4

Musical: An Allegorical
Symphony? Mahler’s Sixth

The premise is that we cannot have allegory without first having narrative; and therefore that before we can identify an allegorical activity at the heart of music, we must first show that its effects are also narrative ones. We may leave program music and tone poems aside here, despite Gustav Mahler’s flirtation with them in his early works and his formative companionship with Richard Strauss,¹ one of their most notable practitioners: the term ekphrasis (description), which rhetoric uses to distinguish an essentially picturesque discourse from narrative, also paradoxically presupposes the possibility of musical narrative for its own elaboration in the first place. (We must also entertain the possibility that the tone poem is simply an example of bad or tripartite allegory, something that cannot be pursued further here.)

That there can be bad allegory in the area of musical interpretation must also be admitted; in the following, for example, no less an authority than Richard Wagner, himself one of the sources of late nineteenth-century program music, offers this account of what is for many people one of the most sublime pieces of music ever composed, Beethoven’s Opus 131, the C-sharp Minor Quartet:

The lengthy opening Adagio, surely the saddest thing ever expressed in notes, I would term the awakening on the dawn of a day “that in its whole long course shall never fulfill one wish, not one wish!” Yet it is at the same time a penitential prayer, a communing with God in the firm belief in an eternal Good.—The inward eye then also glimpses an appearance only he can recognize (Allegro 6/8) and in which longing has turned to a play of melancholy captivation: the most private fantasy awakens in fond memory. And now (with the short transitional Allegro moderato) it is as if the Master, mindful of his status as an artist, set about his magical work: this reawakening power unique to him he now (Andante 2/4) trains on the fixation and establishment of a single graceful figure, in order to experience again and again that holy testimony to the most primordial innocence—in ever changing and unexpected metamorphoses illuminated by the prismatic and eternal light he trains on it turn after turn.—And now we seem to see him as in his deep inner satisfaction with his own power he gazes again at the outside world (Presto 2/2): it stands before him again, as in the Pastoral Symphony, all lit up with his inner creative joy; it is as though he hears the very sounds of appearance itself, which, alternately ideal and material, moves before him in a rhythmic dance. He gazes at life and at the same time (short Adagio 3/4) returns in memory to that first moment when he began to make this life come to dance: a brief yet gloomy reminiscence, as though he were once again sinking back into the dreams of his own soul. One glimpse was enough to disclose the very inner essence of the world; now he wakes again and arouses the strings to a dance such as the world has never heard before (Allegro finale). This is the very dance of the world itself: the wildest desire, wails of pain, love’s transport, the utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, debauchery, suffering; all this shuddering like lightning, rolling thunder, and high above it all the colossal Virtuoso himself who masters everything and charms it, leading it imperiously from whirlwind to whirlpool, and to the very brink of the abyss—and then he mocks himself, for all this magic was little more than a game.—And night beckons him. His day is done.²

I must confess that one is stunned by the philistinism of this “allegorical reading.” Leaving aside the narcissistic evocation of the genius and his transcendence of an essentially Schopenhauerian world of suffering, one asks oneself for whom this little fairy tale is meant: an essentially stolid bourgeois public in need of help in approaching this complex work, or other (presumably) more sophisticated performers for whom its practical, pedagogical usefulness will surely be limited? Like all Wagner’s prose writings, his short Beethoven essay is meant to serve a purpose in proselytizing for his own work and reception and can certainly be seen as a (rather awkward) move in training his future public to grasp his own music dramas as the logical heir to Beethoven’s absolute music. Wagner’s appreciation of the late quartets and his championing of what were (and remain) difficult, even inaccessible works coincides with his composition of Die Meistersinger.³ Indeed, a certain influence of Opus 131 has been detected in the Prelude to Act III of that opera, so that it is appropriate to juxtapose this Wagnerian narrative with a far more critical and jaundiced view of the same musical text than Wagner’s storytelling resumé. This is then Adrian Leverkühn’s narrative of Wagner’s Prelude:

How stupid, how pretentious it would be to ask: “Do you understand that?” For how should you not? It goes like this, when it is beautiful: the cellos intone by themselves a pensive, melancholy theme, which questions the folly of the world, the wherefore of all the struggle and striving, pursuing and plaguing—all highly expressive and decorously philosophical. The cellos enlarge upon this riddle awhile, headshaking, deploring, and at a certain point in their remarks, a well-chosen point, the chorus of wind instruments enters with a deep full breath that makes your shoulders rise and fall, in a choral hymn, movingly solemn, richly harmonized, and produced with all the muted dignity and mildly restrained power of the brass. Thus the sonorous melody presses on up to nearly the height of a climax, which, in accordance with the law of economy, it avoids at first, gives way, leaves open, sinks away, postpones, most beautifully lingers; then withdraws and gives place to another theme, a songlike, simple one, now jesting, now grave, now popular, apparently brisk and robust by nature but as sly as you make them; and for someone with some subtle cleverness in the art of thematic analysis and transformation it proves itself amazingly pregnant and capable of utter refinement. For a while this little song is managed and deployed, cleverly and charmingly it is taken apart, looked at in detail, varied, out of it a delightful figure in the middle register is led up into the most enchanting heights of fiddles and flutes, lulls itself there a little, and when it is at its most artful, then the mild brass has again the word with the previous choral hymn and comes into the fore-ground. The brass does not start from the beginning as it did the first time, but as though its melody had already been there for a while; and it continues, solemnly, to that climax from which it wisely refrained the first time, in order that the surging feeling, the Ah-h-effect, might be the greater: now it gloriously bestrides its theme, mounting unchecked, with weighty support from the passing notes on the tuba, and then, looking back, as it were, with dignified satisfaction on the finished achievement, sings itself decorously to the end. Dear friend, why do I have to laugh?⁴

But the fulminations of Jack Goody about the inflation of the word narrative⁵ and, in particular and with respect to music, the influential demurral of the redoubtable Jean-Jacques Nattiez⁶—namely, that music cannot be considered in any way narrative, let alone a narrative as such—require a more elaborate theoretical response; and I hasten to add that much contemporary musicology has done just that, in particular the seminal work of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy on what they call sonata theory, the appropriation of Northrop Frye by Bryan Almen and others, and the path-breaking work on Mahler by Seth Monahan.⁷ That the specter of Adorno looms large behind all these efforts is perhaps merely inspirational, inasmuch as Adorno has little enough to offer of a practical or methodological nature on either narrative or ideology.

I cannot myself hope to contribute anything theoretically or methodologically useful to this already rich musicological research, particularly inasmuch as I here seek to exploit such musical analyses as mere examples in a more abstract discussion of allegory. But it is often revealing to observe from a distance and as an outsider the way the theoretical analysis of an unfamiliar art form produces an imaginary object for us: pure narrative form emerging from such purely abstract reading, which itself then insensibly becomes allegorical in its own right.

As for the limited context in which I wish to stage the problem of musical narrative, it must be grasped in two versions, external and internal, or, if you prefer, as the larger question of the symphony itself as a whole; and then the more technical and specialized problem of that sonata form taken by only one or two of its movements. The logic of the sequence of the four movements of the symphony raises quite different issues of continuity than does the internal sonata-form relationships of themes and “subjects” within a single movement, so that we confront an initial paradox here, in the subsumption of one complete formal development (the sonata) within a larger sequence of other, seemingly discontinuous but equally complete forms (such as the scherzo or the slow movement).

The paradox of this nested relationship of seemingly autonomous units can then be dramatized this way: if the first movement of a symphony is organized in sonata form (as generally seems to have been the case), then its completeness or resolution must somehow be left open, or in other words left incomplete on some other level of reception and unresolved in a larger perspective, which does not leave us utterly discontent on the level of that individual movement. The ending must in other words remain an unresolved resolution, an incomplete completion, an open closure: and this paradox, which we may even go so far as to consider a contradiction in the very form itself, is not to be wished away by some superficial evocation of the serial form in novels or narratives (the cliffhangers) or even the repetitions of a novelistic plot in which a problematic situation is laid in place, undergoes a host of variations and complications, and is then somehow ingeniously or at least convincingly resolved.

The discontinuity of the four movements of a symphony is too absolute to accommodate such traditional discontinuities of the novel, even in its serialized form, and this despite the conviction that the symphony, in its historical development, ought to be counted as a more distant relative within the generic or media family that includes the novel and its cousin, the feature film. Obviously, the innovations of the modern sometimes involve more absolute discontinuities, as in the semi-autonomous chapters of Ulysses or the episodic interweavings of more recent works such as Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (many of which, however, are inspired by the problems and forms of the musical tradition in the first place, rather than the other way round). To be sure, an experiment like the Symphony in D minor of César Franck, in which a single melodic protagonist is made to inhabit four very different formal environments, seems to confront and overcome the dilemma of symphonic discontinuity which its radicality in fact confirms: a one-time pyrrhic victory.

I want to draw two principles from this discussion before proceeding. The first is a preliminary rule: namely that whatever the hypothesis or theory to be entertained, it must not be psychological. The psychological presuppositions on which books like the classical work of Leonard Meyer are based⁸—namely, that we have here to do with feelings of anticipation which are somehow worked over and then “resolved” into this or that form of satisfaction—may seem to be adequate expressions of what this or that individual listener feels during the execution of a piece of music, but they are expressions drawn from a specific and systemic code, a humanistic and traditional language which articulates a specific and historical ideology. This ideology is not merely a system which is imposed on subjectivity but one which forms and constructs it in the first place. Its language is not simply a reflection (however imperfect) of human nature, not simply the attempt to do justice to what everyone more or less tacitly feels. It is not natural at all, but rather what Foucault might have called a disciplinary grid, which brings a certain conception of human nature into existence by way of our submission to it and our agreement that it does more or less name what everyone, from time immemorial, feels or has felt. The nomenclature of psychology is as nonnatural as language itself; and psychology is, as I have tried to show in earlier chapters, itself an allegorical system that cannot be taken at face value but which must always be historically identified, even where it is not ideologically denounced as a form of that humanism and that metaphysics contemporary theory has been concerned in so many different ways to overcome. This resolute opposition to everyday or “commonsense” psychology is however a political and theoretical commitment, which we must also faithfully keep when deploying the innovations of narratology, as prone to fall back on psychologism as any of the more traditional forms of aesthetic “appreciation.” (There can be no doubt that the primacy of the concept of narrative today is also a historical and an ideological, an antipsychological, development in its own right.)

The other conclusion that can much more briefly be added to this one has to do with the inevitable and necessary role of philosophy in the discussion. Contemporary philosophy indeed offers an alternate and nonpsychological way of handling phenomena such as anticipation or thwarted resolution, and that task has mostly been assigned to the thematics of repetition, articulated in its modern form by Søren Kierkegaard and elaborately codified by Gilles Deleuze. Beyond that, what philosophy offers music in the way of a very different and antipsychological terminology is the interminable problem of time and temporality as such. Philosophy’s business, its calling, surely lies in the demonstration of the impossibility of conceptualizing such experiences of the fundamentally and structurally contradictory nature of all the solutions we have historically imagined: Immanuel Kant is the name and symbol of this philosophical vocation. Unfortunately, contradictions are not to be dealt with by consigning them to a reservation where they can do no further damage; indeed, the experience of time is so fundamental that we cannot cease philosophizing about it even after agreeing that it cannot even be thought or formulated.

This ever-reenacted impossibility also holds for a problem that cuts across these problems of time and repetition; that is the question of beginnings and endings, about which we have been assured (again by Kant)⁹ that it is unthinkable, even though it exists in the work of art. That there are beginnings and endings in life and time, in reality, even in history, is an assertion which is necessarily always ideological (even when true). The privilege of aesthetic theory, however—maybe it’s the only one!—lies in the fact that there, in art, beginnings and endings are demonstrable; and that art alone seems to offer a laboratory in which these otherwise imponderables can be observed if not regulated. This is perhaps the sense in which Deleuze might have suggested that music is also a way of thinking, and in particular a way of thinking about time,¹⁰ but in its own specific form of thinking, which is musical and which uses time to think about itself. It cannot of course reach any definite or absolute conclusion: Wagnerian temporality is as different from that of Bach as Hegelian thinking is from that of Descartes or Augustine. Still, all these differences do converge somewhere, even if it is in a place in which inconclusiveness has become a kind of Absolute in its own right. The existentialists thought that place was human existence (or Dasein) itself; I think it is more likely to have been History, an opinion which can posit only action or praxis, radical change, as a “solution.”

As for the symphony and its overall narrativity, however, the musicologists seem to have found their most convincing solutions in the work of Northrop Frye, whose seasonal and cyclical view of the genres has the advantage, not only of coming in fours, but also of suggesting a way in which a given four movements might be thought of as a kind of cosmic unity (a unity that Hayden White has completed by identifying Frye’s four moments as tropes and thereby anchoring them as solidly in language as Frye does in nature).¹¹ Frye’s cycle—Spring or Comedy, Summer or Romance, Autumn or Tragedy, and Winter or Irony and Satire—can no doubt be rotated as one likes; White’s tropes—Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Irony—pointedly, and as it were theologically, conclude with that fourth trope he identifies with reflexivity or self-consciousness, (perhaps also allowing for a Viconian ricorso!). And certainly nothing is more tempting than to grasp the four movements of a given symphony as a tragic or heroic first movement, followed by a slow movement and a scherzo, which one might well identify in some way with romance and satire, so as to conclude, as does the “Eroica,” with a comedy or at least a happy ending.

There is, to be sure, a good deal of Jungianism here (Frye explicitly uses Jung’s language of myths and archetypes), a psychology itself explicitly based on the principles of narrative, with a kind of transcendent healing as a resolution. White’s version absorbs all this into a much more contemporary rhetorical ideology of language. The two versions seem to share a foundational belief in the ethical binary of good and evil: optimism and pessimism, say, or the happy versus the tragic ending (of which perhaps the contemporary capitalist version would be more recent ideological notions of success or failure).

I suspect that such systems ultimately end up in psychology once again, and in normative conceptions of human nature. But what seems to be almost more significant is the numerology of the thing: numbers, and above all, numerical systems, are after all themselves profoundly philosophical. The philosophical stakes of the dualisms are well known; and at least since Christianity but certainly since Hegel, the virtues and vices of a trinitarian system have also become obvious. Why the number four should designate a kind of completeness is less evident, inasmuch as four can always in a pinch be folded back into a pair of dualisms. We may leave aside the power of the seven for mystics and that of the nine for composers. I believe that at least one philosophical solution to the lurking presence of a rather suspect numerology in these issues of aesthetic closure and autonomy is to be found in the logic of the semiotic square itself and its dialectical combination of identity and difference (see Appendix A); but for some this will be no less allegorical (if more abstract) than Jungianism or the tropes. To be sure, the Greimas level of abstraction will once again, if much less acutely than in the case of Frye’s Jungianism and White’s implicitly Viconian teleology, pose the problem of its own relation to narrative as such, which was the problem whose solution was to have been our starting point. At any rate, in all these schemes the problem of narrative coincides with that of allegory.

Let us assume that for our purposes here we have at least raised the issue of narrativity as far as the four movements of the symphony are concerned; and that these schemes can plausibly find some satisfying relevance to the symphony as practiced (or even reinvented) by Haydn or Beethoven. But when we reach the other end of its generic career, in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, such fourfold schemes present new and more interesting problems, not so much because his symphonies rarely have the traditional four movements, but rather because all the terms of the succession of those movements have been here interiorized, and what characterizes the relative autonomy of Mahler’s immense individual movements is that each one seems to include all the genres simultaneously, in a free-wheeling intermingling in which it is very difficult to characterize any one of them as being in and of itself tragic or comic, satiric or romance-oriented. The movement in question certainly goes somewhere, its individual moments press on toward something, and even his “indecisive” conclusions are decisive. In this ultimate moment of symphonic form, something has happened to genre as a defining formal value (and it will ultimately be this peculiar fate of genre which will lead us back to the problem of allegory).

In what follows I remain uncomfortably mindful of Roland Barthes’s precautions in his book on fashion: what disappointed so many of us at the time was the warning that he meant to study, not the things themselves, the tangible, visible clothing and their properties and effects, their mutations, their very ideologies, but rather the local and contemporary reviews of those objects, in other words, the language and the codes of their description and classification. This was certainly a proper area of investigation which, opening onto contemporaneity and its multiple languages, was worthy of study; but it was far from confronting the material world of fashion itself, which continued to stand in relation to its mere description as the irrecuperable Real itself.

So here, too, the layman that I am must remain content with the various attempts to describe the form of the sonata—however technical and professionally specialized—rather than the Ding an sich of the music (itself sundered into our hearing and reception of its performance and the printed score which seems to encode the reality of the musical text, but which in effect merely translates it into yet another code or script in its own right).

My sense of what the varied theoretical and linguistic attempts to convey musical reality offer in the way of a narrative runs something like this: the sonata begins with some first, arbitrarily chosen subject. (Whether that subject constitutes a completed object in its own right—a melody or at least a theme—is a different question altogether, and one which justifies its postponement on account of the seeming neutrality of the term.) This first subject is dwelt on until it assumes a certain consistency, the relative stability and durability, recognizability, of an existent in the world, of an object as such. At some point, then, a second subject is introduced: whatever its relationship to the first subject, the formal requirement will be the acknowledgment of the difference of second from first and the former’s relative independence and autonomy. The object of the game is then to stage a rivalry between these two subjects, which can be as stürmisch as an agon or as affectionate as a courtship or a seduction but which must come to some sort of definitive conclusion: triumph, compromise, an utter rout, an astonishing metamorphosis. I have already indicated one of the problems facing this construction of a sonata as the first movement of a symphony, namely the danger that such a conclusion be too definitive, that it be so overwhelmingly final as to shut down any momentum toward the following movements. And as for the form of some finale (also often in sonata form), we should note the interesting remark of Michael Steinberg on its historical fate after Beethoven:

The symphonic finale presented a problem to several nineteenth-century composers, bent, as many of them were, upon imitating Beethoven at shifting the focal point of the symphony to a climactic, summing-up last movement. Schubert, for example, found himself stymied to the point of abandoning a symphony after two movements of extraordinary greatness. Brahms had no problems, but a whole run of excellent composers from Mendelssohn and Schumann to Franck, Dvořák, and Mahler show signs of strain in their finales. Tchaikovsky conquered the problem only when he dared the boldly original solution he put forward in his Pathétique. Nor was the challenge beyond Bruckner, who was exceptionally ambitious with respect both to grandeur and originality. In his Second, Fifth, and Eighth symphonies he confidently achieved finales commensurate with this ambition, symphonic summations that can stand with any in the repertory.¹²

Meanwhile, we have omitted a crucial dimension from our first account of the sonata, whose formal distinction from Propp’s classic account of the folktale lies in the notion of a “restoration of order.” The beginning of a symphony cannot be grasped as an order in this paradigmatic structuralist sense, unless we make the more metaphysical assumption that it is tonality itself which constitutes the initial “order.” (We will come back to tonality in a moment.) What I find more seductive, as well as more critical, is Adorno’s (allegorical) position on the very ideology of symphonic form as such, which he saw as the establishment of hegemonic order. The opening theme or subject, the fundamental key of the work, arrives as it were with all the arbitrariness of a new regime of some kind: what happens in the development of the sonata and with its final recapitulation is something like the ratification of that new order, its passage from the unfounded to the legitimacy of a nature and a norm, a sovereignty. Or to put it another way, the subject and the key that open the work are at first unfamiliar and unjustified: it will be the work of the form itself to press their claims home and to render them necessary and to confirm them in their hegemonic inevitability. It will be noted that this Ideologiekritik of the form by Adorno implicitly denounces the symphony as a specifically bourgeois form, which symbolically reenacts the right of this class (and its economic system) to power. This is then an allegorical reading of the form in political terms, a perspective we will shortly meet in a far more sweeping characterization of tonality itself by Arnold Schoenberg.

Before we proceed, however, two further observations need to be added to this as yet skeletal account of sonata form. The first and most obvious one is the matter of tonality as such, a system that academic musicology and psychology have taken to be grounded in nature itself. It is then in the very nature of this particular universe and its organic bodies that a sound is accompanied by specific overtones and undertones and that a key possesses a privileged relationship to its “dominant” and its “subdominant.” Whether these phenomena, which are taken to be natural laws, are grounded in the specifically human anatomical system or somehow (like the tree falling in the empty forest) exist “in nature” as the very structure of vibration itself—these are indeed metaphysical and ontological questions, whose very existence, whatever the answers to them, is historical and ideological. Max Weber, indeed, has rigorously analyzed tonality as a specifically Western form of rationalization; the tonal system has its own history, which is closely linked to the development of European capitalism since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹³ Here is then Schoenberg’s “political” analysis of the hierarchical spirit of Western tonality:

It is important for us to recognize that in tonality there are regions that will remain neutral, so long as they are forced to do so, but that, as soon as the rule of the fundamental is even momentarily relaxed, are ready to submit to the enticements of a neighboring tonality. We may not wish to regard every chord that follows as an incipient departure from the tonality (even assuming reference back to it). We must acknowledge nevertheless that the strong will of the respective masters of the dominant and subdominant regions, together with the tendency of the neutral chords to conform to this will as well as eventually to the will of another, neighboring tonality, invites the danger of loosening the bonds. From this situation, and from the tendency of every degree either to become a fundamental or at least to gain a more significant position in another district, a competition emerges, which constitutes the excitement of the harmonic events within tonality. The appetite for independence shown by the two strongest subordinates in the district, the mutiny of the more loosely connected elements, the occasional small victories and gains of the competing parties, their final subjection to the sovereign will and their meeting together for a common function—this activity, a reflection of our own human enterprise, is what causes us to perceive as life what we create as art …

Perhaps the rebellious ambitions of the subjects spring as much from the tyrant’s urge to dominate as from their own tendencies. The tyrant’s urge is not satisfied without the ambitions of the subjects. Thus, the departure from the fundamental tone is explained as a need of the fundamental itself, in which, in whose very overtones, the same conflict is contained as a model, so to speak, on another plane. Even the apparently complete departure from the tonality turns out to be a means for making the victory fundamental so much the more dazzling.¹⁴

The rather Austro-Hungarian preoccupations of Schoenberg’s analysis thus show all the complexity of the political analysis of a Machiavelli or Gramsci!

The other addition I wish to make to my description of the two “subjects” of the sonata has its specific reference to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which will serve as our object of study here, and in particular to Seth Monahan’s reading of it (who essentially follows the Hepokoski/Darcy “sonata theory”). In particular I want to dwell on what seems to me something of an anomaly in his reading of the symphony’s first movement by positing a supplementary version of the official “second subject,” an S₂ alongside the P of the primary or first subject and the S₁ of the second one (see Figure 4.1). Here already, it seems to me, we have a closer approximation to Propp than at first suggested. The latter was based on the notion of opposition and conflict, the appearance of any number of obstacles on the path of the protagonist–hero to the appropriate apotheosis. These obstacles most often took the anthropomorphic form of the villain, whose multiple ruses needed to be overcome (and indeed his very existence neutralized) before a triumphant conclusion could be assured.

Figure 4.1

We have deliberately avoided positing this kind of struggle as the only form in which the relationship of Primary Subject and Secondary Subject could be described in the sonata. Now, however, with the strengthening of resources made possible by the outright variations in the second subject that Monahan posits in his analysis, the likelihood of its relationship to the first subject being apprehended as one of a struggle between adversaries markedly increases. It is as though a first relatively independent appearance of this second theme had reworked itself into an additional character or “actant” capable of affronting the first theme more directly and efficiently; as though an innocuous passerby had suddenly unmasked himself as an unmistakable adversary.

There is no reason not to hear it this way: after all, the description turns on a more fundamental categorical distinction, namely the dialectic of identity and difference; and that lies to a certain degree in the attention of the listener. It is his perceptual choice whether to see S (the second subject) as two characters—S₁ and S₂—rather than one; whether to stage this opposition as a drama with three protagonists rather than two; or even—Monahan claims that ultimately we can identify the second subject as a derivation of elements of the first one—as a completely inner drama of mood and inner turmoil, as an identity inwardly stirred into distinct dispositions and humors.

Figure 4.2¹⁵

At this crucial level of attention, in which the listener’s own formal shaping power comes into view, it even seems possible to glimpse additional actants at work and to grasp what seemed like fleeting variations as separate and distinct entities altogether. The initial agon or struggle—the two—would then suddenly become a multiplicity, a crowd of different characters vying for existence, if not indeed for that ultimate triumph promised by the very concept of closure and conclusion.

Meanwhile, one might mention at this point, the shadow cast by a later atonal music, that of Webern or Schoenberg, over these Mahlerian forms: for at that point, the very identity of this or that “subject”—which is to say the consistency and autonomy of each as a complete theme or melody—is problematized and even undermined (in the direction of the Schoenberg maximalism of the twelve-tone row—scarcely a melody you might hum in the shower—or of Webern’s minimalism). In that case, the old-style subject finds itself broken into groups of two or three notes at a time, each group winning its own semi-autonomy and becoming a player in the larger form without having ever become a recognizable “character.”

Indeed, in a grandiose vision of history, Carl Dahlhaus sees the development of nineteenth-century music as a bifurcation into two distinct lines, which might ultimately even lead in some evolutionary logic to two distinct species: it is the fateful moment in which alongside Beethoven, Rossini emerges, and the line that leads on to the absolutization of the anthropomorphic melody as an independent and autonomous aria can no longer affirm its kinship with a symphonic organization of absolute music whose logic leads toward a fragmentation and an atomization of the old thematic “subject” and then on into atonality and the end of the Western tradition.

It is a useful narrative or myth, insofar as it allows one to position Mahler in all his ambiguity as the ultimate parting of the ways of this distant kinship, the definitive splitting of the two genetic codes. I have elsewhere tried to stress the operatic nature of Mahler’s work, the aspiration to rhetorical declamation and the kind of outsize and gesticulatory intensity and exaggeration the wide-ranging conductor found in the Italian works he was called upon to direct.¹⁶ These great declamatory moments—and I want to argue in a moment that they are not just separate episodes in Mahler but govern the entire protean continuity of his music—are also those in which the later avant-garde composers found their inspiration, identifying the minute work of analytic differentiation present in the very intimate fabric of the score itself, page after page. For them, then, the task of reading the score does not consist in organizing notes into subjects, which then become so many characters or actants in a larger overall drama, but rather in finding their delectation in the way in which a virtually inaudible motif of three or four notes—one is tempted to call them subnotes on the order of atomic particles—can be observed to find inconspicuous places in the most incongruous moments of an orchestration or a transition from one thematic moment to a different one. Here, then, the dialectic of identity and difference takes the form of a dialectic between narrative and … what? Postnarrative? A narrative on some microscopic or even subatomic level, which may be nothing more than a repetition of post-Wagnerian clusters without any visible narrative logic altogether? This is indeed how Adorno characterized the logic of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone rows: that at this point the musical text, which can by definition only consist in the repetition of these same rows over and over again, has to resort to the logic of pastiche in order to impose on that meaningless repetition the semblance of a traditional form in order to persuade the listener that something intelligible is in the process of happening (intelligibility being what I am here calling narrative).¹⁷

Derrideans and dialecticians alike will no doubt rejoice in the unparalleled undecidability between these two antithetical versions of the reading of (this prototypical Mahler work) the Sixth Symphony—melodramatic gesture versus micrological simultaneity. One is thereby fully justified as positioning at some absolute fault-line or watershed between the traditional and the new and as pronouncing it the last classical monument and the first achievement of modernism at one and the same time: eliciting an unforced admiration from both sides that does not exclude a certain malaise at its historical ambiguity (a feeling one detects everywhere in Adorno’s book on Mahler, one long probing for contradictions which cannot but conclude, much against Adorno’s critical habits, by saluting them).

However, I think it is still possible to seek that little lower level which is to be found in the historical situation to which these works respond, or indeed in the historical contradiction they seek, if not to solve, then at least to express and to articulate. We can, it seems to me, translate the dilemma of interpretation I have just outlined into a temporal language which clarifies the dilemma of a growing incommensurability between two schemes of temporality, two ways of talking and thinking about time itself. The first, the traditional option here, is the system of the past–present–future, the notion of some continuity of time beyond immediate existential experience, or perhaps—insofar as a totalizing concept of this kind always needs some experiential analogue from which to derive its plausibility and to ground its schematic structure—a projection of the experience of individual memory onto an ideological construction that transcends any possibility of personal experience. Clearly enough, in any case, forms like those of the sonata or even the novel, which seem at first glance to rely on our power of retention and memory as individuals both to identify repetitive motifs, to recognize their variations, and also to distinguish the interventions of the radically new and as yet unfamiliar—such forms in fact depend very much on this cognitive category of the continuous in time for their deployment. One would however also want to add that this is not some ahistorical category but that, at least in “modern times,” such attention to continuity changes and evolves with the complexity and also the dimensions of the historical situation as such. Indeed, when, as in modern history, that situation increasingly overloads the possibilities of individual experience, other features of time offer to displace the older organizational schemes of temporality and to propose new and more plausible substitutes, in particular our second temporal option—that living present which cancels the spurious continuities of the traditional model of past–present–future.

This is, I think, what explains the peculiarly disruptive and yet constitutive role of the living present in Mahler’s work. Philosophically, the various existentialisms have been the privileged place for the expression of this new temporality, which is radically different from the old past–present–future continuum and indeed inconsistent with it, if not incommensurable. For we all live in both temporalities simultaneously, each one taking its significance or preponderance from the immediate situation; nor can one really affirm, as have existentialist thinkers since Kierkegaard, that the present is somehow real in the sense of a concrete experience, while the tripartite temporal continuity is at best a mere abstraction and can only affirm its claims to existential reality (as in Proustian memory) by allying itself with a living present of some kind. This would be so only if the “present” in question were a mere instant of the other kind of time, a moment or point on the continuum, a mere break in the flow: in which case the line is as real as the point. On the contrary it seems probable that there are many kinds of present and that the living present includes a good deal of temporal complexity to which we do not do justice when we (quite reasonably and understandably) reduce it to the simplicity of the Deleuzian schizophrenic, the confinement in the present of the amnesiac or the Alzheimer’s patient, the fixation on the eternal of the mystic.

This absolute present is also what Adorno denounces as nominalism, that experience of being which excludes all negation or critical distance and which is the philosophical source of empiricism when the latter becomes an ideology and a worldview. I have elsewhere characterized this present, for good or for ill, as a reduction to the body, a formula that seems to be capable of doing justice to both sides of this historical phenomenon, seemingly unique in modern times, and which has its positive advantages and possibilities fully as much as those philosophical defects Adorno and so many others have deplored. For the new life structure is certainly materialistic in a new way and anchors our experience in being in such a way as to justify the (equally new) existentialist judgment of authenticity. I believe that it is also not merely the result but the acknowledgment and dawning awareness of the new globality of massive populations of living others—a scandal and a stumbling block for the former individual who can no longer encompass this multiplicity in older ethical notions of “the other” as such, and for whom the experience of temporality is displaced from recognizable ideas of the various cultural communities and drawn as by the irresistible magnet of sheer mass to the only synchronic experience we can imagine sharing, namely simultaneity or the living present itself. The global standardizations of capitalism and its new world market, which undermine community and region and whose production depends on a creative destruction even of its own past, cannot but reinforce this ontological dilemma, which even blots out death itself insofar as it can no longer encompass that future either.

Mahler’s music, it seems to me, makes available to us something like this experience, in which a present of time at every moment challenges the official requirement of the form to integrate that moment in a formal continuum of past–present–future. Our charts and the musicologists can to be sure step away from the musical experience and demand that we reorganize our perceptions in such a way that consciousness of the whole always accompanies the part and that we agree to attend to and acknowledge the generic pretensions and retentions of this particular auditory moment in time, continuing to recognize its incommensurability with the absolute present of its “components.”

That Mahler also wants us to do this is without question; he surely retains a passionate conviction in the existence of the great traditional forms and the demands they make on us. He believes, in other words, in the symphony: a belief that will be weakened and shattered for so many later twentieth-century composers. But at one and the same time he is as it were viscerally or even unconsciously committed to what Hegel called “the immense privilege of the present.” He cannot admit what earlier practitioners of a far more transparent and legible symphony form could in all good conscience acquiesce in, namely that some moments of the musical development are necessary without being themselves interesting or eventful, like those parts of a sentence required for it to be grammatical, or those areas the traditional painter must fill in without any discernible intensity in the obligatory brushstroke.

This can be seen more dramatically in the orchestration than in the horizontal score: for here all kinds of unheard details affirm the absolute primacy of moment and detail. One remembers Proust’s famous observation about Madame Swann’s toilette:

And I realised that it was for herself that she obeyed these canons in accordance with which she dressed, as though yielding to a superior wisdom of which she herself was the high priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unobserved, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has devoted infinite labour although they may never reach the ears of the public: or, in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, and would lengthily gaze at, for my own pleasure or from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strap, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those Gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, overlooking the whole town, between the soaring towers.¹⁸

Maybe orchestration is too weak to express the well-nigh gravitational shift in attention propelled by the complexity of this scoring. It is a complexity marked first and foremost not by the number of notes or instruments involved, but rather by the articulation of their voices and the ideal requirement that we hear each one separately at one and the same time. It is this which can best convey the intensity of Mahler’s compositional act and that led Leonard Bernstein, in a memorable remark to his players (the Vienna Philharmonic) to warn that in Mahler each and every note has to be played with “intensity”; “otherwise” he said, “you’re just playing music and not even that.” But this multicentered intensity clearly demands an attention from the listener which by locking us into the present threatens to weaken if not altogether to screen off any perception of the other temporal dimensions of the form, any sense of what went before and what is to come. That way, of course, a kind of temporal nominalism lies and will make its appearance and bring its resultant puzzlement and incomprehensibility to the audience in so-called modernism: to practice this present-oriented texture within the older traditional forms is as it were a fundamental strategy of Mahler, which is instinctive rather than planned or calculated.

The other feature of this increasing “attack of the present on the other temporalities” (Alexander Kluge) lies in what we may call the increasing materialism of our hearing. For this new articulation, this radical separation of the various instruments from one another within the unity of a swollen and overloaded present is not simply a matter of so-called orchestral coloration (although the latter also knows a unique practice in Mahler’s composition); it forces the materiality of the musical instrument and its peculiar and distinct resonance on our attention by way of its unique sounds, whose specificity is only heightened by the simultaneity of the other different ones in a new kind of dissonance comparable only to Baudelairean synesthesia (“a green so intense it hurts”). Music, thereby, on its way to sublimation and (at least with Mahler) to some kind of transcendent spirituality, ends up immersing us ever more physically and inextricably in the sheer materiality of the world of sound, of this “most abstract of all the senses” (Adorno).

What then serves as a counterforce to this tendency to an absolute present (a historical tendency in contemporary experience as well as contemporary art) is of course precisely that narrative form (or “sonata form”) that is at issue here and that attempts to enlist these masses of sound in an intelligible movement forward toward a conclusion that completes what gradually appears as a genuine historical past and can therefore be identified as an intelligible event. Just as a sentence can mesmerize in its own right but demands to be remastered and placed back under the control of its larger context and the web of successive sentences in which it has meaning and not merely style, odd words, rhythms, striking image content—so also this overwhelming Mahlerian present needs to be tamed somehow and marked with renewed force as a moment of an organized temporal progression in which time has again a formal unity and is not merely a succession of autonomous moments one after another. I have already specified a few of the institutional traditions that somehow enforce this shift of attention back to the absent whole: the isolation of distinct subjects from one another comparable to the individuality of separate characters in a dramatic action; the modulations which force us to attend to the keys of a given passage and thereby reactivate the whole tonal system of the keys—dominant, subdominant, and so on—that has been laid in place in a form determined by the tonal starting point of the work and which thereby also awakens our anticipation (but, as I warned about such psychological or psychologistic conceptions, can we not say it in some other way?) of this or that possible ending to come. The opposition between major and minor modes offers yet another, perhaps even central, structural possibility whereby an “optimistic” or positive expression—a comic worldview, as Frye or White might put it—can be ruthlessly modulated into a “tragic” one; and an apparent joy or even peacefulness can be undermined and become the contest for the overwhelming triumph of melancholy or despair or simply the spectacle of defeat. (That the latter is not at all inconsistent with aesthetic pleasure has been understood at least since Schopenhauer and perhaps epitomized by the title of Terry Eagleton’s book on tragedy, Sweet Violence.¹⁹ )

Surely, however, the reduction of such conceptions of the action or “event” of the work to so many binary oppositions (tragedy–comedy, pessimistic–optimistic, success–failure) tends to work against the articulated notion of a drama with multiple characters; and indeed this very alternative is yet another version of the problem I propose to study here, namely the distinction between traditional allegory and contemporary allegoresis or interpretation. For the classical form of allegory—the play of personifications which interact on the order of a drama—is quite different from a text whose literal level is a style or a mood, let’s say the Walter Pater fin-de-siècle “elegance” of Joyce’s early sentences. These are radical shifts I would be tempted to interpret in terms of the historical difference between an Aristotelian substantialism and more contemporary philosophies of process (and equally tempted to suggest that Mahler’s practice subsumes and includes both modes, both forms of allegory).

Yet in this same first movement of the Sixth Symphony, Mahler himself explicitly marked and personified the more lyrical second subject as “Alma,” his famous wife’s famous name, thus endowing the movement with an allegorical spirit, which seems to demand a rewriting of the entire movement in terms of a kind of drama. What, then, does the first subject represent, with its ominous and threatening march and its oppressive promise of domination and catastrophe? Is it the world as such and its inexorable laws, its relentless and overwhelming power, as Adorno thought? Or would it make more sense to construe some more domestic situation in which the first theme conveys everything that threatens the lyric expressivity of the Alma subject, perhaps even including her obsessive and neurotic husband himself? Or can we generalize both these alternatives into some more abstract and yet more universal opposition between public and private as such, between professional and domestic, or state and individual? Or would it not be better to confine ourselves to the purely formal and generic connotations of a tragic versus comic antithesis, so that the development of the sonata registers the interferences and contaminations between these modes as well as the struggle of each to have the upper hand over the other?

Nor must the reading neglect the rhetorical aspect of these antitheses and forget to notice the relative vulgarity of the Alma theme (as easily caricatured as the personage herself) as well as the very limited expressive range of the march-and-drum motif, which can surely not offer a very comprehensive vehicle for conveying the pressure of the world itself, save for its impoverished inexorability. In this sense, the terms of the drama are also meant to convey the restrictive and limited, distorted way in which it is represented to us here; and the allegorical scan shifts from a reading of the content of the drama to an assessment of its mode of representation as such and a judgment on the adequacy of its form.

These readings also fail to register a dimension of music that falls under what Kant called the categories of modality, namely those of possibility, of existence, or of necessity. It may seem odd to evoke such levels of being in relationship to an art which does not involve propositions and in which the existence of its “statements” (the notes) can scarcely be in doubt (a note is played or it is not). It is worth remembering, however, that Adorno did just this when he judged the form itself in terms of an eventual confirmation of the necessity of a key or a theme; meanwhile, surely, in the tonal system there exist something like logical implications—the related keys that always accompany the twelve possible tonal centers of the scale. One key can negate another one, ruling it out or overruling it; another can summon a related key with it, as a kind of shadowy implication and tentative accompaniment (a minor character following in the entourage of a protagonist and perhaps becoming a new protagonist in its own right).²⁰ These “implications” arouse the awareness of multiple actantial possibilities (or impossibilities, as the case may be), which risk strengthening the feeling of that even more momentous event which constitutes the shift from minor to major and back, not to speak of radical changes of key. Such categorial potentialities make of the musical form something a little more multidimensional than an empirical set of notes; they can be compared to the perspectival in painting, where the absence of perspective or of the vanishing point, with its analogies to literary or filmic “point of view,” suggests comparable modal and narrative freedoms.

We need, however, a terminology for all this, and it is just that with which Monahan has provided us, in his notion of hypothetical music:

a concept which allows us to distinguish between what is merely wished for and what is conclusively attained. I submit that this would-be “recapitulation” [he is discussing the finale of Mahler’s First Symphony] is exactly this kind of “hypothetical” music: the sonata dreams of a tonic homecoming for S [the second subject], but the resolution remains out of reach, and the dream darkens into nightmare. Worse still, the music awakens to find the “real” recapitulation tainted by the knowledge that S has already expended its one opportunity for a tonic key presentation. It has failed before it has even begun.²¹

This remarkable reading generates many new interpretive and analytic possibilities: for one thing, it allows for a kind of vertical reading of the score, in which both positive and negative statements are simultaneously possible: the positive outcome as a wish, the negative one as a reality. The idea bears some resemblance to the once popular literary notion of irony, by virtue of which an author could take two sides simultaneously in any given evaluation (for example, in Wings of the Dove, Merton Densher as both hero and villain simultaneously): it is a concept which historically has been an excuse for liberal ideological and political fence-sitting, and I believe that in current musicology it has most often been misused as a description of a kind of nonbinding and shamefaced citation or incorporation of other styles, as when Mahler “quotes” the kind of popular music Adorno tends to call vulgar or kitsch. To call this ironic suggests that Mahler himself agrees with our judgment and does not mean the quotations to endorse the quoted text in question as “serious” music in its own right but only to intend it as a deliberate allusion or indeed a wink (neither of which is at all consistent with Mahler’s character).

Monahan’s idea is, however, free from these ironic implications of the traditional concept of irony; and makes it possible, for example, to understand how a first movement could end with a certain finality and at the same time retain enough formal indecision to warrant the addition of further movements until we are finally able to reach a more conclusive and definitive ending in the finale.

It also allows us to reorganize the uses of Frye’s seasonal generic categories in a new kind of vertical simultaneity, in which a moment of the development can be both tragic and comic at the same time and include each other according to the modes of virtuality or implication, or even negation, in that dialectical (or Freudian) sense in which to deny a thing is also to suggest it, if not to affirm it outright. “Hypothetical music” is thus a genuinely dialectical category, in which the irreconcilable demands history imposed on Mahler can be seen to have been genially coordinated, if not reconciled (it will be remembered that of all ideological stances, “reconciliation” [Versöhnung] was the one most detested by Adorno, a form of the common misreading of Hegelian “synthesis” and susceptible to construal as one of those positive or “affirmative” propositions he rightly judged ideological).

Hypothetical music then allows us to grasp how Mahler can have been able to navigate the gap already discussed between the contradictory logics of the living present and the temporal scheme of the past–present–future. Each step is as it were viewed stereoscopically, as though both perspectives were superimposed within a single image. The musical event will be grasped in all its implications for the past (which it revalues and indeed reinvents in a certain form) and the future it implies, fears, cannot hope to hope for, and so on. But at the same time another part of the musical imagination will become obsessed, stalled as in a trance on the possibilities of this particular now, which is for it musically inexhaustible; and so Mahler will not let go of the moment, will turn it in all directions and vary it according to all its structural possibilities, until at length he is willing to have had enough and to recall the direction this episode was to have progressed toward, a movement taken up with renewed determination, until the next moment of elaborative concentration and mesmerization arrives. I have elsewhere compared this momentum to that of the eddies in an ongoing current, an untheorized genre which it would be better not to associate with the “digression” as a form but rather with some of the elaborations taken by the new postwar episodic narratives of a Günther Grass or a Salman Rushdie.

EXCURSUS

But this is also the moment to compare the concept of “hypothetical narrative” with the seemingly antithetical notion of the “breakthrough,” attributed to Adorno and yet endowed with the most remarkable variety of meanings by contemporary musicology. It has indeed two kinds of origin, if one may put it that way: the first is the coining of the expression as a technical term in Paul Becker’s 1922 Mahler monograph. The second origin can be found in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, for which Adorno was the “musical advisor” but in which the breakthrough has a very different kind of politico-psychological meaning, to which Adorno, even if he suggested the term to Mann, could not have been insensible. (We will shortly return to this issue, which turns on the military origins of Adorno’s keyword.)

The musical meaning of the term breakthrough designates the eruption of extraneous or extrinsic material in the development, resulting in its interruption or deflection in a new direction. The most frequently adduced example of this phenomenon—almost always in the context of a Mahler–Adorno discussion—is the sudden arrival of a chorale in the finale of Mahler’s First Symphony: the problem of its reduplication is a different one, and the example is limited in impact by the context of this most traditional of the composer’s nine (or ten, or eleven) symphonies. But there are enough notable instances of such “breakthroughs” in the Sixth Symphony for the concept to have an immediate relevance here, as well as a more general theoretical interest.

The latter derives from its relevance to the question of the autonomy of the work of art: the essence of the sonata form, indeed, depends on its absolute unity and homogeneity, “which dictates that all significant motivic content of the development section be derived in some fashion from the material of the exposition.”²² Breakthrough can then technically be defined as the introduction of new content which did not figure earlier and which then of necessity unexpectedly interrupts, suspends, or deflects the ongoing development of the sonata’s intrinsic material. Thus Mahler himself characterized the eruption of his chorale in precisely such terms: “My chord [the D-Major chorale] had to sound as though it had fallen from heaven, as though it had come from another world.”²³ “Luft aus anderen Planeten” was the verse of Stefan George that Schoenberg famously quoted in another musical context, and certainly this version of the breakthrough suggests an apprehension of other-worldliness and can easily be read as approaching transcendence or the sublime. But in Bruckner (for example) the sublime is attained by remaining within the language of the initial material; here in Mahler, as for example in passages of the Sixth Symphony that Monahan characterizes as Utopian, otherworldliness is conveyed by the use of “instruments” not officially recognized as musical ones in either high or popular culture—namely the notorious cowbells and birch brushes and those already somewhat alien sounds that are made in full orchestra by harp or piano. But for Mahler himself these designated, not the afterlife of resurrection, as in the early symphonies, but simply the alien peace and calm of the mountain meadows and the snowy peaks: the Naturlaut, which marks the outside world beyond the city and its “civilization” and symphony concerts; and in that sense it simply designates the other of the social world of art rather than that of the earthly world as such.

The formal problem raised by such breakthroughs is indeed the philosophical one of immanence versus transcendence: have such passages really succeeded in breaking through the closure or the autonomy of the work of art, or have they not on the contrary subtly managed to draw the external into the work and to transform it into an intrinsic, albeit enlarged, artistic language? Is the sublime, in whatever form, a phenomenon that can be aestheticized and transformed into a properly artistic end and effect? For Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the work and of art in general was a fundamental concern, the problem lies here and it remains a source of uncertainty and even ambivalence, not to speak of ambiguity, in his thought. On the one hand, the work seeks, within the increasing dominance and multiple subsumptions of the commodity form, to free itself from commodity logic by commodifying itself; by turning the very form of the commodity against itself in the evolution of a strategy in which the work becomes a final enclave of noncommodification (what Kant refers to as the “disinterested interest” of the aesthetic). Clearly, Adorno became less and less sanguine about such possibilities as he saw the dawn of universal commodification and the repression of the negative everywhere in an empiricist society in which only the “positive” or the “affirmative” (and the empirically existing) is recognized.

On the other hand, was this not also that same Adorno who told us that we could not hear Beethoven properly unless we also heard, within the music itself, the unique fact and historical Novum of the French Revolution? Marxists have often, in their criticism, vulgarized such extra-artistic reverberations of history, class, revolution, and the concrete historical situation; nor have they often enough insisted that such reverberations are part of the very semantics of artistic languages and that the jubilation of Beethoven is the expression of a genuine class triumph which will not be heard again in Western music after the bourgeoisie becomes unable to conceal its hegemonic status or to evade the bad conscience of its domination (in 1848).

But that bad conscience will not only preclude the further elaboration of joy in Western music; it will also, even more fatally, call the very justification of the aesthetic itself into question and begin to undermine all those forms, like the symphony, which are institutionalized by the new ruling class. This is where Adorno develops a remarkable solution to his ambivalence about the breakthrough: for what the latter does is not to destroy art altogether—if anything, Mahler affirms the aesthetic in as affirmative a way as Joyce or Proust, Cézanne, or even Wagner before him. It is to challenge the form as such: breakthrough is the “Ideologiekritik” of the sonata form as such; it denounces the historical and ideological basis of its own now obsolete form. Its allegedly reflexive art is one which calls into question, not art in general (as the avant-gardes, which Adorno detested, would claim), but this particular form whose uses and achievements it designates and prolongs by way of continuing to practice it: something that accounts for Mahler’s peculiarly unstable and Janus-faced position in the history of the symphony or perhaps of Western music in general.

This is then the moment to return to the relevance of Thomas Mann’s deployment of the concept of the breakthrough in Doctor Faustus, his “biography” of an imaginary composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who feels and lives the crisis and the multiple contradictions of contemporary art in more lucid and historical ways than either Mahler or Schoenberg (naturally enough assisted in this new lucidity enough by Adorno himself). “Um ihn war Kälte”: it is this proposition of Adrian’s fundamental isolation, the icy force field around him that repels friendship, love, and any more general sociability—a return, no doubt, to Mann’s own youthful aestheticism and to the pathos of the misunderstood genius. But here, the isolation of Adrian will be the isolation of Germany itself, stranded between the West (French “civilization”) and Russia. (“The West has form, Russia depth, only we Germans have both,” asserts a patriotic Wandervogel student in conversations that echo Mann’s own ambiguities as they are much more elaborately expressed in that long World War I argument with his West-oriented brother Heinrich, in the mistitled Reflexions of an Unpolitical Man.)

At least since the Thirty’ Years War, and perhaps even since Canossa, the Germans suffer their cultural isolation between their two great neighbors (with Italy as a dream wish fulfillment) as a turning inward in toxic ways on themselves. This is why in Mann’s novel Hitler’s armies constitute a desperate attempt at breakthrough: a military term easily confused with its cousin the breakout (Kesselausbruch or Durchbruch), where an army succeeds in breaking out of a seemingly fatal encirclement: the fate of the German army at Stalingrad. The more general Durchbruch is associated with the famous Blitzkrieg; it is the breaking through of the enemy defense lines, the triumphant overrunning and appropriation of alien territory.

Doctor Faustus then identifies both forms of desperation, that of the musical contradictions that seem to spell the end of music itself and that of the national–cultural in which Germany as a new world power fails to produce its own hegemonic culture, and at length (in Adrian’s Nietzschean syphilitic paralysis) attempts to escape its cultural–spiritual dilemma by way of the convulsions of Hitlerian “national revolution.” But can fascism really be understood in this pseudopsychological, pseudoexistential way?

Mahler as an Austrian will scarcely have felt the same anguish Mann seeks here to express: the precarious Austro–Hungarian monarchy had other contradictions and other dilemmas (no doubt also reflected somehow in Mahler’s music) but not exactly those of Central Europe and its successful or unsuccessful breakthroughs.

Yet the equivocations of this now omnipresent Adornian term raise another issue that is crucial for us in the present context, namely the distinction between metaphor and allegory, which it seems to revive and intensify. For is not the parallelism Mann dramatizes between music and war simply a homology whose allegorical force and consequences are strictly limited to some first point-to-point metaphorical parallel? Adorno’s use of the military term to characterize an increasingly acute crisis in musical form implies the context of a whole narrative of musical history and not simply, as in Mann, a figural parallel between two situations that are presented in terms of psychological states (isolation, desperation, acting out, and so forth). The latter, indeed, would seem to present all the features of what, with all homage to the greatness of Mann’s novel, we have already characterized as bad allegory.

But we have not yet come to terms with the tropes and in particular with that omnipresent and obsessive process (denounced by Roman Jakobson) whereby virtually every figure eventually finds itself subsumed under the metaphoric. Let me then briefly suggest that it was no accident that the key word I used to differentiate Adorno’s use of breakthrough from Mann’s was the word narrative. Metaphor is nonnarrative: indeed, it has seemed to me that we find our most productive approach to its operations by recognizing its fundamental effect as one of denarrativization, of breaking the horizontal line by way of a verticality or transcendence of the metaphorical comparison or identification. Metaphor lifts us into a world beyond movement or temporality, a world without figural change (inasmuch as it is itself a figure), a nonspace for which the word eternal is appropriate only if it is understood negatively, as the name of that something for which we have no name and which is probably language itself. I’m not sure whether this is always the element toward which lyric aspires (and out of which in its eventual failure it sinks back into narrative); but it disappears at once, when the identification is treated like legal evidence and examined part by part, the rose dissected into stamen and petals, stalk, color, odor, and so on. The metaphor has no parts; but their enumeration at once leads to allegory and beyond it to some protonarrative movement, and it is this kind of inspection that allows us to distinguish a metaphorical identification, such as Thomas Mann’s military breakthroughs, from Adorno’s historical allegory of the development of musical form.

I should add, in this instance, breakthrough is another example of the misuse of Adorno’s thought (in which he was often himself complicit) to extract named and reified “concepts” like “late style” or “nonidentity”: what made his work a model of dialectical thinking was precisely the dissolution of such commodified terms before they had a chance to harden into doctrine.

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony has always been considered the most difficult of his works, no doubt for players fully as much as for listeners. It was first performed in Essen in May 1906; and the setting has its own anecdotal interest, in that Essen, lying at the very heart of the industrial Ruhr, was even then home to the Krupp works and the family associated with them, in other words with the purveyors of the German war machines of both world wars. This premiere in the very “cradle of German heavy industry” has struck one of the composer’s most astute commentators as symbolically significant:

All those driving, relentless, militaristic rhythms, mechanistic percussion and harsh-edged contrasts that permeate so much of this work have always seemed, to me to share kinship with the place where the work was first heard. Here were the foundries and factories that put iron in the Iron Chancellor and built the guns that would spill the blood of his “blood and iron” when fired in World War I, the cultural pre-echo of whose cataclysm eight years later the work seems partly to illustrate. So I believe this symphony is, first and foremost, a twentieth-century work, perhaps the first twentieth-century symphony. It breathes as much the same air of Krupp as it does Freud, and its concerns are those of our time because so much of our time was formed in the furnaces of Essen as in the consulting rooms of Vienna.²⁴

The German component, then, is no more alien in this Austrian or Viennese work than the appearance of the great German businessman and intellectual Arnheim in Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften; and it leads Duggan to suggest that we

strip Mahler bare of nineteenth-century sonorities and folk memories, contrast the sound of the Fifth Symphony, and project, as though on a bright stage, a bitter, unforgiving elegy that opens out the tragedy into something universal, held at one remove to reinforce the tragedy’s universality and confirm its contemporary relevance.²⁵

By this last, I believe that he means to correct the overly personal and autobiographical versions of the symphony that have proliferated since Alma Mahler’s account, which generally turn on the problem of how so bleak a work should have emerged from what was to all accounts the happiest period of Mahler’s life—marriage, children, the lake in summer, his little composing shed, the rowboat, and so on.

We must, I think, grasp these first two interpretations in a dialectical relationship to one another and conjecture that it was that very personal fulfillment which released the composer to far darker intimations of the modernizing world and its conflicts.

It remained, however, for a resolute and untraditional commentator to produce a far different and more realistic view of this “blissful” interlude in Mahler’s life. Seth Monahan documents a view of this summer as the experience

of a marriage in crisis—of a young wife beleaguered by unglamorous responsibilities, exasperated by her husband’s aloofness [and, indeed, as he suggests later on, impotence], and deeply resentful of her social isolation and lack of a creative outlet … Mahler was an imperious, workaholic killjoy and self-absorbed misogynist [“You … have only one profession from now on,” he wrote in 1901, “to make me happy”], while she was a vain, independent-minded hedonist, nearly twenty years his junior and well accustomed to being the center of attention.²⁶

This revision is all the more significant, inasmuch as the identification of the second subject as “the Alma theme” inevitably forces interpreters to take some such domestic and autobiographical level of the symphony into account. I should add that Alma has been the predictable target of contempt and vilification by Mahlerians, thereby undergoing the fate of so many of the sometime companions or partners of “great men” from Flaubert’s lover Louise Colet to the various evil empresses of Chinese dynastic rulers: namely the object of mockery as well as of the most scurrilous misrepresentation. She may have been a difficult character in later life, but she had her own musical and compositional gifts, which were officially silenced by commands of the type of the 1901 injunction of Mahler himself; who for his part seems to have shared the traditional image of the wife as “helpmeet” current everywhere in nineteenth-century bourgeois society and most visible in Ibsen (Peer Gynt) and Wagner (Senta, Cosima).

I dwell on these points not merely to underscore the inevitability of some such biographical reading of the symphony, however fleeting, but also to emphasize the tendency to frame such allegories around individual characters: if the Alma theme is to be a character in a symphonic drama, then, the march motif must also be susceptible to a complementary personification. The result can only be faintly ludicrous and archaic, inasmuch as modern allegory begins by eschewing personification altogether. We will return to this issue at the end of this chapter.

For the moment, I want to suggest that these two interpretations, the politico–historical one of a pre–World War I tension and the domestic one of a troubled marriage, in fact correspond to two levels of the classical fourfold scheme of allegorical analysis, namely the anagogic and moral levels.

It is clear, then, that it remains to identify the initial levels at his set or scheme, namely the literal text and the allegorical interpretive code. I will assume here that something like Adorno’s reading of a purely formal musical history (in the context of which this particular symphony includes the reflexive undermining and critique of the sonata form it is itself reproducing) will offer at least one of these missing narrative options: for its terms—an institutional narrative or generic structure which is “deconstructed” at the very moment of its replication—posit their historical origins (the emergent symphony in the moment of the French Revolution) and their historical outcome (the end of tonality after Mahler), and project yet another third narrative, this time a music-historical one, in its own right.

As for the literal level, which can surely only be the musical text itself, the philosophical question posed by its identification is one that has plagued musicology since the beginnings of its flirtation with narrative analysis.²⁷ It is as it were an ontological question: is the analysis, the narrative reading, really part of the musical structure or has it not merely been superadded onto the latter after the “parasitic” fashion of all interpretation? I won’t try to take a position on all this, except to say that I believe the fundamental terminology of technical music analysis itself to be allegorical in some deeper sense: allegro, andante, and so on are after all easily unmasked as proto-allegorical pictures; major and minor are inevitably treated as comic and tragic alternatives; and even the visible score itself makes a language of rising and falling unavoidable. As for the number twelve, which presides over the tonal scale, I feel sure that numerologists have long since found meanings in its components which are distantly comparable to what Rimbaud found in the letters of his childhood ABC.

These findings may be summarized in the now familiar fourfold scheme of traditional allegory:

ANAGOGICAL: conflict and modernity as war

MORAL: the couple, the impossibility of marriage

ALLEGORICAL: the end of sonata form and of tonality

LITERAL: music as the tension between temporality and an eternal present

In conclusion, then, I return to the question of personification, which is so often the stumbling block and the source of all kinds of misunderstandings about the nature of allegory and in particular of allegory today. The dissolution of personification is part of what I have characterized as the dissolution of substantialism in modern thought and its replacement by relationality: it is a belief in things rather than processes, a personification-oriented allegory thereby giving way to a different kind of structure when that presupposition itself falls away.

Meanwhile, it would certainly seem historically perverse to continue to identify themes with anthropomorphic characters at a moment when the experience as well as the theories of individual subjectivity find themselves in crisis and are confronted with a variety of options: the “subject” as a space of multiple subject positions; the “subject” as itself an impersonal object for consciousness lacking in any of the traits we associate with the older individuality or personal identity; the Copernican decentering, if not the famous “death,” of the subject; Nietzsche’s position that nothing is achieved by acknowledgment of the death of God if it is not accompanied by the parallel displacement of the grammatical and psychological subject itself. These various theories, or better still, these ideological positions and programs are obviously reinforced by the widespread personal experience of fragmentation and disorientation in late capitalism, an accumulation of testimonies variously formulated as desperate “searches for personal identity” and the like, which would seem to render the traditional procedures of personification misplaced and futile if not unsatisfying. They then get transferred inside a multiple subjectivity and begin to name the various faculties of the mind, the multiplicity of subject positions which the dissolution of the traditional character leaves in its wake.

Still, there would also seem to be no doubt that a composition like the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth stakes out a certain number of recognizable musical “subjects” that any narrative approach to music must confront. There can be no doubt that Mahler himself thought in terms of narrative, in a way wholly different from that tone-poem descriptive nomenclature officially attached to the earlier works (awakening, spring, and so on); indeed his own letters evoke this or that first subject as a “hero” to whom things happen. We do not have to follow him in this (the author’s intentions not being particularly binding on the reader), and it is certainly permitted to think that this is simply a practical working terminology on the part of a composer handling complex masses of musical signs and developments.

But we have already shown that this first movement confronts us with an unmistakable pair of distinct musical identities (refraining from using the narrative terminology of character, actant, or the like). There is the initial driving, marchlike, relentless movement, with its own melodic banner as it were; and then there is the very different theme of yearning, romantic, florid expression.

Their interaction certainly constitutes the development of this rather skeletal and transparent movement. What transpires, however, is rather unexpected, for if it is a question of a struggle for mastery here, it is the “feminine” subject (Alma, the second subject), who triumphs in this first movement conclusion. That theme has effectively absorbed the first one into itself, so that it has appropriated all the driving and relentless force of the first “masculine” musical identity. To be sure, one could appeal to the psychological subtleties of dramatic confrontation to argue that on the contrary, this transfer is a defeat for the second subject, who has in effect been remolded into the spirit of the opponent and has been made to assume “his” traits and values.

At any rate, some such reading is useful at least to the degree that it solves a problem quite unique to this particular symphony, namely, the uncertainty about which movement is to follow this opening one. Mahler himself notoriously hesitated about the order of the second and third movements, one of them a scherzo that virtually replicates the marchlike intensity of the old first subject, and the other an andante far more romantic and subdued than the rather garish second subject we have been evoking. I would argue, in the light of the compromise formation with which the first movement ends, that it renders plausible some lingering dissatisfaction of its principal subject with this outcome; a frustration in which the imperious force of the first subject has not come to fulfillment and must then vent its energies in a new attempt in that scherzo, which in most performances is chosen to stand as a second movement but which feels very much like an embattled and stubborn, uncompromising return to the marchlike spirit of the previous one, the opening of the symphony.

Yet, as we have already observed, there are moments in this same first movement that somehow complicate the simplicity of the first movement’s oppositions and suggest, for want of anything else, an enlargement of its rudimentary cast of characters. There is for example a wondrous moment of stillness that Monahan marks as “Utopian,” in which both motifs are as it were taken up into heaven and played out in an ethereal transcendence in which struggle is suspended along with development as such, and in which the notorious aforementioned cowbells, along with the harp and a few cool notes on an otherwise inconspicuous piano, certify our removal to another world. Is this not—alongside equally distinctive perspectival moments in which the music takes place in a palpable distance, as though offstage (or under the strange prolonged ceiling of the pedal-point at the beginning of the First Symphony)—is this not also yet another form of what Monahan calls “hypothetical music,” a qualitative transformation in the very space in which the musical event takes place? A shift in the very ontological modes that count as musical immediacy or reality?

How are such moments to be integrated into the narrative of the two named characters, whose drama is allegedly being told here? It is as though the characters were transferred to a series of different worlds to play out their eternal opposition in a bewildering variety of landscapes and their weathers, now in spring, now in deepest winter; and this not, as traditionally from movement to movement, but rather within the unity of a single musical elaboration.

I have in another place (perhaps prematurely) suggested that we reduce the Mahlerian drama to two alternating poles, the one I simply called agitation, the other facing the same linguistic problem as the state of calm or recovered serenity did in Aristotle’s system of the emotions²⁸ (where the opposite of anger could find no ready-made name, let alone an adequate translation). Now, however, I wonder whether these states might not be enumerated in a more adequate variety and characterized in something like the following way: the driving or marchlike, the arialike and operatic, the Utopian-idyllic, the transcendental, the metamorphic (those moments in which a wholly different melodic and harmonic seethes within a given state and makes its way to the surface), and finally the chorale-haft or unison-affirmative in which a traditional solemnity seeks to bring the music to some stability if not some more definitive movement toward a more traditional and definitive conclusion.

The point is that none of these states is successful in the fulfillment it seeks; none come to any real satisfaction, as we saw with the forward-driving first subject in the first movement. Mahlerian agitation ultimately infects all of them and undermines them to the point at which they make way for some new affective attempt. So even this new system of essentially allegorical names and allegorical identities gives way under the momentum of restless mood swings, repeated alternations and transitions: and indeed this which is modern and relational about what is still traditional in this musical language and its formal developments: as in all truly modern art, the inner essence of the thing is not a substance but a transition, many transitions, a perpetual modulation not only from one key to another but from one kind of identity, one kind of value or categorial perspective, to another. And in this sense I persist in thinking that my first diagnosis of the allegorical persistence of an inner principle of agitation, ever dissatisfied and pushing on to new kinds of developments, is the most comprehensive reading.

In an earlier text, I compared this principle to the Lacanian death wish, the drive: not in the well-worn assertions of this or that obsession with death everywhere in Mahler, but rather in that of a well-nigh immortal biological force that uses the individual organism for its own purposes before discarding its husk, like an old shoe, persisting irresistibly and impersonally within the merely mortal satisfactions that it imperiously traverses and reduces to nothingness in its path. Here, then, the formal law is absolute: there must be no ultimate satisfaction, no stopping point, there must be no fulfillment! (Such was indeed the very meaning of Faust’s downfall, his ill-advised cry to the instant of time to stop: Verweile doch, du bist so schön!)

The finale of the Sixth Symphony acts out this ultimate law of the universe, that ultimate fulfillment is neither to be permitted nor attained. For indeed, at the climactic moments of its development, where something like fulfillment seems to draw near, a sound from another space altogether—not that other world of the cowbells and mountain meadows, but rather an inhuman world, neither malign nor benevolent, but icy, impersonal, as though from Montaigne’s “épicycle de Mercure”—an explosive sound neither dissonant nor consonant, a sonority that does not figure in the human battery of sounds and their instruments gathered on the bourgeois stage, but rather a meaningless ear-splitting strident intervention breaking through the worldly developments of this still human and recognizable music: it is the notorious hammer blow, the voice of the Law, the blast of the Shofar, that warns us away from the tabooed satisfaction and sends us back to our sublunary worldly destinies.

Thus, although the conclusion of a work of art is always a happy ending regardless of its content—inasmuch as it certifies the successful transformation of suffering into sheer expression (as classically in Shakespearean tragedy: “And in Aleppo once …”)—conclusions here in Mahler are truly “hypothetical” in the sense in which, naming fulfillment, they claim it at the same time that they demonstrate its impossibility: satisfying and unsatisfying all at once, desire thwarted and thereby realized by way of its very expression: such are the stakes in this work of Mahler and the well-nigh metaphysical outcome that can alone be the conclusion of the force he has awakened.

As for allegory, I will want to draw the conclusion that some new allegory of qualitative states and their transitions into one another here has replaced the older search for personifications and identities. It is with this historical development as with the great historical transition from named emotions to a gamut of nameless affect that I have sought to depict here and elsewhere: Mahler bestrides both, just as he unites for one last time the traditions of Beethoven and Rossini, tempting us with allegory and allegoresis alike and demonstrating that music is profoundly allegorical in its temporalities at the same time that, nonlinguistic, it eludes the analysis of a mode that arises from the alienating power of words and names, of language as such.