The Bard Music Festival

Karen Painter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691218359
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's life and work. But they have focused on analysis internal to the compositions, along with their programmatic contexts.
In this volume, musicologists and historians turn outward to examine the broader political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music. Peter Franklin takes up questions of gender, Talia Pecker Berio examines the composer's Jewish identity, and Thomas Peattie, Charles S. Maier, and Karen Painter consider, respectively, contemporary theories of memory, the theatricality of Mahler's art and fin-de-siècle politics, and the impinging confrontation with mass society. The private world of Gustav Mahler, in his songs and late works, is explored by leading Austrian musicologist Peter Revers and a German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling.
Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival.

PART I

CONTEXT AND IDEOLOGIES

Whose Gustav Mahler?

Reception, Interpretation, and History

LEON BOTSTEIN

If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burnt them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But how could he have realized that? I can see it, because I can compare his music with what the great composers wrote. But he could not, because though perhaps someone to whom such a comparison has occurred may have misgivings about the value of his work through seeing, as it were, that his nature is not that of the other great composers,—that still does not mean that he will recognize its worthlessness; because he can always tell himself that though he is certainly different from the rest (whom he nevertheless admires), his work has a different kind of value.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1948)

Mahler and the Twentieth Century

The popularity of the music of Gustav Mahler, on concert stages and in recordings, particularly during the last forty years, has been so commanding and widespread that it itself has become the subject of commentary and scholarship.¹ This Mahler phenomenon is characterized no longer merely by the revival that began in earnest in the mid-1960s, spearheaded in performance by Leonard Bernstein and defended brilliantly by Theodor W. Adorno’s remarkable monograph Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy.² In the 1970s an explosion of serious research and publication occurred whose preeminent protagonists were Donald Mitchell and Henry-Louis de La Grange. Mahler’s reputation benefited as well from the wide-ranging reexamination of the art and culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna (and consequently the Viennese contribution to modernism), a trend in the 1970s and early 1980s that coincided with a shift in culture and politics especially in the United States.³ In retrospect, however, the fascination with Mahler the man and his music after 1960 took on its own trajectory, as the sheer volume and variety of recordings, performances, research, critical attention, and other forms of Mahleriana suggest. In an age when so-called “classical” music is understood as losing its audience, the popular attachment to Mahler, including the burgeoning scholarly industry, is a striking exception.⁴

By the end of the twentieth century Mahler had become the most visible figure from the high-art classical music tradition since Mozart.⁵ The massive Mozart celebrations of 1991, the popular play and film Amadeus, and the enduring image of Mozart as childhood genius par excellence have resulted in permanent iconic status within popular culture. Mozart’s music typifies the quaint, pleasing, unproblematic beauty of an antiquated form of music. At the same time, his legendary skills have sustained the notion that the traditional canon of music is educationally useful as a source of high levels of cognitive achievement in children. Mahler, on the other hand, still commands interest for having written music that sounds as if it possessed a contemporary, direct, and emotionally accessible meaning for today’s listeners. The power of the symphonic music’s expressive range and sonority, the humanity of the lieder texts and their settings, all remain undiminished, despite their roots in a distant culture. Mahler seems as adequate to the moment and the age (if not, superficially, more so) nearly a century after his death as he was a century after his birth. Mahler not only exerts an overwhelming if not oppressive presence in orchestral concert life, but his music has become the defining example of symphonic music. His music constitutes a paradigm for listening to instrumental music, of the attributes such music might possess, and of the meanings long-form music without words can convey.

No doubt conductors have wanted to program Mahler since Bernstein’s success in part because his work is now seen as an essential test of a conductor’s capacity as an interpreter and shaper of sound and drama—much the way Beethoven functioned as an obligatory vehicle in the repertoire before 1950. Conductors are drawn to Bruckner for similar reasons. Yet concert promoters and orchestra managers all over Europe and America will testify to the radical difference in audience response. Mahler plays to packed houses; outside of Germany and Austria, halls are far less easily filled when Bruckner is performed.

But the Mahler that has emerged victorious at the end of the twentieth century is not quite the Mahler put forth by Adorno in 1960. The Mahler that outraged his most discerning contemporary critics (Wittgenstein among them) and attracted, during his career, many supporters—particularly younger musicians like Alban Berg and Anton von Webern—has vanished. The aspects of negativity, rebellion, innovation, and resistance Adorno located in Mahler’s music are neither heard by the audience nor communicated from the stage.⁶

The rise to popularity and prominence has made it increasingly difficult to disentangle the historical Mahler from the massive overlay of posthumous reception. This itself is a symptom of the role Mahler has come to play not only in musical life, but in the late twentieth century as a facet of cultural iconography. As the primary protagonist with an accessible core of musical works from within the traditions of high culture, the Mahler of the late twentieth century has its closest historical analogue in the role played by Beethoven during the late nineteenth century. Even Adorno’s small book can be set side by side with Richard Wagner’s seminal 1870 essay “Beethoven,” although Wagner’s Beethoven had a more lasting effect on the reception of Beethoven than Adorno’s has had in the case of Mahler. In terms of scholarship, de La Grange’s biography can be compared to Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s pathbreaking and precisely chronologically ordered life of Beethoven that was published, after Thayer’s death, in partial form from 1866 to 1879. These detailed, devotional, and definitive biographies each appeared more than four decades after their subjects’ respective deaths; they exerted a lasting influence on readers in more than one language.⁷ Beethoven and Mahler both entered fiction and, ultimately, the movies.⁸ The visual images of these composers became emblematic of aesthetic inspiration and genius as contingent on the struggles and self-critical habits of adulthood (in contrast to Mozart, the naïve, inspired, childlike figure). Mahler, as one recent novel and movie suggest, now rivals Beethoven, not only in the repertoire, but as the stuff of pseudohistorical legend and biographical fantasy—perhaps because he was one of the few great composers with a notorious and beautiful wife.⁹

Beethoven’s nineteenth-century popularity was intertwined dialectically with divergent responses to late romanticism: its radical expansion under the aegis of Wagner, and an antiromanticism of the sort pioneered by Debussy, whose antipathy to Beethoven was pronounced.¹⁰ At the fin de siècle, Beethoven’s work became a battleground in which Mahler, Heinrich Schenker, and Arnold Schoenberg all played particular roles.¹¹ The post-Debussy anti-Beethoven sensibility became cloaked in an antiromantic aesthetic skepticism and, after Debussy’s death, in a novel neoclassicism (particularly through Stravinsky). However, the antiromantic trajectory within Second Viennese School modernism also owed something to Beethoven; a revisionist view of the Beethoven of the late quartets functioned as a legitimating precedent. Even the reactionary and conservative Viennese musical factions from the early decades of the century focused on Beethoven. In their fight against a perceived decline in cultural standards and taste, an obsession with Beethoven persisted, as Schenker’s lifelong project to rescue Beethoven from misreading and popular bowdlerization attests.

From the start of his revival in the 1960s, Mahler took on a pivotal, Janus-like function in musical culture, comparable to Beethoven’s a century earlier. On the one hand, Mahler continued to be appropriated as a prophet of modernism and model of progressive innovation, as Adorno suggested, albeit with decreasing plausibility. As modernism in music came under attack beginning in the 1970s, however, Mahler became utilized as a precursor and model of the postmodern, a source of inspiration for the restored viability of tonality, narrative, and traditional expressiveness in music. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mahler has become entirely emblematic of the emancipation from modernism. His music is understood as evocative of a path in twentieth-century music different from Stravinsky’s or Schoenberg’s and suggestive of a potential rapprochement between popular and concert music. His popularity led ultimately to the rediscovery of the substantial antimodernist orchestral repertoire composed between 1890 and 1960.¹²

Although Mahler has become the twentieth century’s Beethoven, the contrasts are as instructive as the surface similarities. The Beethoven idealized and popularized initially in the mid-nineteenth century by the generation of Liszt and Schumann was a heroic figure. By the fin de siècle and well into the early twentieth century, the incarnation of Beethoven as hero had shifted away from the image of the romantic hero as artist to that of defiant egalitarian revolutionary hero, a trajectory sustained by the increasing popularity of the middle-period works and the revival of his late quartets and last piano sonatas. Beethoven’s music, as Paul Bekker’s enormously successful 1911 volume on the composer suggested, was deemed one of ideas, accessible to a wide audience and suffused with meaning beyond the strictly musical. It conveyed politics and philosophy. Although he was understood as a forlorn, isolated, temperamental, and romantic idealist, on the eve of World War I Beethoven persisted as a heroic larger-than-life figure, an antibourgeois revolutionary hero: the genius as aesthetic original who helped identify and promulgate conceptions of freedom, resistance to convention, and individuality.¹³

These residues of the heroic ideal lost their allure in the wake of fascism and the carnage of World War II. In the early 1970s, Beethoven was becoming subsumed within the early music revival in terms of performance practice. Interpretive revisionism with and without period instruments distanced him from his romantic legacy. By the start of the Mahler revival, the last great exponents of the late-romantic heroic approach to Beethoven on the concert stage had either died or were on the brink of retirement. However, the failure of the period-instrument movement to dominate the performance of Beethoven reveals how difficult it remains to reinvent Beethoven without invoking residues of nineteenth-century images of the heroic.

In this context Mahler’s life and work seemed a perfect foil and alternative. Mahler’s role as a symbolic successor of and surrogate for Beethoven possesses its own ironic overtones, given Mahler’s obsession with and debt to Beethoven. Nonetheless, after 1960 Mahler was gradually transfigured and elevated into the exemplar of the artist as anti-aristocratic antihero, inclined toward democracy if not socialism. Here was the artist as vulnerable individual, struggling internally with conflict and alienation. Mahler was decidedly not heroic in the manner of Beethoven, in part because his life possessed familiar bourgeois attributes including social position, public office, marriage, and family. Cast into a pattern of life and career with which the audience could identify, Mahler, insofar as he transcended the ordinary, was deemed either martyr, saint, or prophet.

The antiheroic aspect of Mahler’s reputation coincides with the impression that his music, even the later symphonies that have no texts or overt programs, possesses meaning beyond music alone. Mahler has succeeded in reducing the distance between composer and listener. Despite the massive scale of the music and its overpowering sonorities, all reminiscent of Beethovenian ambitions, Mahler’s music seems nonetheless to communicate the personal and the intimate. His music implies a universal message that is neither dramatic nor didactic in the sense of the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven. Mahler’s music appears to mirror the complexities, layers, and chaos associated with everyday life, rendering, for the larger public, the narrow debate about the role of secret or overt programs in his symphonies a purely scholarly question. Much like mid-twentieth-century popular accounts of Freud’s theories, Mahler’s music came to reveal in a normative way a temporal geography of the psyche; it offered a metaphor for the process by which the soul is tormented by modernity.¹⁴ Mahler’s life, replete with an actual encounter with Freud, a difficult marriage, the loss of a child, career setbacks, and a personal affinity for the way dreams mirror revelatory interactions between fantasy and reality, contributed to the image of the composer as confessional artist and quintessentially sensitive modern individual. He was, after all, in manner, gai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I: Context and Ideologies
• Part II: Analysis and Aesthetics
• Part III: Mahler's American Debut: The Reception of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, 1904–1906 Edited by Zoë Lang
• Part IV: Mahler's German-Language Critigs Edited and Translated by Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig
• Index
• Notes on Contributors