Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

Abstract

Carl Niekirk’s Reading Mahler contributes to a rapidly expanding scholarship that attempts to illuminate the meaning of Mahler’s musical compositions through contextual interpretation, but without falling into a contextual reductionism that would determine musical meaning as subjective expression or objective representation of something outside music. Niekirk’s specific strategy is to focus on what he calls Mahler’s ‘reading’, a term that is actually used in a number of overlapping but distinct ways throughout the book. The focus is first of all on close contextual readings of the texts that Mahler actually used in his compositions, such as the alleged ‘folk’ songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the lyrical poetry of Friedrich Rückert, Nietzsche’s ‘Midnight Song’ from Also sprach Zarathustra, parts of Goethe’s Faust II, the medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and Hans Bethge’s translated adaptations of Chinese poetry. But Niekirk moves beyond this obvious and familiar interpretative tactic to pursue and examine references to texts Mahler may have read or remembered as he framed both the general and the specific intentions of his musical compositions, including compositions that did not include texts, such as the First and Seventh Symphonies. The book provides an extensive analysis, following up comments and references in Mahler’s notes and correspondence, of Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800–1802), and of the ways the structure of the literary text may have framed Mahler’s construction of the musical narrative of the First Symphony. Niekirk also expands the scope of ‘reading’ to include references to significant visual images (such as Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’) and indirect philosophical associations (Spinoza) to elaborate the context of Seventh Symphony. His aim is to portray Mahler as a self-conscious and critical ‘reader’ of the cultural traditions in which his music was composed, performed and received. The way Mahler read the texts of both dominant and marginal German cultural traditions displayed his particular historical and cultural perspective, and allows us to see him as engaged with the discursive and symbolic frameworks that shaped the production of personal and cultural identity in his place and time. In this sense ‘reading’ becomes a term that avoids some of the reductive, programmatic implications of expression and representation. Mahler is portrayed as engaged in a productive and critical dialogue with traditions that shaped cultural meaning in the public sphere of fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany. The (hoped-for) implication of this interpretative method is that the reader of Mahler (and his listener) will be able to sense the particular critical and innovative perspectives embedded in the musical forms. Closer attention to context (that is, to Mahler’s reading) can exhibit the connection between the innovative dimensions in Mahler’s musical forms and the historical/cultural message or ‘text’ the music presents for our own reading. Rather than losing ourselves in the music through emotional identification or rejecting the music because of alleged formal conservatism or confusing historical eclecticism, Niekirk asks us to read Mahler as a specific voice and dialogical partner (as the other who is revealed as the other within ourselves) in cultural debates that continue to resonate in our time.