- There are, to be sure, other ways to make a case for the Jewishness
of Mahler’s music, ways that already have some currency and
may be extended easily enough. It has been pointed out, for example,
how different Mahler’s version of Christianity is from Catholicism
or any other widely accepted version of Christianity. Thus,
his “Resurrection” Symphony places much more emphasis
on heavenly grace and forgiveness than anything one is likely
to hear in a church, deftly putting aside the very idea of judgment
even though what is ostensibly being redeemed, according to earlier
movements, is the soul of a rather self-centered suicide victim
who was probably also an unrepentant adulterer.30
We may note, as well, the rather bizarre way that his Third Symphony
seeks to “derive” Christianity through a process of
evolution within an idiosyncratic version of the cosmos, transporting
us from inanimate nature, through flowers, creatures of the forest,
and even Nietzsche, before supplanting it all with another singularly
non-judgmental version of heavenly grace. And if one listens carefully
to the words in the finale of the Fourth Symphony—a movement
he at one point subtitled “Heavenly Life,” and which
presents a child’s view of heaven in the style of a lullaby—one
notices that even Herod is apparently redeemed in this supposedly
Christian heaven. Moreover, his redemption does not seem even
to involve reform, let alone contrition, as he stands cheerfully
ready to slaughter the Lamb—which can only represent either
Christ or the countless children that the historical Herod slaughtered,
and which is led in by no less than John the Baptist, another
of Herod’s victims. Yet, however strange these highly individual
takes on Christianity may be, it is hard to see them as particularly
Jewish, particularly as an aggregate, except perhaps in their
generalized rejection of Christian orthodoxy. And it seems particularly
odd to find Mahler setting—in the finale of the Fourth Symphony,
the first major work he composed after his return to Vienna—a
text that reads, “We lead a meek, innocent, little
lamb to its death!” (original)—just
as if the blood libel and the charge of being Christ-killers were
by then a thing of the past.
- What may work better here, if we want to get at Louis’s
claim that Mahler “spoke musical German with an accent,”
that his music “acts Jewish,” is for us to think
briefly about the model of language, and about what typically
happens when a great writer writes in a language not his or her
own. For instance, we may consider Nabokov, whose mastery of English
was of the highest order, but who wrote like no native speaker
would. What matters here is a sense of being inside or outside
the language; a strong writer will always have an individual voice,
but if she or he is a native speaker, there will usually be some
sense of familiarity as well. With Nabokov,
though, there are always going to be moments when you realize
that his experience of English is different from yours, that his
engagement with the language is that of an outsider, however well
he has mastered it, however much he seems to love its sound, its
nuances, and what it can do for him. Word choice will suddenly
seem to have the subtlety and strangeness of a butterfly looked
at from up close, and your own language will seem for a moment
foreign to you.31
So, too, might Mahler’s music sometimes seem Germanic without
seeming precisely German. One way it might do so is through the
exaggerated nuances of his orchestration. Another might be the
frequent and unsettling shifts, as if the music can’t seem
to steer as straight a course, or maintain the same sense of musical
flow, as a symphony from another, more “German” composer—and
here, we might remember Bernstein’s identification of a neurotic
element in Mahler’s music. These things,
indeed, could easily have been what Louis meant when he wrote
that Mahler’s music exhibited the “gestures of an Eastern,
all too Eastern Jew,” especially when we remember that Mahler’s
conducting—particularly his conducting of Beethoven, and
most particularly of Beethoven’s Ninth—was criticized
for a similar kind of “Jewish” gesturing, both in the
fussiness of the sound itself and in his elaborately gestural
manner on the podium, which was much discussed and even caricatured
in the press (see Figure 2).32
(And here, again, we might think of Leonard Bernstein for a more
modern example of something similar—and someone similarly
vilified in the press.)
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Figure 2: Mahler Conducting, Silhouettes by
Otto Bohler
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- But the most fruitful way to get at the question of Mahler’s
musical Jewishness is surely to consider more specifically the
nature and perception of German music in the late nineteenth
century—the ideal that Louis claimed Mahler’s music
did not attain—and then to examine instances when Mahler
engages directly with that ideal. What emerges when we look from
this vantage point at the wide variety of situations that Mahler
creates in his music, is that he sometimes speaks fluent musical
German—from the inside, as it were—but also at times
presents a distorted version of that ideal, one whose oppressiveness
is staunchly resisted. We find in these two types of situation
the essence of what it meant to Mahler to be a Jewish composer
within late-nineteenth-century Germanic musical culture. German
music was at that time self-consciously the most elevated music,
intellectually and spiritually demanding, with an unrivaled capacity
for powerful and exalted expression. Whether or not one agreed
with the German philosophers who claimed that music was the highest
of the arts—implicitly, of course, they meant German music,
which was to say, music at its best—musical German was eminently
a language worth mastering. Yet the elevation of music to this
position in Germanic culture involved a strong component of oppression,
and was inflected by a correspondingly strong dose of German nationalist
feeling. German music was elevated—and many were quite explicit
about this in the generation following Beethoven—because
Germans were more capable than others of this kind of profound
engagement with what was claimed to be the highest of the arts,
and less disposed towards the kind of frivolousness one found,
say, in Italian music (Pederson 87–107). Listening to Beethoven
and Bach was good for you; it made you better Germans. And we
may well note that this rather oppressive attitude, passionately
fostered throughout the nineteenth century as an essential component
of German nationalism, is still very much with us in the exaggerated
reverence we are taught to bring to the concert hall, except now
we pretend it’s a universal language, so we drop the “German;”
now we say: listening to serious music—such as Bach
and Beethoven—is good for us; it makes us better people.
In this way was born the myth of musical transcendence, that German
art music—the musical “mainstream”—was universal
and culturally uninflected, a myth that has occupied the background
for most attempts to identify Jewishness (or Czechness, or Russianness,
or any other implicitly marginalized ethnicity) in music.
- Americans, especially, have long had something like Mahler’s
ambivalence regarding what we now call “classical” music
(which is mostly German, or German-derived, but no longer exclusively
German); for us, though, “popular” musics (jazz, rock,
Broadway, whatever) serve as the less serious alternative. Broadly
speaking, as a culture, we tend to have something like reverence
for the classical tradition—although this is less and less
true—but feel more at ease with some flavor of popular music,
which is another way of saying that, while we revere classical
music, we are also oppressed by it. And we can find ready examples
of this kind of ambivalence, with “popular” musicians
such as Duke Ellington and more recently Paul McCartney aspiring
to write for the concert
hall, but also using “classical” music as a point of
reference—what musicologists like to call a “topic”—for
something much less positive. An early and well-known example
of this use of a classical-music “topic” from McCartney
is the 1966 Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby,” which is dominated
by the sound of closely miked lower strings playing in an agitated
minor mode and in a contrapuntal texture evocative of Baroque
music (not a sound typically used in popular music before this
song); this is “classical” music at its most severe,
emerging most prominently during the opening and recurring phrase,
“Ah, look at all the lonely people,” which seems almost
to point to this music (hear Ex. 12). Here, a referential version
of “classical” music serves to represent a kind of alienation,
a sense of lonely isolation; notice, for example, how little heed
this relentless churning motion pays to the sympathetic vocals,
which seem powerless to actually connect with the lonely people,
forever trapped within the unstoppable flow of their empty busy-ness.
Later, in the verse about Father McKenzie—it
was originally going to be Father McCartney, but that’s another
story, and much too Freudian for us to get into here—the
theme of failed communication leading to alienation is made particularly
clear, as we find Father McKenzie “writing the words of a
sermon that no-one will hear” (hear Ex. 13).33
- Intriguingly, Mahler also wrote a song about a preacher whose
sermons are not heard, and used a very similar technique.
In Mahler’s “St. Anthony of Padua’s Fish-Sermon,”
based on a folk poem from Des knaben Wunderhorn, St. Anthony
leaves his empty church to preach to the fishes, who listen attentively,
are most appreciative, and then go back to business as usual.
In an explanation of the song, Mahler declared this to be a satire
on humanity that he believed “only a few people will understand,”34
and he’s probably right. Most hear it as a satire on the
way typical congregations listen appreciatively, but then return
to their lives as if nothing has happened. But the song probes
deeper than this, as Mahler indicates, for it also satirizes St.
Anthony himself, who seems quite as content to have a congregation
of appreciative, uncomprehending fish as he would have been had
real people come to his church. And it satirizes the smug complacency
with which we—that is, humanity at large—go through
the motions of communication without anything whatever actually
being communicated, beyond the roles themselves, of preacher and
preached-to, etc. Thus, we are implicitly told, we have roles
to play in relation to each other, but they are empty, without
real content, and we don’t ever really connect—just
as, in “Eleanor Rigby,” the sad inflections of the voice
observe empathetically, but cannot reach “all the lonely
people.” In Mahler’s “Fish-Sermon,” he sets
the swimming motion of the fish in the orchestra, with the dry
voice and manner of St. Anthony set in the angular vocal melody;
in one deliciously grotesque passage for the E-flat Clarinet,
we even hear the sermon as the fish must hear it, in Mahler’s
words, “translated into their thoroughly tipsy-sounding language”
(see endnote 34) (hear
Ex. 14).
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Ex. 14: Mahler, "St. Anthony of
Padua's Fish Sermon"
from Des knaben Wunderhorn
New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein
© 1993 Sony Classical SMK 47590
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- Even before he completed the song, Mahler started working on
a more elaborate symphonic version, which eventually took its
place as the third movement—the Scherzo—of his Second
Symphony (the “Resurrection”). Here, the theme of alienation
is even more relentlessly pursued, and the effect reaches beyond
satire to genuine pathos. On the three occasions that Mahler provided
an account of this movement, he describes the empty, bustling
activity of life in various ways, with the first account being
the most elaborate:
When you wake out of this sad dream, and must re-enter life,
confused as it is, it happens easily that this always-stirring,
never-resting, never-comprehensible pushing that is life becomes
horrible to you, like the motion of dancing figures in
a brightly-lit ballroom, into which you are peering from outside,
in the dark night—from such a distance that you
can not hear the music they dance to! Then
life seems meaningless to you, like a horrible chimera,
that you wrench yourself out of with a horrible cry of disgust.
(Abbate 124, her emphasis removed, Mahler’s restored; original)35
The second and third movements are episodes from the life of
the fallen hero. The Andante tells of his love. What I have
expressed in the Scherzo I can only visualize as follows: when
one watches a dance from a distance, without hearing the music,
the revolving motions of the partners seem absurd and pointless
because the key element, the rhythm, is lacking. Likewise, to
someone who has lost himself and his happiness, the world seems
distorted and mad, as if reflected in a concave mirror. The
Scherzo ends with the appalling shriek of this tortured soul.
(Bauer-Lechner 784–5; original)
The spirit of disbelief and negation has seized him. He is bewildered
by the flood of apparitions and he loses his perception of childhood
and the profound strength that love alone can give. He despairs
both of himself and of God. The world and life begin to seem
unreal. Utter disgust for all being and becoming seizes him
in an iron grasp, torments him until he utters a cry of despair.
(Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe 268; and La Grange, Mahler
785; original)
In the first of these, the hero wakes from a “sad dream [the
second movement], and must re-enter life, confused as it is, …
an always-stirring, never-resting, never-comprehensible pushing
that … becomes horrible, … like the motion of
dancing figures in a brightly-lit ballroom.” While Mahler
eventually drops the analogy to dancers dancing to unheard music,
he consistently describes the effect as of something missing,
something vitally important, something that might give meaning
to life—the music, we might say, that ought to direct and
accompany the “dancing figures” of living humanity;
thus, in the second description, he continues, “likewise,
to someone who has lost himself and his happiness, the world seems
distorted and mad, as if reflected in a concave mirror,”
and, in the third, “bewildered by the flood of apparitions
… he loses his perception of childhood and the profound strength
that love alone can give—he despairs both of himself and
of God.” In all three descriptions, the horror finally proves
too much, and the hero’s outraged revulsion leads him to
utter “a horrible cry of disgust,” “a cry of despair,”
“the appalling shriek of [a] tortured soul.”
- About the specific source for the overall scenario of his Second
Symphony, Mahler was a little vague, perhaps because his apparent
literary source, at least in the first movement, hit too close
to home in its depiction of an adulterous relationship. Bernstein’s
universalized—perhaps also more humanistic—reading of
the symphony finds it a work that expresses the resurrective capacity
of the human spirit, with a specific focus on the living that
Bernstein insisted on even when he played the work after Kennedy’s
assassination. But the most plausible programmatic explanation
for the work, one that accounts more honestly for what Mahler
had to say about it, and for what it actually does as a piece
of music involved with a particular programmatic trope, is one
that recounts the anguish of a soul caught between Heaven and
Hell, forced to wander the earth because his business among the
living is not yet finished, who recounts and relives traumatic
events in his life, revisiting what led him to suicide in the
first movement, dreaming of a lost love in the second, and recoiling
in disgust in the Scherzo, when, from the vantage point of a soul
whose body no longer lives, he contemplates the empty pursuits
of the living world (Hefling, “Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier’”).
In the end, in the “Resurrection” finale, the wandering
soul enters Heaven and is forgiven. This overall scenario explains
more specifically why, in the Scherzo, the “hero” cannot
“hear the music” that the living “dance to.”
And, more broadly, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the perspective
of a Jew—more precisely, of Mahler himself—caught between
two worlds, unable to leave the one behind, incapable of fully
embracing the other in part because he fears he will not be welcome,
and so is forced to wander the world without a home of his own,
disgusted by the emptiness he sees around him. Moreover, it captures,
in its projected suicide and its despairing aftermath, the predicament
of a Jew who has renounced Judaism but has not received a Christian
welcome (although, again, we may note that the work predates Mahler’s
own conversion by several years). And, sadly, we can see more
clearly why the resurrection Mahler details in the finale proves
unexpectedly forgiving and non-judgmental; in the alternative
world that Mahler creates for himself in the Second Symphony,
the penitent is offered a blanket forgiveness, one that might
absolve, as we may assume, even the most grievous “sin”
of being born a Jew.
- The basic material for the Scherzo, as adapted from the “Fish-Sermon”
song, is manipulated so as to create the effect of something self-generating,
something all embracing, more than a little seductive, but also
repellent and oppressive; it is in effect a parody of Germanic,
“absolute” music, with all the seemingly autonomous
flow requisite of that tradition supporting a grotesquely rendered
musical surface. It is important to underscore here
that what nineteenth-century Germans were successfully marketing
as the central, most distinctive characteristic of their music
was coextensive with the neutral, supposedly universalized designation
of “absolute” music.36
Thus, as part of the background for both this particular parodistic
presentation and Louis’s disparaging claims against Mahler’s
music, we must note that the standard to which Mahler was once
found wanting, or tainted, stands as the pure, essentialized core
of “good” music, while at the same time remaining deeply
inflected with a German-nationalist sensibility. Through this
marriage and the particularities of the tradition itself, a sense
of autonomous flow is both the great strength of the German “absolute
music” tradition and the source of its oppressiveness. If
you are in alignment with that flow, you are empowered by it;
if you are outside, it seems oblivious, self-contained, and more
than a little threatening, for it runs over everything, absorbs
everything and seems irresistible in its force. It
was this capacity of Mahler’s parodistic Scherzo, to absorb
anything and everything that comes under its gravitational pull,
that Luciano Berio exploited in the version of the movement that
he presents in his 1968 Sinfonia (honoring not only Martin
Luther King, but also Leonard Bernstein, who so often performed
the “Resurrection” Symphony); in Berio’s version
a bewildering amount of verbal and quoted musical material appears
and disappears within its myriad currents and eddies (hear
Ex. 15).37
- A reading of Mahler’s Scherzo along these lines produces
a scenario that may stand equally well for what Mahler describes
in his three accounts of the movement, in the first instance;
for Mahler’s situation as a Jew within Germanic culture in
the second; and, in the third, for Mahler’s ambivalent attitude
toward German music, which here is presented as autonomous and
even a little seductive in its on-going perpetual motion—acting
something like the hypnotist’s twirling sphere or methodically
oscillating pendulum—but made repellent through the banality
of its material and its occasional flights into grotesquerie.
The dramatic trajectory falls roughly into three parts: 1) the
near-seduction by what we might call the “absolute music”
topic; 2) the attempted (but unsuccessful) escape from its absolutist
flow, and; 3) the ultimate rejection of the “absolute music”
topic through a purging orchestral scream.
-
The movement begins with a wake-up gesture, which is not in the
song, a gesture that establishes the impulse and musical motive
that will seem to generate the perpetual-motion material that
thereafter dominates the movement, material that seemed in the
song to represent the swimming motion of the fish. This opening
gesture also marks that material as an intruder, establishing
from the beginning of the movement an outsider’s perspective
on its “absolutist” flow. In this first section, we
hear both prominent tokens of satire (the grotesque E-flat-clarinet
figure), and a striking demonstration of the absorptive capacity
of absolute music, when the vocal melody finally shows up and,
instead of dominating as in the song, is not even allowed to finish
its phrase before simply being absorbed into the musical flow.
This is the kind of absorption that will be resisted by the subjective
center of the movement—the tortured soul, Mahler’s Jewishness,
whatever we may take that center to be (hear Ex. 16). In the next
part of the movement, the first attempt at seduction, a suave
dance-like music is suddenly resisted at the end of the passage,
just before a return to the original material (hear Ex. 17).
- Now comes a kind of dialogue, in which Mahler first presents
an intensification of the “absolute music” topic—involving
fugal processes and the addition of a counter-melody along the
way—followed by a violent resistance, much louder than the
“absolute music” material and in a different key. This
pattern happens twice, that is, with two fugal passages followed
each time by violent resistance. Then, with the second violent
passage comes part two of the scenario sketched above: the apparent
escape, which is into a world fairly dripping with nostalgia,
an evocation of small-town rusticity, with the trumpet choir playing
with their bells up in the air and with exaggerated expressiveness.
Harps accompany the trumpet choir, adding a sense of comforting
benediction, punctuated by occasional bird-like trills. Almost
unnoticed, though, the “absolute music” topic sneaks
back in during the later stages, signaling that the escape is
only apparent, another dream world from which we must awake (hear
Ex. 18).
-
The final subjective response to the “absolute music”
topic comes in the later stages of the movement. Once again, the
violent resistance follows on the heels of the dance-like episode,
but this time the resistance is more forceful and definitive,
culminating in a ferocious “scream.” What happens after
the scream is especially noteworthy. Once again we seem to have
opened before us a subjective space where the “absolute music”
topic doesn’t intrude, but this time it is no nostalgic escape
into the past, since we can still hear the “absolute music”
topic churning away underneath it all. Now the oppressor is in
the background; the subjective surface seems to have wrenched
itself away from its influence (hear Ex. 19). In musical terms—and
also in cultural terms—something important is represented
by the emetic purge of the orchestral scream. The scream articulates
with uncompromising force an irrevocable gesture of denial, of
refusing to take part. Thus, there remain no indicators of subjective
dismay in the fairly brief concluding section of the movement,
only a sense of psychic detachment, and of waiting.
- But even here there is ambivalence, for the direction the symphony
as a whole points to is diametrically opposed to the orientation
of the musical and cultural markers in this movement. Within the
program of the symphony, the haunted subjectivity of the Scherzo
that rejects the empty bustle of living humanity is immediately
displaced in the calm opening of the next movement by a much less
troubled subjectivity, through the sound of a human voice entering
without instrumental accompaniment, seeking and eventually finding
Christian redemption. How evocative, in this context, is the grotesque
bustle of the Scherzo of those streets in New York, whose chaotic
Jewishness Mahler was to reject some years later? And yet—on
the other hand—how much more vital is a reading that focuses
on the act of a resisting outsider fighting against the tide of
absorption into the dominant flow of a hostile culture? Isn’t
that the essence of being Jewish in the German lands at the turn
of the century?
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Kassabian:
Ubiquitous Listening
Draughon and Knapp:
Mahler and the Crisis of Jewish Identity
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Masson:
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