Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas. By Seth Monahan

Abstract

There can be little doubt that Seth Monahan’s Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas is the most important book-length analytical study of Mahler’s music in English. That might as well be faint praise: it is also one of surprisingly few books of its kind. As the author emphasizes in his introduction, serious analytical work on Mahler still is something of a rarity, and some of the best of that work comes from outside the discipline of music theory.1 One of the many merits of this monograph, therefore, is that it firmly (and finally!) embeds Mahler in the highly sophisticated discourse of modern North American music theory—more specifically the wave of theoretical and analytical work on musical form that is now commonly referred to as the “new Formenlehre.” Against the mainstream of Mahler studies, Monahan convincingly argues that sonata form is not an ossified remnant of the symphonic tradition that the composer nolens volens inherited, but an essential component of his art, at least up to Symphony No. 6. This does not mean that the music’s technical aspect is Monahan’s sole interest: through the analysis of musical form, he strives for a higher level of hermeneusis; “form itself,” he writes, “can be a vital source of meaning” (5). Nor would it be correct to assume that the hermeneusis is any more the outcome of the analysis than that it is the driving force behind it: one of the book’s distinctive characteristics is that both aspects are closely intertwined.