After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption by Stephen Downes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption by Stephen Downes Matthew Mugmon After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze, and Romantic Redemption. By Stephen Downes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiv, 276 p. ISBN 9781107008717 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107453562 (ebook), $79.] Music examples, bibliography, index. As Julian Johnson suggested in his landmark study Mahler’s Voices, Gustav Mahler’s emotionally charged and discursively fractured works are often understood as having navigated a transition from romanticism to modernism. “Mahler’s music continues to fascinate us,” Johnson wrote, “in part, because it is caught between two aesthetics, one that presents musical expression as if it went directly ‘from the heart to the heart’ (as Beethoven hoped for the Missa Solemnis) and one that dwells (playfully or ironically) on its own element of artificiality and fabrication” (Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 102). Johnson was careful, however, to point out that these “aesthetics” share more than they might seem to at first. “But it would be unhelpful to imagine that this defines the difference between an essentially romantic aesthetic and a modernist one, though that has some usefulness: unhelpful,” he wrote, “because while the early romantics were preoccupied with the idea of irony, the early modernists were equally preoccupied with the idea of expression. His music makes clear that the romantic and the modern are shaped by essentially the same tension” (ibid., p. 102). As Johnson suggested, the boundaries between romanticism and modernism are not so clear. Recently, Peter Franklin collapsed them further. In his enlightening new book, Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music, Franklin wrote that “Mahler keeps faith with the Romantic dream that . . . embraced the disillusionment and denial that were always a part of it, that represented the rational or waking side of Romanticism” (Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], 19). Taking aim at standard evaluations of “late Romantic” music as self-indulgent and over blown (and thus easily dismissed), Franklin suggested that “Instead of seeking ‘modernist’ impulses in the music of late-Romanticism (prejudged otherwise to be a manifestation of ‘decadence’ or ‘maximalism’), we might, for example, propose that official European Modernism was itself a late manifestation of Romanticism” (ibid., p. 23). This relaxing of boundaries between romanticism and modernism—highlighted especially by Richard Taruskin’s argument [End Page 694] that modernism’s “beliefs and practices . . . are all maximalizations of a nineteenth-century inheritance” (Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 10)—sets the stage for Stephen Downes’s new book, which invests in a newly energized vision of Mahler as romantic and charts its legacy into the twentieth century. This reflects a shift from an earlier study, Music and Decadence in Euro pean Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). There, Downes considered musical decadence as a pathway to modernism, in a sense saving late-romantic music by locating its modernist bona fides. On Scriabin, for instance, he wrote that, “out of mannerism and decadence emerge miniature documents of the New Music, compressed expressions of the avant-garde” (ibid., p. 228). In After Mahler, Downes redeems late-romantic music in a different way—by taking it at face value, as a form of romanticism. Specifically, he examines Mahler alongside three twentieth-century composers—Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill, and Hans Werner Henze—who, like Mahler (and many other composers), stand astride typical aesthetic categories like “romantic” and “modern.” Downes selected them because of their “profound concern for how music might evoke—through both affirmation and negation—a redemptive or transcendent mode that so preoccupied the Romantics but which seemed, to many of their contemporaries, to be indisputably redundant, dismissible, or disreputable” (p. 3). Their music, he writes, is “after Mahler” because for them, Mahler “probed the possibility of fulfillment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes” (p. 3). In other words, romanticism thrived in the musical work of these composers—a crucial point that forces us to consider how much of what tends to be valued in twentieth-century music is really nineteenth...