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Mahler’s Overwhelming Climaxes: The Symphony as Mass Medium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Peter Franklin
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 391 - 404
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 ‘Von hier an … bis zum Schluss ist es empfehlenswerth die Hörner so lange zu verstärken, bis der hymnenartige, alles übertönende Choral die nöthige Klangfülle erreicht hat. Alle Hornisten stehen auf, um die möglichst grösste Schallkraft zu erzielen. Mahler’s direction in the score of the Finale of the First Symphony, seven bars before cue 56. English translation by the author.

2 From Theodor Helm’s review of the Vienna premiere in November 1900 of the First Symphony, upon whose ‘parodistic’ elements he had dwelt satirically. Translation by Painter, Karen and Varwig, Bettina, from Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 293–294 Google Scholar [original German text not included].

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5 Gisela Tolnay-Witt may have been the nine-year-old subsequent musicologist Gisela Selden-Goth, although Herta Blaukopf questions this assumption on grounds of Selden-Goth’s 1884 birth-date; see Blauopf, Herta, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, Neuausgabe (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 1982), 434 Google Scholar. Mahler does, however, clearly refer to her as his “little tormenting spirit”; see Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 149.

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9 I am thinking here of Wagner’s theorization of the post-Beethovenian orchestra’s ‘faculty of speech’ (‘the faculty of uttering the unspeakable’) as outlined in Wagner, Opera and Drama, III, section V, 316ff.

10 My engagement with this single essay by Kittler is rather deliberately opportunistic; for more extended consideration of Kittler, relevant to the present article, see Gundula Kreuzer, ‘Kittler’s Wagner and Beyond’ in ‘Colloquy. Discrete/Continuous: Music and Media Theory after Kittler’ in Journal of the American Musicological Society 70 (2017), 228–33.

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29 The translated text of this programme is reproduced in A. Mahler, Gustav Mahler, 213–14.

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31 A. Mahler, Gustav Mahler, 213.

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