A number of Mahler’s symphonies contain climactic accumulations and releases of musical-expressive energy that overspill conventional boundaries between the aesthetic and the sensational, the spiritual and the physical, high art and the popular. These might be said to define something of the ‘problem’ that his music represented for many of his contemporaries. They are still infrequently confronted in terms of their elaborately staged excess, as if mocking the metaphorical language of harmonically contrived ‘tension and resolution’ by revealing, in spite of conventional mockery of ‘programmaticism’, what such notionally formal or ‘theoretical’ language always implies. Even Lawrence Dreyfus’s recent exploration of the ‘erotic impulse’ in Wagner’s music was to some degree hedged by symptomatic analysis of Wagner’s supposed ‘decadence’, although it valuably opened up the field and offered insight into key features of post-Wagnerian, late-romantic music. Mahler himself, in a famous letter to Gisela Tolnay-Witt, situated these in the specific, socio-cultural characteristics of symphonic music in an era of mass consumption by ever larger numbers of people in ever larger spaces. The history and changing implications of these climactic moments in Mahler’s symphonies will be sketched here with reference to their often explicitly transgressive implications.

中文翻译：

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马勒的压倒性高潮：作为大众媒介的交响曲

马勒的许多交响曲都包含了音乐表达能量的高潮积累和释放，超越了审美与感官、精神与物质、高雅艺术与流行之间的传统界限。这些可以说是定义了他的音乐为他的许多同时代人所代表的“问题”。就其精心策划的过度而言，他们仍然很少遇到，就好像在嘲弄和谐设计的“张力和决心”的隐喻语言，尽管对“程序主义”的传统嘲弄，但揭示了这种概念上的正式或“理论”语言总是暗示。甚至劳伦斯·德雷福斯最近对瓦格纳音乐中“色情冲动”的探索也在某种程度上被对瓦格纳所谓的“颓废”的症状分析所对冲，尽管它非常宝贵地开辟了这一领域，并提供了对后瓦格纳晚期浪漫主义音乐的关键特征的洞察。马勒本人在给吉塞拉·托尔奈-维特的一封著名的信中，将这些置于交响乐特定的社会文化特征中，在一个越来越多的人在越来越大的空间中进行大众消费的时代。马勒交响曲中这些高潮时刻的历史和不断变化的含义将在此处参照它们通常明确的越界含义进行概述。