Was Mahler a Modernist?

Detail of Beethoven Frieze, Gustav Klimt.

The third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) could accurately be described as a bricolage; an intertextual collage of sonorities; quotations both musical and discursive.[1] The canvas upon which these sound-fragments are painted—Christopher Butler calls it a ‘metanarrative backbone’—is  the Scherzo from Mahler’s second symphony.[2] Mahler’s scherzo ‘more or less controls [Sinfonia/iii’s] rhythmic movement … which it then decomposes or deconstructs as it goes along.’[3] Musical sources including and not limited to a Bach chorale, Schoenberg’s Peripetie, Debussy’s La Mer, Ravel’s La Valse, and—following the spoken words ‘I’ve got a present for you’—the explosive opening chord from Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli, are interwoven with text extracts from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable, slogans from the May 1968 ‘évènements’,  and quotations from Lévi-Strauss and Martin Luther King.[4] Berio not only appropriates Mahler’s scherzo for his canvas, but quotes him more than any other composer in this movement. But, in so radically pluralist and overtly postmodern an intertextual assemblage (to quote the title of a bad book), ‘Why Mahler’?[5]

Sinfonia was written in the wake of the Mahler revival of the 1960s.[6] Championed by composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and following the ideology of Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, the Mahler of the 1960s concert hall was, in Karen Painter’s words, ‘appropriated as prophet of modernism and model of progressive innovation.’[7] At the time, Adorno’s reading of a composer whose ‘aesthetic choices seem curiously out of line with the modernism that had already been shaping the Viennese art world for at least a decade’ was revisionist, but nevertheless motivated by a pre-existent and unique ideological-aesthetic tangle surrounding the nexus of Mahler’s symphonies, biography, and reception.[8] Where Adorno heard ‘negativity, rebellion, innovation, and resistance’, there also lies, according to Julian Johnson,

a figure in whose music historicist and modernist culture collided, in which the self-consciousness of a romantic subjectivity came close to that of the postmodern, in which the universal aspirations of the Austro-German tradition of autonomous music were urgently restated while being undercut at every turn by the proliferation of plural and heterogeneous voices.[9]

‘Janus-like’ between the two as Painter says he historically stands, both the romanticism and modernism within Mahler’s symphonies are easily, polemically justifiable: romantic tonality and yet extreme chromaticism, blistering irony and yet nostalgic fairy tales, the use of complex, large-scale symphonic forms and yet the less-than-formalist desire to contain ‘the whole world in a symphony’; these are not mutually exclusive qualities, but generative cultural frictions from the increasingly (and violently) pluralist landscape of fin-de-siècle Vienna laid out by Carl E. Schorske.[10] Taking after Johnson’s assertion that ‘unpicking the cliché of Mahler as representative of fin-de-siècle Vienna requires drawing out contradictions rather than obscuring them’, this essay will interrogate all of the seemingly incongruous pairs listed above in an attempt to locate the scattered fragments of Mahler’s modernism, whether they be in score, commentary, concert, or his life.[11]

The appropriation of a symphony for politico-ideological poster-child has an obvious precursor to Mahler’s in the form of Beethoven’s ninth. In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013), Slavoj Žižek traces the uses its ‘Ode to Joy’ as ‘a kind of ode to humanity—as such to the brotherhood and freedom of all people’ through ideological movements which are totally opposed to one another, concluding that ‘it's truly that we can imagine a kind of a perverse scene of universal fraternity where Osama Bin Laden is embracing President Bush, Saddam is embracing Fidel Castro, white races is [sic] embracing Mao Tse Tung and all together they sing “Ode to Joy” [….] A neutral frame [for ideology that] always has to also work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings’.[12] This ‘neutral container’ is an over-simplification revealed by the conspicuous absence of the post-War twentieth-century West in Zizek’s list. Painter suggests that, in the wake of war, ‘anti-bourgeois heroic Beethoven’ became less appealing, and Mahler, as ‘democratic hero rather than socialist [….] vulnerable individual in an ordinary middle-class social life audience can identify’ became the ‘perfect foil’.[13] With the ‘impression of extra-musical meaning in Mahler symphonies […] reducing the distance between composer and listener’ she writes that, to a 1970s audience, a Mahler symphony ‘appears to mirror complexity, layers, chaos of daily life.’[14]

While there is no trace of the abstract in this narrative, the psychologism of the public intimacy of relatability aligns with pop readings of Freud; being heard to reveal ‘in a normative way a temporal geography of the psyche’, Mahler in ‘manner, gait, and habits’, perceived to be ‘appropriately intense and neurotic’, was ‘uncannily compatible with characterisations of the post-World War II romanticised cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual.’[15] Here was a kinship fashioned between two liberal Viennese Jewish men buttressed by the biographical concrete of a real-life meeting. Freudian psychological narratives allow the Mahler symphony to assimilate mimesis and modernism in a way which conveniently prolonged its popularity amid the post-1970 unpopularity of musical modernism.[16] In light of this, Johnson’s suggestion that ‘Mahler might be cited as an extreme example of Carl Dahlhaus’s characterization of romanticism after 1848—that is, a historical period in which romantic music coexisted with an age of positivism rather than an age of romanticism’ becomes, in its conflation and ambiguity, a post-structuralist springboard.[17] Just as, for contemporary Viennese audiences, ‘Mahler’s work exemplified aspects of the city’s culture but at the same time remained distant from it’ in its ‘mixing of sentimental rural topics and urban ones’ and the listener’s ‘theatrical […] performance of social identities’, so too, for Bernstein and his audiences, ‘Mahler’s music projected interiority, emotion, subjectivity, and move towards personal identification and emotional resignation, not a complex engagement with history and politics.’[18]

Mahler’s symphonies deny Zizek’s ‘ideological container’ model, however. Their ideological and cultural significances may have shifted since fin-de-siècle Vienna, but their topics remain—albeit sometimes elusively—to be historical sound-artefacts of Mahler’s contemporary world. Military marches (symphony II/i, symphony VI/i), funeral marches (symphony I/iii, symphony V/i, symphony VII/i), waltzes (symphony II/iii, symphony IV/ii, symphony VII/iii), and Laendler (symphony I/ii, symphony V/iii symphony IX/ii) are staple first, second, and third movements of Mahler’s symphonic forms, the dances in particular often disrupted by aggressively chromatic interruptions, jarringly metallic orchestration, and extremes if instrumental register. With these uncannily distorted forms, Johnson’s observation that ‘Mahler’s irony is different in tone from that of Schoenberg and Berg but not in substance or function’ is particularly apt when considered alongside Berg’s Wozzeck and its bitter, twisted dance forms acting as referential containers for serialism. Indeed, as Johnson writes, ‘The solitary individual, falling through the cracks between the plural voices of Mahler’s scherzo movements (as in the Seventh or the Ninth), is every bit as deconstructed as Schoenberg’s Pierrot or Berg’s Lulu.’[19] The decentred subjectivities expressed here are felt, however, every bit as much in the communal dances as in the cracks between them. The ‘sense of impending collapse pervading the longing for the past’ in fin-de-siecle Vienna creates these uneasy undercurrents in Mahler’s nationalistic Landler; in spite of increasingly hostile pluralism, the formation of collective Viennese identity is nevertheless at stake, and always performatively, in this music.[20] As Johnson writes, ‘the crowd scenes of Mahler’s symphonies (in the Finale of the Second or the first movement of the Third) are every bit as “staged” as those in operas by Berlioz or Verdi.’[21]

The making of identity that motivated Bernstein’s Mahler fervour was an altogether different and more personal one. ‘Bernstein sets Mahler’s Jewish ambivalence against his own pride’, writes Painter, pitting Mahler’s ‘complex relationship with Catholicism’ after his 1897 conversion against Bernstein’s ‘facile, all-embracing cultural eclecticism in his 1971 Mass’.[22] Significantly, Mahler’s ‘crowd scenes’ are at their most overt in his two most Christian-inflected symphonies: I (Resurrection) and VIII (Symphony of a Thousand). Reminiscent of “Ode to Joy” in their grand, universalizing narratives, here the fractured ‘modernist prophet’ Mahler stands Janiform once again, with one head facing a very public Catholicism and the other facing a more private, subjective Jewish heritage that aligns him with Freud.[23] Mahler’s snarling irony in part functions when Klezmer-suggesting modal inflections, ornamented violin solos, and off-beat cymbals take over his public Viennese dance forms in a landscape which was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jewish people. In light of this understanding, the words repeated in Berio’s Sinfonia over Mahler’s scherzo take on a new significance: ‘it can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger, or lower the price of bread’.

At the centre of Mahler’s third symphony, a mezzo-soprano sings ‘Zarathustra’s drunken song of midnight’. Nietzsche’s text reads,

from a deep dream I woke and know:

the world is deep,

deeper than the day has known. …

Woe speaks: Go, die!

But desire wants eternity—

Wants deep, deep eternity![24]

The intersection of Schopenhauer and Freud here—a blind Will for eternity meeting deep, meaningful desire in dreaming—encapsulates many of the shared qualities of Mahler reception that have, at least partially, permeated from fin-de-siecle Vienna through to today. Peter Franklin describes it as an embrace of ‘portents and threats, contradictions and consolations, and have an ability both to express and induce experiences of dreamlike escape and alienation.’[25] This is a modernist consolation. T. S. Eliot would describe the contradictions as ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’, Schorske hears the drunken song as the ‘deathly dissolution of the boundaries of ego and world which desire decrees.’[26] With modernist art, literature, and psychoanalysis documenting both the fracturing of the ego and the liberal imperial world-order, Lewis Thomas hear in the ninth symphony the ‘door-smashing intrusion of death everywhere …. Not “keep going”, but the opening of all the hatches and the instant before ignition, and not the ever-repeating, if bewildering, encouragement to ‘keep going’ spoken throughout Berio’s sinfonia.[27]

As Schorske points out, ‘so many pioneers of twentieth-century though and art were using traditional language to convey modern messages’, listing Klimt, Mahler, Otto Wagner, Freud by way of example.[28] Mahler’s symphonies have, perhaps even more than the works of these other figures, enjoyed a long an public popularity, which Painter attributes their ‘capacity to adjust by retreating into privacy within a dehumanizing modernity.’[29] In other words, the ‘absence of traditional formalism’ and ‘sprawling, episodic, multi-layered textures’ contributing to a ‘sense of duration, space and collage’ are counterbalanced, according to Adorno, by a sense of ‘realism’ which, ‘lifelike’, ennobles the ‘quotidian’.[30] An ‘accessible sound experience that offers reassurance concerning normalcy of distress, rage, and anxiety’ makes, for Painter, an ‘antiheroic Mahler is relevant for all, not just Jews’, wherein the ‘existential struggle no longer seems exceptional’ and the ‘political plight of the Jew is reformulated: dehistoricized and depoliticized into template for understanding the generic psychological and personal alienation of the modern individual’ whereby the ‘embrace of music as personally meaningful overwhelms any historical distance’.[31] In other words, while there once existed a modernist Mahler, who like a Freudian, anti-heroic uncanny, father fractured himself between the romantic and the modern. In his place stands post-structural Mahler, name-dropped in Sondheim musicals, ‘germane to the ordinary, educated middle classes’, a dead author haunting the ‘ideological containers’ of music that he left behind.[32] Between these two extremes lies a plurality of possible answers, each with interchangeable nuances and ideological baggage, and that, for a composer such as Berio existing on the cusp between the postmodern and the modern in an increasingly plural and intertextual aesthetic landscape, is why, at least for a canvas, Mahler.

Bibliography

Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism : A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Butler, Christopher. Modernism [electronic Resource] : A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions ; 236. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Barham, Jeremy. The Cambridge Companion to Mahler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Cambridge Companions to Music.

Johnson, Julian. Mahler's Voices [electronic Resource] : Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Painter, Karen. Mahler and His World. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-siècle Vienna : Politics and Culture. Paperback ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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[1] Bricolage, n. ‘Construction or (esp. literary or artistic) creation from a diverse range of materials or sources. Hence: an object or concept so created; a miscellaneous collection, often (in Art) of found objects.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 21 November 2016.

Format

[2] Butler 2002, 74.

[3] Ibid, 74.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lebrecht, Norman. Why Mahler? : How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Answers to this question here will attempt more nuance than Lebrecht’s, and not entertain the question of whether I (or Beyonce Knowles) might be related to Gustav Mahler.

[6] Painter 2002, 4.

[7] Ibid, 4.

[8] Johnson 2009, 229.

[9] Ibid, 229.

[10] Schorske 1980, 116-175.

[11] Painter 2002, 4.

[12] Zizek 2013.

[13] Painter 2002, 5.

[14] Ibid, 6.

[15] Ibid, 7.

[16] Painter 2002, 8.

[17] Johnson 2009, 228.

[18] Ibid, 232; Painter 2002, 9.

[19] Johnson 2009, 230.

[20] Ibid, 230.

[21] Ibid, 230.

[22] Painter 2002, 8.

[23] Ibid, 1.

[24] Schorske 229.

[25] Franklin 2011, 8.

[26] Schorske 1980, 230.

[27] Painter 2002, 13.

[28] Schorske 1980, 316.

[29] Painter 2002, 14.

[30] Ibid, 16.

[31] Ibid, 14.

[32] “A matinee, / A Pinter play,/ Another piece of Mahler./ I’ll drink to that!”, “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company (1970); Painter 2002, 9.