In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his ...sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic ...negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.
Thomas Mann’s “musical novel”, Doctor Faustus, tells the life story of Adrian Leverkühn, a composer to whom the Devil makes an offer of fame achieved by the discovery of a groundbreaking ...compositional technique. Mann conceived the plot as an allegory of music’s alluring and perilous role in German history, as the doom eventually met by Leverkühn is a projection of the final collapse of Nazi Germany. According to one of various schools of thought, the character of Leverkühn and his compositional output correspond with the person as well as certain aspects of the work of Gustav Mahler. The present article aims at linking up with this interpretation, along with offering a more general reflection on the essence of Mahler’s music by confronting it with the ideas expounded in Mann’s novel.
This book examines Gustav Mahler’s career-long engagement with sonata form. It argues that a dynamic, process-based sonata-form concept factors into all of his early and middle-period symphonies, ...informing not just their schematic design, but also their narrative/expressive character. The first three chapters lay out the interpretive machinery for the analyses to follow. Chapter 1 considers the role of sonata form in Mahler’s creative imagination, with special interest in (1) his consistent linkage of tonal plot and affect, and (2) the intertextual networks that link his sonata forms to one another. Chapter 2 examines the celebrated Mahler writings of Theodor W. Adorno and draws from that author several of the study’s leading interpretive themes, including the idea of Mahler’s deformational idiom as a “nominalist” indictment of prefabricated forms. Chapter 3 attends to issues of music and narrative, with special focus on the complex relation of single-movement narratives to those spanning entire symphonies. Chapters 4 through 7 are analytical studies of complete movements: Symphonies nos. 3/I, 4/I, 6/I, and 6/IV. On the one hand, each is concerned with the nature and extent of the movement’s dialogue with the traditional sonata plot. On the other, they seek to connect this sonata-form dialogue (1) to the processes implicated by Adorno’s vision of “novelistic” construction and (2) to the traditional programmatic frameworks that accompany the symphonies that embed them.
During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and ...spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion. These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antisemitic discourses of compassion, Kita reflects on the explicitly and increasingly troubled political and social dynamics at the end of the Habsburg Empire.
