Die Unordnung der Dinge: Das musikalische Groteske in der Wiener Moderne (1885-1914). By Federico Celestini.

Abstract

This study of the grotesque in the music of the Viennese modernists is divided into two main parts. The first is concerned with the ‘self-conscious’ grotesqueries of Mahler's music, mainly in the symphonies but also including the song ‘Revelge’. The second part, ‘Die Musik und das Unbewusste’, covers the music of Schreker, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg up to the First World War; works discussed in this section are Schreker's Der Geburtstag der Infantin and Die Gezeichneten, Schoenberg's Opp. 7, 9, 10, 16, 17, 20, and 21, Webern's Opp. 5 and 6, and Berg's Opp. 4 and 6. When considering grotesque elements in Mahler's music, it is important to remember that, for Mahler, reality was grotesque: ‘Als grotesk empfindet er nun die “Wirklichkeit” ’ (p. 40). This contrasts with the more usual use of grotesque elements to portray the fantastic or exotic, as for example in the finale of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique or (an example inexplicably ignored by Celestini) the ‘Mephistopheles’ movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony. In support of Mahler's view of the grotesque, Celestini quotes the oft-cited report by Freud of his meeting with Mahler in 1910, in which Mahler told of witnessing a quarrel between his father and mother and immediately escaping into the street only to be confronted with a hurdy-gurdy playing ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’; this fixed for ever in Mahler's psyche the conjunction between high tragedy and trivial popular music. While accepting that this conjunction forms the basis of ‘the close connection between literary and pictorial suggestions, childhood experiences and compositional activity’ (p. 31), the author asks us to guard against the temptation to see such ‘pictorial’ references as programmatic in the Straussian sense: ‘In no sense does Mahler use literary and pictorial sources as a programmatic model, but rather he draws them into the process of composition on the basis of their value as experiences and memories, as a sort of déjà vu’ (loc. cit.). It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this: Mahler often sounds full of quotations even when nothing is actually being quoted. On the other hand, Celestini says, it is a mistake to regard such references as of ‘psychological’ significance. Talking about the third movement of Mahler's First Symphony, Celestini says: ‘The funeral march is not a musical representation of literary and pictorial content or of psychological traumas but the expression of where Mahler finds himself in the world’ (loc. cit.). Nevertheless, it would certainly be possible to argue that Mahler's fixation on Des Knaben Wunderhorn and related materials in the first four symphonies, in the form of both vocal settings and grossly inflated orchestral reworkings of earlier settings, was the result of a traumatic experience such as that related by Freud.