lived off a knowledge about other peoples and their cultures. For von Arnim, folk songs additionally have an anthropological function in that they allow a nation to find its own cultural identity by comparing itself with other cultures. However, a version of the ambiguities underlying Herder’s use of the term “Volk” can be found in von Arnim’s essay as well. While von Arnim in the first half of his essay, as I have shown, gives very concrete examples of what he means by the “Volk” concept and emphasizes the term’s social connotations that would potentially make a politically progressive interpretation possible, toward the end of the essay it turns into a very abstract category. According to von Arnim, only the artist who is close to the “Volk” can bring it together under his “flag” (Fahne); he can do this even though it may be separated by “language, national prejudices, religious errors, and superfluous fashion” (Sprache, Staatsvorurtheile, Religionsirrthümer und müßige Neuigkeit; 413). The question to ask here, then, is: what is the constitutive component of the “Volk” if it is not language, a sense of national identity, or religion? The only answer that von Arnim allows is, surprisingly, the activity of the poet-archaeologist. In the end, the role of the “Volk” is to legitimize the efforts of the poet, and not the other way around. Little remains of the openness to alterity evoked earlier when von Arnim, at the end of his essay, speaks of the folk-song project as a “public monument for the greatest new people, the Germans” (allgemeinen Denkmahle des größten neueren Volkes, der Deutschen; 413–14). Folk songs are meant to serve the goal of national unification. Here von Arnim is no longer interested in the anthropological, descriptive function of folk poetry; instead, he evokes its prescriptive, normative potential, its ability to create a nation superior to others. It is precisely this element that would later be picked up on by the anti-modern, nationalist, and conservative Völkische Bewegung that played an important, even crucial role in the rise of German and Austrian fascism.14
The contradictory ways in which von Arnim conceptualized the “Volk” in his essay indicate a shift from the concrete to the abstract. While at the beginning of his essay the influence of the Enlightenment’s social agenda and Herder’s ideas clearly manifest themselves, at the end these have moved into the background in favor of more abstract ideals. It is not just in von Arnim’s works that this shift can be found; his text is symptomatic of broader changes that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. In its new interpretation, the term “Volk” functions primarily as an imagined category with strong national connotations, no longer as a term that was meant to refer to a historically existing entity. This shift is also documented in some of Wagner’s early writings.
Following Herder and von Arnim’s line of thinking, Wagner, in his 1849 essay “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (The Art-Work of the Future), writes that a renewal of German art is only possible through art’s reorientation toward the “Volk,” an idea that he would repeat in many later texts, even though it is clear that he relied on highbrow literature or philological publications for the narratives of his operas.15 But what does Wagner mean when writing about the “Volk”? Wagner defines the “Volk” as “the epitome of all individuals who made up a collective” (der Inbegriff aller der Einzelnen, welche ein Gemeinsames ausmachten) and, echoing Herder (who remains unnamed), mentions the use of a single language as a criterion that unites the “Volk” into a nation (DKdZ, 3:47; AF, 74). Later he will clarify his definition by stating that the “Volk” consists of people who “feel a common and collective need” (AF, 75; eine gemeinschaftliche Noth empfinden: DKdZ 3:48, trans. modified). This is ambiguous language, in particular because Wagner embeds this argument in a discourse that criticizes luxury and fashion, and their effects on society and culture. This could be read as a remnant of a socioeconomic understanding of “Volk” that is possibly in line with a progressive political agenda. “Noth” would accordingly refer to the basic needs of life. But this is not what Wagner means. A little later in his essay he clarifies this “Noth” in an abstract sense as something “unconscious” and “involuntary” (AF, 79; unbewußt, unwillkürlich: DKdZ 3:52, trans. modified), as an intrinsic (but abstract!) drive propelling the people. In clear contrast to von Arnim, Wagner believes that intellectuals should learn from the “Volk” and not the other way around (DKdZ 3:53; AF, 80–81). A subtle transition from the descriptive to the prescriptive can also be found in this essay. In later texts such as “Was ist Deutsch?” (What is German?, 1878) the second, prescriptive function dominates entirely. Here Wagner draws explicit connections between the German “Volk” and a German spirit (deutscher Geist) that remains largely abstract, although we learn that it is associated with a “conservative temperament” (konservativen Sinn).16
While Wagner never mentioned Des Knaben Wunderhorn in his writings, Nietzsche discusses von Arnim and Brentano’s collection in chapter 6 of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music), first published in 1872. Read on a programmatic level — and this was certainly what Nietzsche originally intended — Die Geburt der Tragödie can be interpreted as a call for a revitalization of German culture, which had become too rational, too constructed, and above all, too lifeless. In the context of the work of earlier folk-song theorists (Herder, von Arnim), it is interesting to note that folk songs, for Nietzsche as well, represent a critical potential in relation to the epic tradition dating back to Homer (antagonist of Antilochus, the father of the folk song; SW 1:42–43; BT, 29) and also, if compared to the later dramatic tradition, Greek tragedy (SW 1:52–57 BT, 36–40). Nietzsche mentions the Wunderhorn songs as an example of Dionysian art, or at least of a form of art that harbors many traces of what he calls “Dionysian” (SW 1:49; BT, 34).17 The superiority of folk songs over other forms of art manifests itself in the fact that music prevails over language in them. Language serves music; it tries to imitate music, and one melody can lead to many different poetic images (SW 1:49; BT, 34). Such statements are to be understood in the context of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, for whom music, in contrast to text, was an unmediated manifestation of the will underlying all life (SW 1:46–47; BT, 31–33). Nietzsche points out that folk songs are, consistent with their Dionysian foundation, neither objective nor subjective, but that the artist functions only as a medium, and that therefore this type of poetry cannot be considered the expression of an individual will (SW 1:47; BT, 32).
Nietzsche’s reflections on the critical potential of folk songs are relevant because they point to a certain tension with the main message of the work: its goal of renewing German (musical) drama. Nietzsche wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie — a book that destroyed his scholarly career almost overnight — under the influence of Wagner (to whom it is dedicated). One could say that Nietzsche’s book invents a philosophical program for Wagner’s dramatic works. But the excursus on “Volkslieder” and Des Knaben Wunderhorn in chapters 5 and 6 investigate what could be a different trajectory for German culture, one that Wagner did not follow. Nietzsche clearly had the above-mentioned writings by Herder, von Arnim, and Wagner in mind when he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie. What is significant is that he seeks to preserve the potential for cultural criticism in their texts. It is tempting to read such a hesitation as a foretaste of Nietzsche’s later criticism of Wagner’s nationalistic and religious turns (see chapter 3). That may overstate the case, but it was, I would argue, Nietzsche’s promise of an alternative trajectory for German culture that attracted Mahler when he started work on his Wunderhorn compositions — a trajectory very different from that of Wagner. By the time Mahler started work on the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) and the Wunderhorn songs, the intolerant side of this conservative agenda had become much clearer than had been the case during Wagner’s lifetime. But what kind of knowledge do these folk songs contain that makes them suitable as a platform for a counterreading of German culture?
While there are connections between the First Symphony and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, there are also indications that Mahler wants to do something very different in these songs. At the roots of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is a program that, I will argue, is similar to the programmatic deliberations underlying the songs collected under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The titles of both cycles could easily evoke a reductionist Romantic image of an idealized and unproblematic past, but if one looks at them more closely, it becomes clear that it is precisely such a tendency toward idealizing the past that is fundamentally questioned by text and music. By giving his first cycle the title Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Mahler may have sought to profit from the name recognition provided by Rudolf Baumbach’s popular book of poems with the same title from 187818 — it is not clear whether Mahler knew the book, but it is not unlikely — but the intentions underpinning Mahler’s cycle are very different from Baumbach’s. While Baumbach offers his readers harmless entertainment, Mahler’s songs are much more serious in nature, despite their occasionally lighthearted façade.
Donald Mitchell has pointed out that there is a clear connection between the origins of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Mahler’s failed relationship with the singer Johanna Richter during his Kassel period (1884–85),19 reminiscent of the way in which the composition of (parts of) the First Symphony was influenced by Mahler’s failed relationship with Marion von Weber. One could say, however, that Mahler resists an autobiographical model of interpretation by naming his cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. The title alone indicates that they are about much more than the adventures of one individual; the protagonist functions as a representative of a certain social group. It is commonly translated into English as Songs of a Wayfarer — the songs of someone who travels by foot, in other words. The German word “Geselle,” however, contains a dimension that is lost in this translation. The primary translation for “Geselle” is “apprentice”; a “fahrender” or “wandernder Geselle” has finished an initial training period with a master (“Meister”) and has entered a period of traveling around in order to refine his skills as a craftsman before settling down somewhere permanently.20 The “Geselle” mentioned in the title is one of the “figures of mobility” described in von Arnim’s essay accompanying the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The social connotations of the term are important; they are indicators of one’s status within a group in society. This may strike us as self-evident today, but in this context the observation is relevant, because such a social and historically specific interpretation clearly sets Mahler’s cycle apart from the “abstract” conservative conceptualizations of the Volk in Mahler’s day.
And yet in spite of the social function of the term “Geselle,” the social status of the “fahrender Geselle” is also characterized by a certain uncertainty. The first song of the cycle, “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht” (When my love has her wedding day), the only text of the Gesellen cycle not written by Mahler himself,21 points to this separation of the apprentice from society — the song consists of his imagining his lover getting married while he remains alone. This song clearly establishes a contrast between public space, where the marriage of the protagonist’s former lover is celebrated, and the private space of the “dark little room” (dunkles Kämmerlein) which, we are to believe, is the protagonist’s (temporary) living quarters. In one of the very few statements Mahler made about the cycle, he emphasizes the element of separation: the apprentice “moves out into the world” (zieht in die Welt hinaus; Br, 57). The song imagines the marginality of the apprentice, but the image Mahler evokes here is also one of emasculation. The protagonist’s marginality implies an inability to find a partner, to establish one’s sexual identity in society. Even though sex is not directly discussed in these songs, they all contain a strong sexual undertone.
One could say that the term “fahrender Geselle” refers to a transitional stage in life that also has philosophical connotations. Mahler’s cycle was originally supposed to consist of six songs. Donald Mitchell has made accessible an early untitled poem by Mahler that one can assume was meant to belong to the cycle but was ultimately not included. We find the apprentice wandering around at night, having lost his “way and orientation” (Weg und Weiser), surrounded by soft imaginary voices speaking seductively.22 Then the wanderer wonders when his travels will end and compares himself to someone who encounters a Sphinx “staring” at him and “threatening” him with “tormenting riddles” (Es starrt die Sphinx und droht mit Rätselqualen) that he cannot solve. One can debate the poetic merits of this image — a sphinx imagined in the middle of what we assume is a predominantly German landscape? — but the image makes clear what is at stake here: the poem is asking a philosophical question about the meaning of life. Not surprisingly, it ends on a rather negative note: “And when I cannot solve the riddle — — I must pay for it with my life” (Und lös’ ich’s nicht — — muß es mein Leben zahlen). It is not clear how we are to interpret these lines, however. It could be that this is what the protagonist really thinks, but it could also be that this is what the soft and threatening voices tell him — what they want to make him believe.
The fact that “wandering” is to be understood as a metaphor for humanity’s lack of orientation should not come as a surprise to German audiences. “Wandering” as a literary image has a long tradition; it plays a prominent role in the works of Rousseau, but also within German literary and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jean Paul, Goethe, and Heine come to mind).23 In late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German literature the wanderer is a rebel, but he is also looking for a place in society.24 While for Goethe and the Romantics the wanderer is a central figure searching to make sense of life, in the later nineteenth century the wanderer is a marginalized figure, a journeyman or vagabond driven by unrest, unhappiness, and a pathological urge to travel.25 In his songs Mahler seeks to rehabilitate the figure of the wanderer by referring back to the older tradition (represented by Goethe and the Romantics) while simultaneously emphasizing the critical potential and heterogeneity of that tradition. In Mahler’s time German audiences may very well have associated the image of the wanderer with Goethe’s classical Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and in particular also with its sequel: the Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). While the Lehrjahre promise readers a clear ideal, albeit ambiguously, the Wanderjahre are characterized by the lack of a philosophy of life. The lack of philosophical perspective associated with the wanderings of the Wanderjahre’s hero is mirrored by a dissolution of the novel’s formal structure: the linear narrative is abandoned and makes way for individual novellas, essayistic fragments, letters, and aphorisms. In the following, I will argue that this same openness of form is also characteristic of Mahler’s song cycle.
The first song of the cycle, “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,” hints of a counterworld to the protagonist’s desolation. The flower and bird briefly mentioned in the middle stanza provide the leading images for the second song, “Ging heut morgen übers Feld” (Walked this morning through the field). Text and music express, throughout the song, the happiness and naiveté associated with nature, or at least with a certain image of nature. (Mahler used the main melody in the first movement of his First Symphony, intended to evoke a similar atmosphere of nature’s innocence and simplicity.) Nature provides some relief to the tortured soul; the second song describes a walk over the fields early in the morning with the birds and flowers speaking directly to the protagonist. And yet, as in the First Symphony, the song does not allow for an unambiguous idealization of nature. As much as nature may provide the protagonist with aesthetic pleasure, it always remains a subjective experience and is therefore dependent on his perception and imagination. “Will my happiness now begin as well?!” (Nun fängt auch mein Glück wohl an?!) the song asks in the end, only to answer with a clear “no”: “No! No! That, I believe, will never be able to bloom for me!” (Nein! Nein! Das ich mein, mir nimmer blühen kann!). The subjective element “for me” is very important in this context; it is not so much that nature will not bloom again; nature will continue to go through its natural cycles — but in the perspective of the subject speaking here, it will not.
Scholars have commented on the importance of contrasts for the structure of this cycle26 (and of Mahler’s music in general, one might add). The second and third songs of the cycle are built around such contrasts. The general tone of the second song is peaceful and friendly; the third song is agitated and loud. The latter song, “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer” (I have a glowing knife), counters the second song’s imagery of nature with that of a knife in a chest — a knife that is always there. In psychoanalytical terms one could speak of a masochistic scenario in this song. The violence is not directed against the other but against the self, and it is tied closely to feelings of lust; “joy” (Freude) and “lust” (Lust) are mentioned in relation to violence in the first stanza of the song. But what does the knife mean; what does it stand for? In one scholar’s view it is the protagonist’s imagination, as he thinks about his lover, that is at the root of this violent imagery.27 Indeed, in the last stanza of the song, hearing her laugh makes him long for death. But it is not just this (imagined) renewed acquaintance with his lover that evokes the imagery of violence. The middle stanza, which connects the third song with the preceding and following songs, gives a further clue leading to an answer. The underlying structure of “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer” is A — B — A; like the first song of the cycle (and the fourth), the middle stanza contrasts sharply with the first and last stanzas, both musically and textually.28 While the first and third stanzas are dominated by masochistic imagery, the middle stanza of the third song seeks to revive the natural scenery (the sky, the field) from the second song, and also mentions “blue eyes” — a prominent image in the last song. However, this middle stanza reminds the song’s narrator of the impossibility of returning to nature as innocent. The imagery prompts reminiscences of earlier days: the sky reminds him of his lover’s eyes and the field recalls her blond hair. “Nature,” in other words, is always also the product of the subject’s imagination; there is no nature outside the subject. The song is deeply skeptical about the consoling powers of nature. In the end, the contrasts evoked by the poem collapse; what once offered consolation now causes pain.
The cycle’s last song, “Die zwei blauen Augen” (The two blue eyes), is perhaps the most puzzling of all. The song reiterates the story of loss, separation, and isolation (first stanza). It reminds the listener that nature offers no consolation; we see the protagonist wandering alone at night through the heather fields (second stanza). In the third and final stanza, however, something changes. While the first stanza seemed to argue that it would be better for love never to have existed — “Oh blue eyes, why did you look at me” (O Augen blau! Warum habt ihr mich angeblickt?) — the final stanza does accept love, or to be more precise: the memory of love. The beginning of the final stanza features the memory of the linden tree under which the protagonist first slept after leaving his love. Peter Revers has pointed out that the linden tree is an important literary topos that functions as a symbol of love; it also plays this role in Schubert’s song “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree), part of the Winterreise cycle.29 The tree is associated with sleep, and sleep is seen as a recapturing of a time of childlike innocence: “There I did not know how life treats us” (Da wußt ich nicht, wie das Leben tut). And yet this evocation of childlike innocence is not the final message of the song. The song in the end does not offer a clear path to a (brighter?) future, nor does it idealize the past in any way; Mahler’s instructions are clear: it should be played “without sentimentality” (ohne Sentimentalität).30 What remains is a seemingly indiscriminate listing of human experience brought back to its essentials: “Everything! Everyting! Love and suffering! And world and dream!” (Alles! Alles! Lieb und Leid! Und Welt und Traum!). It is possible to read these final lines as a poetic program legitimizing the cycle: real art does not offer easy answers or “ideology” but rather insists on experience, negative or positive, real or imagined. One can also read these final lines as language’s failure to organize experience (by means of syntactical structure) — a failure that is meant to be positive, in the end, in that it allows a more complex view of reality.
In the orchestral songs based on von Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, too, Mahler is interested in a historically specific and concrete definition of Volk. This is noticed by Adorno (among others), who writes of the “historical” nature of the “world of images” in Mahler’s music (MPE, 47; Geschichtlich ist seine Bilderwelt: MP, 196). This is especially true for the characters populating this world. In Mahler’s music we find “pressganged soldiers” (wider ihren Willen gepreßte Soldaten), “peasant scheming against the overlords” (Bauernlist gegen die Herren); its protagonists are “outsiders, the incarcerated, starving children, the persecuted, lost soldiers” (MPE, 46; Außenseiter, Eingekerkerte, darbende Kinder, Verfolgte, verlorene Posten: MP, 195, trans. modified). In his choice of texts Mahler may have been motivated by the hardships of his own youth, Adorno suggests; more recent biographical research is inclined to downplay these hardships.31 Even if the marginality of the figures populating Mahler’s songs is self-evident, it is worth investigating further. It is not just memories of his youth that made Mahler pick these specific poems; they are part of a program. In spite of the marginality of these figures, they are representatives of the “Volk.” In the way they describe their protagonists, the poems that Mahler chose for his songs remain remarkably close to the original meaning of “Volk.” In German, “Volk” originally meant a “group of soldiers” or a small group that has something in common, for instance a profession.32 It had, in other words, a strong social connotation, and it is precisely this aspect that is emphasized in Mahler’s songs.
How did Mahler select texts from von Arnim and Brentano’s three-volume collection entitled Des Knaben Wunderhorn? To answer this question, it should be remembered that Mahler’s criteria were by no means exclusively literary. He may have chosen certain texts because they offered good building blocks for the musical intentions he had in mind or because they allowed him a certain amount of artistic freedom. In this sense I would interpret Mahler’s comment to Ida Dehmel that von Arnim and Brentano’s Wunderhorn texts “are not perfect poems, but rather rocks, from which everyone can make what they wish” (Das seien keine vollendeten Gedichte, sondern Felsblöcke, aus denen jeder das Seine formen dürfe.).33 The content of the Wunderhorn texts, however, also influenced Mahler’s choices. Mahler chose texts on topics that interested him and that had some thematic similarities, as I will show in greater detail below. Another question is: which poems did Mahler not include? An undeniable undercurrent of anti-Semitism exists in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. In total, ten texts in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are characterized by openly anti-Jewish content; in most cases these texts are about Jews interfering with Christian rituals.34 Mahler must have encountered these. Yet he may not have been aware of the fact that von Arnim and Brentano were both members of the Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft (Christian-German Dining Club), a conservative and fiercely nationalistic group that openly propagated anti-Semitism. He also may not have known that Clemens Brentano was the author of Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte (The Philistine before, in, and after History, 1811), one of the most notoriously anti-Semitic texts of German Romanticism and originally read at the inaugural meeting of the Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft.35
One observation to be made in this context is that the characters populating Mahler’s Wunderhorn cycle are again, with very few exceptions, figures of mobility. While mobility in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is seen as predominantly negative, in Des Knaben Wunderhorn mobility, at least initially, seems to be something positive — the protagonists of these songs tend to accept it as a part of life. This is consistent with von Arnim’s programmatic statement in the essay accompanying the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, in which he argued that only those who travel (or wander) could represent his ideal of folk art. “Wandering,” however, is also part of an iconography that can be associated with Jewishness in Western culture, most prominently in the figure of Ahasverus, the wandering Jew.36 In the nineteenth century, for instance, the “wandering Jew” was the subject of a popular woodcut by Gustav Doré and a novel by Eugène Sue. The image was increasingly used by anti-Semitic propagandists as a countertype to more positive forms of masculinity,37 but had originally had more positive connotations. We know that Mahler was aware of the iconography surrounding the “wandering Jew” from a letter he wrote at a very young age to his friend Josef Steiner. The letter is a highly personal document, written over three days and organized in three parts. The second part contains a rather dark dream-like sequence in which figures of Mahler’s past, as well as mythological figures, play a role. It ends with Mahler’s dream vision of Ahasver, who is rejected by an angel and “picks up his walking stick and moves on, dry-eyed, forever, immortal” (dann nimmt er seinen Stock, und ziehet weiter, ohne Tränen, ewig, unsterblich).38 On some level — unconsciously, one would be inclined to say — Mahler must have identified with the figure of Ahasver. This may explain, at least in part, his fascination with “wandering figures” in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. They are likeable figures, and in Von Arnim’s view, as representatives of the “Volk,” they are at the core of the German cultural tradition.
The order in which Mahler published his orchestral settings for the first ten orchestral Wunderhorn songs most likely followed their order of composition (between 1892 and 1896).39 These songs were published in two volumes of five songs each in 1899; two additional songs (“Revelge” and “Der Tamboursg’sell”) were published separately in 1905. In the following, I will discuss these songs more or less in the order in which they were published. While I do not believe that they present a linear narrative — a Bildungsroman in the traditional sense — they do respond to and communicate with each other. Mahler himself did not have them performed in their original order,40 and many performances or recordings today do not do so either. Nevertheless, one runs the risk of overlooking some of the associations that exist among them if they are only considered individually and out of their original sequence.
One striking thematic difference between the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the orchestral Wunderhorn cycle is that “love” is dealt with in an entirely different manner in the Wunderhorn cycle. The Gesellen songs were about love as passion — a conceptualization of love that emphasizes feelings independent of social or moral responsibility, associates the feeling of love with self-realization,41 and includes both a spiritual and a physical element. These songs also depicted the suffering experienced when this kind of love cannot be fulfilled. At the end of the cycle, the protagonist has understood that this love can only be a memory and that life moves on. The protagonist of “Der Schildwache Nachtlied” (Sentinel’s Night Song),42 the first song of the Wunderhorn cycle, resolutely rejects the idea of love as passion. In an imaginary conversation between the sentinel and his (imaginary) lover,43 this lover represents love as passion for him: she tries to seduce him into leaving his post by promising to wait for him in the “rose garden,” among the “green clover” (im Rosengarten, / im grünen Klee) — symbols that may very well be understood to signify a sexual promise. But the sentinel does not want to be seduced and counters her proposal with images of weaponry and a garden used to store weapons (“Waffengarten”). When his lover invokes God to protect him in the field, the sentinel refers to king and emperor. He goes so far as to order his lover to stay away from him — the text emphasizes physicality: “Bleib’ mir from Leib” (Stay away from me [literally: from my body]) — and even calls for the patrol to join him in order to prevent her from coming closer. Only the knowledge articulated in the final stanza by an anonymous narrator, who is not the soldier, that the song is sung at midnight by a “Verlorne Feldwacht” (lost watchman in the field), opens a new perspective on the message of this song. What does it mean that the sentinel is “lost”? Does it have something to do with the anti-idealist tendency of the song, the rejection of love and religion in a traditional sense?
The second and third songs in the first book of Mahler’s Wunderhorn cycle are closely related. In von Arnim and Brentano’s collection, too, they can be found next to each other.44 “Verlor’ne Müh” (Wasted effort) consists of a dialogue between, we assume, a young man and woman, in which the woman again tries to seduce the man. To do so, she evokes various images. First, she associates love with innocence; she invites her male counterpart to watch some lambs with her. When that does not work, she tries to trick him with food: “Would you like to nibble on some sweets, / Get some from my pocket!” (Willst vielleicht a Bissel nasche? / Hol’ dir was aus meiner Tasch’!). One does not need to be psychoanalytically inclined to see that both “naschen” — the word “nibble” is a good translation, even though “naschen” generally implies something sweet — and “Tasche” (pocket) have a strong sexual connotation in this context. The male figure’s response, “ich nasch’ dir halt nit” (I don’t want to nibble on anything from you), is equally unambiguous. Finally, the woman offers him her heart and appeals to his feelings so that he will forever think of her (“Immer! Immer! Immer!”) and is nevertheless rejected again. The text here returns to love as “passion,” and not just as physical pleasure, even though the listener will take this turn with a grain of salt, since love as “passion” comes only in third place after descriptions of love as childlike innocence and physical pleasure. Read this way, the song is about the impossibility of turning something physical into something spiritual (a topic that recurs in the fourth song).
The third song “Trost im Unglück” (Consolation in Hardship) is another dialogue, this time between a soldier (hussar) and a girl. Here both partners agree that they are not destined for each other, as is clear from the verse “I love you only out of folly” (Ich lieb dich nur aus Narretei), first announced by the hussar and repeated by the girl. The term “Narretei” reminds the listener of the “foolish girl” (Närrisches Dinterle) with which the male figure in “Verlor’ne Müh” addressed his female companion. It is not love as passion (with its associations of permanence and self-fulfillment), but rather love as a harmless game that both figures agree upon; both can live very well without each other, they believe. And yet there are also references to another kind of love in the song; there is, for instance, a reference by the girl to the “flower” growing in her “father’s garden” (In meines Vaters Garten / wächst eine Blume drin); she wants to wait until it has become bigger before she starts taking love more seriously. This can be read as a reference to society’s expectations, in particular the expectations that families (fathers) have of their daughters. The end of the song, which contains a rather unexpected turn, confirms such a reading. Both figures agree that they would be ashamed of each other if they were to be seen together in the company of others. This tells us something about society’s pressures that keep these two from finding each other. While the girl may refer to middle-class morality or her parents’ expectations that forbid her from being seen with a (wandering) soldier, the hussar must have his army buddies in mind who, no doubt, would frown upon anyone pursuing such a conventional relationship. This could be a lighthearted ending, if it were not for the title of the song that speaks of “Unglück” (Hardship or Misfortune).
The pressures of society return more prominently in the fourth and fifth songs of the cycle. “Wer hat dies Liedchen erdacht?” (Who thought up this little song?)45 is, like the second song, about the impossibility of translating physical into spiritual love. This song is considered to be one of Mahler’s more enigmatic.46 I would argue, in contrast to one commentator,47 but in line with all other Wunderhorn songs discussed thus far, that to understand it, it is important to see that it presents a dialogue between two partners, one male and one female. The first stanza is narrated from the perspective of a man who is standing at the foot of a mountain with a big house from atop which a girl is peering; she is the daughter of the innkeeper, but, we are told, does not live at the house. Here the song addresses a social issue, I would argue. Women of lower standing are easy prey for those higher on the ladder of society. The second stanza is from the perspective of the girl, who is bemoaning her life — “My heart is wounded” (Mein Herzle ist wund) — and hoping that the man, whom we can now assume is a former love interest (she addresses him as “Schätzle,” Sweetheart), can help her. This middle stanza ends with images of death and illness, yet it also envisions love as a healing power. It is not part of the original poem in von Arnim and Brentano’s Wunderhorn collection but was added by Mahler. In other words, it is Mahler who transformed the poem into one about the conflict between physical and spiritual love.48 The first verse of the third stanza, “Who thought up this nice nice little song?” (Wer hat denn das schön schöne Liedlein erdacht?), refers to the previous second stanza. The meaning of this line is ambiguous. Mahler plays a little joke on his listeners by asking them to guess who wrote the previous lines, not part of the original Wunderhorn poem. But the line also allows for a second reading. It can be read as a rejection of the type of romantic love to which the innkeeper’s daughter had alluded, as if the protagonist is asking: “Who believes in such a silly story? This kind of love does not exist in the real world; it is sheer fiction.” The reference to three geese — two of them are grey; one is white — at the end of the song remains enigmatic. There is little justification for reading them as folkloric parallels of the “stork announcing pregnancy,” as Paul Hamburger has suggested (77). But the idea that the song has something to do with unwanted pregnancy is not entirely out of the question;49 this would explain the references to illness and the call for youth to be wiser at the end of the second stanza. Does the white goose symbolize an illegitimate child? At the very least, the symbolism reinforces the impression of someone who is “out of place” within a community.
If it is true that Mahler conceived of the two books of Wunderhorn songs as separate cycles, how is the final song of the first book, “Das irdische Leben” (Life on Earth50), connected to the previous songs? Its tone and general atmosphere are very different: not humorous, but tragic — a tragedy to which the middle stanza of the previous song, with its images of illness and death, already alluded. It is also meaningful that this last song does not have a man and woman but a woman and child as its main protagonists. It is tempting to assume that this may be the child to which “Wer hat dies Liedchen erdacht?” implicitly referred. Several commentators have remarked on the similarity of this poem to Goethe’s “Erlkönig” (King of Elves),51 one of Goethe’s most famous poems, also because of Schubert’s adaptation of it for voice and piano. However, little has been made of this implied intertextual reference. How does an insight in the connection between both texts help us to better understand Mahler’s song? “Erlkönig” argues that parents must acknowledge children’s spiritual needs; because the father ignores the fears of his son, the child dies. The message of “Das irdische Leben” is the exact opposite: because the mother ignores her child’s need for food (bread), the child dies. Parents, in other words, need to acknowledge their children’s material, bodily needs; if they don’t, their children will die.
There is, in my opinion, a clear connection between this emphasis on the physical rather than spiritual side of human nature and the theme of “love” that so clearly dominates this first series of Wunderhorn songs. In the first four songs the material world, including humans’ physical needs, was powerfully rejected by the male protagonists. In the final song a woman is at the center, and the text offers a powerful defense of the physical side of human nature. One could also say about “Das irdische Leben” that it reintroduces society’s realities (already referred to a few times previously) into the cycle. This puts the female figures’ concerns, particularly in the third and fourth songs, into a very different perspective. Simultaneously, this forces us to reevaluate the male perspective in these songs. All these songs have a dialogic component. It is, however, inaccurate to identify the message of the songs with the (dominant) male perspective present in the first four songs. These songs do not give us a straightforward message or ideology but rather present a clash of viewpoints or a dilemma. Masculinity asserts itself in these songs but is also questioned. Who believes the man who claims to be able to live without love, without physical needs, or without a home?
Initially Mahler considered the term “Humoresken” as a genre designation for these songs, at least for the first four songs and “Das himmlische Leben,” which he composed at the same time, but which was used for the Fourth Symphony instead of the collection of 1899 (Br, 206).52 I will discuss the term “Humoreske” in relation to Mahler in greater detail in the context of the final movement of the Fourth Symphony (chapter 3), but for the moment I would like to note that, as in the Fourth Symphony, the songs’ undeniable lightheartedness is to be taken with a grain of salt.
The second book of Wunderhorn songs from 1899 is quite different in character from the first book. “Love” is still present as a topic, but not in all of the songs and not as prominently as in the first series. The center of attention shifts to issues of art and representation, and many of these songs are critical of art’s functions in society and of its potential. What is interesting about these songs is how art and nature are intertwined in them; in this second series, “nature” does not function as mere scenery for the songs’ texts, but the question is rather: what is nature and how can it help us understand, not only “art,” but perhaps even human culture, understood here broadly as “human activity”?
The first song of the second Wunderhorn series, “Des Antonia von Padua Fischpredigt” (Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes), the melody of which Mahler also used for the third movement of his Second Symphony, is without a doubt one of the most humorous pieces of music that Mahler composed. Its narrative line is simple: Anthony of Padua — an actual historical figure, a Portuguese saint who lived from 1195 to 1231 — finds the church empty and so decides to preach to the fishes. The fishes are described in detail and with great wit; each specimen represents a specific human vice and character type. The fishes are attentive and enjoy the sermon, but none of them, in the end, change anything about their behavior. This is summarized in the last two lines of the final two stanzas: “All were pleased by the sermon, / but they remained like everybody else!” (Die Predigt hat g’fallen, / sie blieben wie allen!). How are we to interpret this? The “sermon” functions here as a metaphor for the work of art and its ambition to teach something, as musicologist Hans Eggebrecht has noted.53 Nature is chaotic and always in movement. Wanting to change that is an illusory undertaking. There is a broader issue behind the song that concerns human knowledge in general: as convinced as we may be of the “truth” of our convictions, nature is essentially indifferent to such moral pronouncements or to any normative pronouncement. Such a conceptualization of nature is very much in line with the philosophy of Nietzsche (see chapter 3). The song, in the end, is highly critical of any form of ideology.
The song that in terms of its message and language most closely resembles the “Fischpredigt” is the last song of the second series, “Lob des hohen Verstandes” (Praise of a Great Mind). This song is often taken to be Mahler’s response to his critics; an earlier version was in fact called “Lob der Kritik” (Praise of Criticism).54 It is certainly possible to read the song that way, but such a reading, based primarily on Mahler’s biography, is perhaps more a statement about the song’s origins than indicative of the song’s interpretative potential. “Lob des hohen Verstandes” presents a fable: a cuckoo and a nightingale organize a competition to determine who can “sing a masterpiece” (zu singen um das Meisterstück). A donkey will be the referee. Of course the donkey thinks that the nightingale’s melodies are far too complex, and he lets the cuckoo win (whose sounds are as repetitive as his own). Thus, one could say that the song illustrates the narrow-mindedness of critics and their failure to recognize true art. The song, however, also makes a more subtle point. The donkey does not just decide intuitively, but presents an argument to back up his decision: the cuckoo sings a much better “chorale” and is rhythmically stronger than the nightingale (“Aber Kuckuck, singst gut Choral / und hältst den Takt fein innen!”). In other words, the donkey bases his decision on specific aesthetic norms, set according to his own priorities. These norms, however, are arbitrary and like all other normative statements they are manmade and not reflective of any objectively existing order in nature (as the “Fischpredigt” had already shown).
This insight into the relative nature of aesthetic norms is particularly relevant if one keeps in mind that most audiences at the time when Mahler composed his song would have recognized an intertextual reference to Wagner’s Meistersinger in it. Wagner’s opera also relates to a competition between singers and can likewise be read as Wagner’s response to one of his critics, Eduard Hanslick.55 There are two crucial differences between Mahler’s and Wagner’s pieces. In the Meistersinger, “true” art wins through a unanimous decision of the “Volk”; in “Lob des hohen Verstandes” “true” art loses out through an arbitrary decision of the referee. The relative nature of artistic norms is addressed in Die Meistersinger as well,56 but in the end the opera is about distinguishing “pure” from “impure” art — a distinction that we are to believe is objective and based on consensus, and not subjective or relative. Mahler’s song, in contrast, insists on the arbitrary nature of all norms. Beckmesser, the contestant representing impure art in Die Meistersinger, has been interpreted, quite convincingly in my opinion, as a Jewish caricature.57 We are not sure whether Mahler saw it that way, even though he did recognize, for instance, Mime in Wagner’s Siegfried as a Jewish caricature (see introduction). At the very least, Mahler in his song opposes the effort to juxtapose “pure” with “impure” art for ideological reasons, as Wagner did in Die Meistersinger with its nationalistic agenda, the presence of which even Wagner’s most ardent defenders do not contest. Mahler revisits Die Meistersinger in the last movement of the Seventh Symphony (see chapter 4).
While the first and last songs of the second orchestral Wunderhorn cycle are critical of art’s potential and function, the general atmosphere and textual content of the three middle songs are quite different. These songs are critical as well, but they also illustrate ways in which art can be meaningful. The second song of the cycle, “Rheinlegendchen” (Little Rhine Legend)58 presents itself as a naive and sentimental love song: the protagonist, who we learn is cutting grass or possibly herbs along the Neckar and Rhine rivers,59 ponders the fate of his girlfriend, who has left him to serve at a distant court. Art in this song is symbolized by a small golden ring that the man keeps as a memento of his absent lover; art, in other words, serves memory. He throws the ring into the Rhine, and he imagines that it is swallowed by a fish and ends up on the plate of the king, his lover’s employer. When the king asks to whom the ring belongs, the girl recognizes it and, in the imagination of the protagonist, brings it back to him. Art, in other words, in the service of memory eventually will find the audience for which it was intended. However, the crux of the song is that this only happens in the imagination of the shepherd. When Mahler characterizes the song’s atmosphere as “childlike and naughty” (RGM, 33, trans. modified; kindlich-schalkhaft: GME, 29), he certainly also has the naiveté of the main character’s thoughts in mind.
The next two songs also portray cases of successful communication, albeit ambiguously (as was the case in “Rheinlegendchen”). The title “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm” is often translated as “Song of the Prisoner in the Tower.” This translation is not incorrect, but it eliminates a dimension that is at least implicitly present in the German text. A “Verfolgter” is someone who is being persecuted, and the question is, of course, for what reason and by whom? It is not possible to answer this question precisely. It is safe to assume that the protagonist has been in trouble with the authorities, possibly by exercising his freedom in ways not sanctioned by them. One cannot help but be reminded of Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio in this context. In spite of the love story implied in the words of the girl responding to the prisoner, the song has a clear political dimension. A second question that needs to be asked of this song regards the status of the girl responding to the prisoner’s litany. Is she real or imagined? Is the song a true dialogue or an interior monologue within the prisoner’s mind? I am inclined to assume the latter. The girl’s responses to the prisoner’s words do not so much articulate an independent point of view but rather seem to function as figments of the prisoner’s imagination: she is a projection, the ideal love object, who would rather die with him than live a life without him. Two verses in the third stanza spoken by the prisoner suggest this projective function of the girl’s words: “My wish and desire, / no one can take away from me!” (Mein Wunsch und Begehren, / niemand kann’s wehren!). Here the song thematizes the creative act as compensation for grim reality. In doing so, these verses hold the key for understanding the song’s first line, “Thoughts are free” (Die Gedanken sind frei), which also functions as a refrain. The prisoner’s freedom is relative to his circumstances: He can think what he wants, but this changes nothing about the fact that he remains locked up where he is and that he may die soon (as the sixth stanza suggests). In showing the ambiguity of this “freedom,” the song debunks one of the most pervasive ideas on the role of art in German cultural history: the idea that art should resist interfering with society and instead focus on what is possible in the aesthetic realm — the notion that art is, in other words, a “noble substitute for politics”60 — can be found in Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and many Romantics. Sociologically this idea has been explained as an attempt by intellectuals, who in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had little political power, to safeguard their intellectual freedom at the price of actual political power. Allowing this idea to be articulated by a prisoner (who may be awaiting execution) is a powerful commentary on the status of intellectuals in German culture; it makes the song into a political statement.
“Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” (Where the beautiful trumpets blow),61 the fourth song of the second book, is another imaginary dialogue and can be understood as a response to the previous song in that, this time, it is the female figure who imagines a dialogue with her lost companion, her “ghost lover,”62 who we assume is a soldier. The (distant) sound of trumpets sparks the girl’s imagination. She imagines her lover knocking at her door. Here too, I would say, we are dealing with a projection: her lover consoles her but also explains his absence; he has to go to war; his “home” is the “green field” (mein Haus, von grünem Rasen). Here too, art functions as a form of consolation, but also, I would argue, as a form of memory. The associations or images evoked by the distant trumpet sounds allow the protagonist to “remember” what otherwise would have been an anonymous death on the battlefield. When we hear the “beautiful trumpets” again at the very end of the song, we know what they mean (and what we perhaps should have understood at the outset): they are commemorating the fallen soldiers. However, whatever the protagonists of this and the previous songs imagine remains a fantasy; they offer an escape from reality as much as they offer access to reality.
All the songs in Mahler’s second orchestral Wunderhorn collection problematize art in ways that we associate with Vienna around 1900 and with modernism in general, but certainly not with the Romantic and seemingly naive texts that von Arnim and Brentano collected under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn. What is at stake is the capacity of art to create community and whether art is successful at facilitating a process of communication from one subject to another. The answer to the latter question is highly ambiguous; in particular, the middle three songs suggest that art can be an important medium of communication, but they also leave open the option that the communicative power of art exists solely in the artist’s imagination. While the Wunderhorn songs tend to be perceived as being full of naive folk wisdom, in this set of songs there are actually several references to major issues in German cultural history, specifically the issue of how art relates to society. I also believe that the associations that these songs evoke with major works of German musical and cultural history — I have mentioned Die Meistersinger and Fidelio — are far from coincidental. Not only must Mahler have been aware of these associations, but the audiences for whom he composed these songs would have recognized them as well. Increasingly, Mahler conceives of himself as an active participant in German cultural history who positions himself vis-à-vis other major figures who are part of this tradition.
Mahler’s last two orchestral Wunderhorn songs were composed considerably later than the others and with a considerable time interval between them. “Revelge” (Reveille) was composed in July 1899 and “Der Tamboursg’sell” (The Drummer Boy) in August 1901.63 Both are marches, and one could characterize them as “tragic, ironic, sometimes desperate songs.”64 There are significant thematic continuities between these songs and the earlier series, while both songs are also closely connected to each other. The protagonists in both songs are (again) soldiers, drummer boys, and Mahler thus again reverts to the older meanings of the concept “Volk.”65 Furthermore, both songs thematize death, albeit in very different ways. “Revelge” describes the fate of a soldier shot on the battlefield and left to die by his fellow soldiers. The plot of “Der Tamboursg’sell” is less clear. The protagonist is awaiting the gallows and nobody wants to have anything to do with him anymore — we assume, because he has deserted: “Had I remained a drummer boy, / I would not be lying around here as prisoner!” (Wär’ ich ein Tambour blieben, / dürft ich nicht gefangen liegen!). These songs remind us of the miseries of war and are decidedly anti-militaristic.66 In them, violence is omnipresent and sometimes described rather graphically: “My brothers are all over the ground, / as if they were mown down!” (Die Brüder, dick gesä’t, / sie liegen wie gemäht; Revelge). Moreover, it is worth noting that the narratives of these two songs supplement each other. Taken together, they point to the limited options available to the simple soldier, the exemplary representative of the “Volk,” and the hopelessness of his situation: he can either choose to be part of the collective and die on the battlefield (“Revelge”), or decide to break with the collective and be hanged as a deserter (“Der Tamboursg’sell”). One could characterize these songs for that reason as being deeply anti-ideological: they do not offer any point of orientation, any form of ethical directive.
And yet there is some hope, maybe not for the songs’ poor soldier boys, but for posterity. “Revelge” ends with the image of a ghost army, led by the protagonist on his drum, first defeating the enemy army and then walking up to the house of his sweetheart (“Schätzlein”), so that she can see him (and his fellow soldiers) one last time. What is the meaning of this image of an army of skeletons showing up at someone’s doorstep? The situation is similar to “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen,” where the protagonist (also a dead soldier) visits his lover after his death, at least in her imagination, to remind her of his fate. This song, too, is about memory. The same is the case with “Revelge.” The deaths of the protagonist and his fellow soldiers are no longer anonymous if they are remembered, and if not merely the individual’s suffering but also the miseries of war are part of individual and collective memory, because the song transforms death from something private or individual into something of collective relevance. This act of remembering the dead is also explicitly dealt with in “Der Tamboursg’sell.” When soldiers come by — we assume by the gallows? — and ask the main figure who he has been (“wer i g’wesen bin”) — note the use of the perfect tense — he replies that he used to be “the drummer of the sovereign’s company” (Tambour von der Leibkompanie). Again, an individual’s death is no longer anonymous but is made part of public memory. This passage has a parallel in “Revelge” when the soldier on the battlefield addresses his fellow soldiers (“brothers”; Brüder), reminding them of his fate. The last two stanzas of “Der Tamboursg’sell,” which we assume are the drummer’s final words, address posterity: he bids goodnight to the officers, corporals, musketeers, and grenadiers — all those who outrank him, in other words. This is a powerful reminder of the inequality inherent to military life (and perhaps to society in general?). The poor die; the privileged survive.
Do these last two songs offer a conclusion to what was said in the first and second Wunderhorn series? I would argue that they do to some extent. Both “Revelge” and “Der Tamboursg’sell” thematize art’s function as a form of remembering; as such, they assign to art a specific function — as problematic, momentary, random, and unreliable as this function may be. The protagonists of both songs are what I have previously called “figures of mobility” and outsiders; not, however, by their own choice. “Revelge” thematizes love and loss (the soldiers march by the house of the protagonist’s sweetheart). This can be read as a comment on the first cycle, but a significant difference is that the main figure does not proudly reject love and is not an outsider by his own choice, but suffers from the loss of his love object. “Der Tamboursg’sell” is also about loss, again as the result of circumstances beyond the main figure’s control. Both songs question the ideal of masculinity put forward in the first four songs of the first Wunderhorn cycle: they show men as being weak rather than strong. Both songs reintroduce society’s harsh reality (not unlike “Das irdische Leben”), and they leave little space for an idealization of the simple man, of the “Volk.” Both songs are at odds with the rhetoric of nationalism that was increasingly surrounding “Volkslieder.”
Because they synthesize and comment on so much earlier material, the last two Wunderhorn songs affect our perspective on the earlier songs; one needs to keep the later songs in mind when listening to the earlier ones in order to understand them fully. When studying the orchestral Wunderhorn songs, it is important to be aware of the kinds of connections among them that I have just identified. While there would be some merit, in my opinion, in performing the songs in the order in which they were composed and published, I would not argue that the songs should only be performed in the original order (nor did Mahler do so, as I mentioned above). The fundamental openness of these texts allows for seeing new continuities and contrasts when they are performed in a different order. Mahler maybe also had his audiences in mind when he characterized the Wunderhorn texts to Ida Dehmel as “rocks from which everyone can make what they wish” (see note 33). In the end, none of these songs offers an ideology in the form of a clear “final” message; instead they present divergent perspectives on problems that can be found throughout Mahler’s works.
The social historian Eric Hobsbawm speaks of the era from 1870 to the First World War — the period during which Mahler composed all his works — as one of “mass-producing traditions,” as I mentioned in my introduction.67 In Germany this trend was particularly pronounced; as a result of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) Germany became a political unity, and there was a sudden need to back up this newfound unity by establishing a German national culture, even though Germans had long viewed themselves as culturally unified. Mahler was certainly aware of these trends. At the very least, his interest in Wagner and his membership of the German-nationalist Pernerstorfer Kreis would have made him familiar with the phenomenon. He was certainly also aware that he, as a Jew and an Austrian, was marginalized by these developments. Instead of establishing alternative traditions, however, he sought to debunk the normative aspects implied in the idea of a German national culture from within, by composing songs that deepened and complicated this concept.
When one speaks of the “production” or “invention” of traditions, the assumption is that traditions are not something stable, something that has always been in place, but that they are continually being redesigned or even developed from scratch (“invented”). This seems to contradict a basic notion about traditions: that they are characterized by stability and go back far into the past. Historical research, in particular scholarship in cultural history, however, has emphasized the fact that traditions can be remarkably versatile and that they are often multifunctional. The cultural interest in the “Volk” among German intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century can be traced back to the French Revolution of 1789 and is predominantly a legacy of German Romanticism.68 The importance that Wagner and in his wake the Völkische Bewegung attributed to the concept “Volk” must be understood in the context of burgeoning nationalist movements and art’s complicity in them. Mahler does not engage Wagner’s philosophy of the “Volk” directly in his Wunderhorn songs (with the possible exception of his “Lob des hohen Verstandes”). In fact, he makes very different choices from Wagner. The way in which “Volk” is used in the late nineteenth century in order to reinvent tradition is, in other words, truly multifunctional. Of Wagner’s operas, one could say that they invent tradition by what Hobsbawm calls “creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity.”69 Wagner’s semifictional mythological operas shaped a historical genealogy for the German nation that was almost completely independent of historical reality, and in doing so they defined the characteristics of the nation, quoting Eric Hobsbawm again, “in terms of its enemies.”70 Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs, on the other hand, insist on their rootedness in historical reality, and one may also say that they identify with outsiders in society.
Before something like a tradition can be invented — or to use a somewhat more careful phrase: “redesigned” — something else has to happen that concerns the collective memory of the past. The insight that traditions are constructions of one kind or another raises the question as to what “ancient materials” are being used in their production.71 Cultural history can be seen as a reservoir of such materials, but not all its contents are equally useful. By necessity there exists a tension between these available materials and traditions that are continually redesigned; one could therefore define tradition as “nothing but deformed memory.”72 When traditions are established, a decision is made regarding which cultural materials are to be used and which are to be discarded: some things are considered worth remembering and others can be forgotten. But what kind of memory are we referring to when we talk about tradition and cultural history? Even though individuals participate in the process of remembering, the type of memory discussed here is not primarily individual but rather collective.73 It can involve historical reality, but historical accuracy is not its primary concern. It is rather about the interpretation of historical reality — in other words, the attitudes, values, and even emotions that we associate with objects from the past. To express the collective character and the normative aspects inherent to this form of memory, the field of cultural studies has developed the term “cultural memory.” “Cultural memory” has been defined as the “intentional remembering through actual records and experiences or symbolic interpretations thereof by any community that shares a common ‘culture.’”74 “Culture” in this context is understood anthropologically as the basic symbolic activity through which humans interpret the world around them and express feelings and values.75 To be sure, such an anthropological definition does not solely refer to “high” culture, but can include “low” culture as well. In fact, one of the provocations underlying Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs is his use of “low” culture for these highly artificial songs.
Mahler’s songs actively take issue with what Hobsbawm calls the mass-producing of traditions in Europe from 1870 to 1914; they do so by pointing to a crisis, whereas others sought to use the “Volk” concept for ideological gain. Many of Mahler’s songs, as we have seen, reflect and problematize the function of art, in particular its ambition to create community or to establish intersubjective communication. They also problematize memory as a process. A number of the songs discussed above — for instance, the last Gesellen song “Die zwei blauen Augen,” and the later Wunderhorn songs: “Rheinlegendchen,” “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen,” “Revelge,” and “Der Tamboursg’sell” — are concerned with the processes through which memories are transmitted and the randomness with which memories may or may not survive. The deliberations on memory within these songs function as a form of work-immanent poetics. When these songs thematize memory, they also contemplate their own status: the role of art in society and history. The same phenomenon can be found in another early work by Mahler: art and memory are also closely linked in the cantata Das klagende Lied (Song of Lament), Mahler’s first major work, which he completed in 1880. He wrote the text of this cantata himself but based it on the fairytale Der singende Knochen (The Singing Bone), which exists in versions by the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Bechstein.76 At the center of the fairytale is the possession of a red flower; he who finds it will be allowed to marry the queen. Two brothers go on a quest to find the flower; the younger one finds it but his older brother kills him and hastily buries his body under a willow tree. A passing minstrel (“Spielmann”), however, finds a bone belonging to the murdered man’s skeleton, makes it into a flute, and goes to the castle to sing at the royal wedding. The flute tells the story of the fratricide, the guests flee, and the castle vanishes. Art serves the recovery of what is repressed; it serves as a counternarrative to the “official” version of history. Art speaks for the abused.
The memories contained in the Gesellen and Wunderhorn songs are guided by equally critical intentions. In relation to dominant cultural memory, Mahler searches for images and texts that do not fit the prevailing model. His songs are descriptive in that they search for material that is repressed and problematic at this time, when German nationalism is seeking to mobilize the concept of the “Volk,” and do not seek an ideal image of the “Volk” in a prescriptive sense. In doing so, Mahler’s songs go back to older semantic contours of the term “Volk.” In the Wunderhorn songs the prototypical representative of the “Volk” is the military man, the soldier of lower rank — and not the mythological hero, the farmer or the merchant, to name a few figures who also functioned as ideal representatives of the German “Volk” in nineteenth-century discourse.77 In particular in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, but also in some of the Wunderhorn-songs (“Wer hat dies Liedchen erdacht?”; “Der Tamboursg’sell”) the social aspect of an older understanding of the term is very clear. The descriptive dimension of the songs is also clear in that all of the characters are individuals and anti-heroes with their own narratives, set in their own specific situations, with their own desires and their own fears. One could say that there is no “Volk” in Mahler’s songs, at least not as a monolithic unity. “Volk” is always something very concrete for Mahler and tied to material conditions of life. His songs emphasize mobility. In his cosmos, wandering figures are the ideal representatives of the “Volk,” as they were for von Arnim in the essay accompanying the first volume of the Wunderhorn songs. All of these elements call into question politically conservative appropriations of the “Volk” around 1900 that emphasized unity, stability, and attributed racial or ethnic characteristics to the term.
The use of the “Volk” for nationalist purposes had a gendered dimension as well. Culturally speaking, 1870–71 marked the beginning of a “‘militarisation’ of public life” that meant simultaneously a “‘masculinization’ of culture.”78 The cultural historian George L. Mosse interprets the establishment of an ideal of masculinity as being motivated by a desire to stabilize Western societies, a desire that began in the eighteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth.79 Mahler’s songs are against this idealization of masculinity, which was very much part of the conservative idolization of the “Volk” (even though tendencies to idealize manhood can be found in the socialist movement as well).80 Not only do his songs focus on outsiders and underdogs in society, but these figures also represent countertypes81 when compared to dominating images of manhood. The Gesellen songs still assert a type of masculinity that emphasizes control, in particular over physical impulses or women’s demands on the male subject. Yet they also ironically undercut this ideal and show its unfeasibility. The Wunderhorn songs challenge the masculine ideal even more by focusing on men who are cowards, lack self-control, or transgress social norms. Mahler’s men are vagrants, without roots in society, and yet at least the military men among them are also supposed to represent society’s core.
Mahler’s songs are severely at odds with an idealization of the past that is often associated with Romanticism but in fact runs through the entire nineteenth century. Behind the criticism of a naive Romanticism that thinks it can return to an unproblematic past without the troubles of modern society, there is a skepticism regarding all ideology — a skepticism that, as Mahler’s songs show, is also part of the Romantic legacy. It is remarkable how many of these songs contain violent imagery and how closely intertwined violence and culture are in these songs. Violence in these songs is not incidental or individual, but deeply embedded in society. In view of such violence, art’s legitimacy itself is at stake. In spite of art’s ability to serve as a medium of cultural memory, it is questionable whether art can teach its audiences anything (“Fischpredigt”) or that there are any objective criteria for distinguishing “pure” from “impure” art (“Lob des hohen Verstandes”). “All singing is over” (Alles Singen is nun aus) is a line in the very first song of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. That is no coincidence; Mahler is deeply skeptical of the conventional understanding of the normative powers of art — his songs are art after the end of art. If these songs are meaningful, it is perhaps not because of their message or ideology but only because the images and sensations contained in them lead us to associations that are meaningful for us. For Mahler, cultures are in movement and they are not monolithic but heterogeneous.
Paradoxically, within German cultural history Romanticism has been associated with nationalism, conservatism, and anti-Semitism on the one hand, but simultaneously with more positive developments, for instance with an increased interest in Germany’s cultural roots, with an interest in the figure of the outsider and artist in German cultural history, and, last but not least, with an increased respect for the alterity of other cultures (going back to the work of Herder).82 Romanticism can be normative and monolithic, but it also embraces humor, irony, and fragmentary ways of thinking and writing. It is possible to understand Mahler’s interest in the Wunderhorn texts as an attempt to rescue this critical and humoristic side of Romanticism (commonly associated with early Romanticism) at a time when the public was mostly interested in the conservative and nationalistic side of Romanticism (usually associated with late Romanticism) which, for instance, dominates Richard Wagner’s work. Mahler is not alone in his desire to revisit Romanticism and rewrite German cultural history; both impulses can also be found in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence is difficult to overestimate in fin-de-siècle Vienna.