Eighth Symphony Research Articles

Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies: Dualistic Polarity and Eventual Unity

Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies: Dualistic Polarity and Eventual Unity

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Early Works: An Insight into the Creative Process through the Prism of Variants of Musical Works

The quantity of draft autographs pertaining to Dmitri Shostakovich’s early works is relatively small. But for acquiring a perception of the creative process of the young composer, other documents of this period may be used — variants of compositions that have been preserved in large quantities. And although some of them present simple complimentary authorial copies meant to be gifts for friends and acquaintances, differing to a minimal amount from the initial musical texts, there exists a number of variants where the composer’s creative will is distinctly manifested — an improvement of the perception of form and the sound of the musical composition. The article makes use of the method of comparative analysis of autograph scores, and all the variants were classified in to 1) compositional and 2) those connected with orchestration. The existent mixed variants, for the most part characteristic for later and more large-scale compositions (the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the Eighth Symphony) have remained beyond the sphere of this research. The compositional transformations are examined on the example of two short pieces written during the year of the composer’s enrollment in the Petrograd Conservatory (1919). They demonstrate various diametrically opposed to each other techniques of work with the material: those include the omission of measure units and groups of measures and the additional composition of new musical text, at times, of great capacity. The variants connected with orchestration are examined on the example of Prelude No. 4 from the Eight Preludes opus 2. The piece has been orchestrated twice. It can be seen in the manuscripts how the composer gradually elucidates for himself the sound contours of the composition and correlates the orchestral profile with the form. The keen understanding of the regularities of orchestrating a composition for wind orchestra is reflected in the variants of the March from the incidental music for the performance of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug. As the result, it becomes possible to conclude that in the early period of his music, Shostakovich’s talent developed itself dynamically. The composer not only evaluates his own works critically, but also aspires to transform some of them. These transformations touch upon both the compositional and the timbral aspects of the compositions, however, at the same time, they do not bring in any radical changes, do not affect the figurative qualities or the musical language and preserve the general structure of the pieces. At the same time, the application of discrepant principles of transcription in various cases demonstrates the composer’s attention to the material.

The Sound of the Soul Mediated through Voice and Music in an Early Proustian Manuscript (“Après la 8e symphonie de Beethoven” [“After Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony”

In The Mysterious Correspondent: New Stories, two manuscript fragments, under the title “After Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony,” highlight Marcel Proust’s exploration of the possibility of deep spiritual communication between individuals. In each fragment, the qualities of the human voice and symphonic music are compared, underscoring the extent to which the emotional and aesthetic effects of sound depend on milieu and medium. The limitations of conversation as a means of achieving spiritual intimacy contrast dramatically with the potential of music to engender more profound human connections. This juxtaposition of voice and music gives readers a glimpse of Proust’s early efforts to transpose into words the seemingly ineffable qualities of music.

Pantheon of plenty

Why are big works so irresistible? Music histories are drawn to them like moths to the light. Hardly a music history exists without reference to the four-part organa ‘Viderunt’ and ‘Sederunt’ from the Parisian Magnus Liber, Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in alium, Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. Big though these works are, it is not always certain that they are the most important or representative in their genre. But there is an appeal, doubtless, in how impressive such large works are. We might want to call it the Guinness Book of World Records appeal: the motto ‘bigger is better’ seems so self-evident that it requires no further justification. But it was not always so. Self-evident though it may appear to us, the bigger-is-better appeal has a distinctly modern legacy. The later 19th century especially, with all the grandness of its Victorian, Wilhelmine or Second Empire varieties, was particularly adept at the majesty and monumentality—or, for that matter, bombast—that we generally associate with the various forms of bigness. What is more, such forms of bigness silently connect with assumption of greatness (another obsession of the 19th century). During that heroic age of music history, the grandest choral works, the Missa salisburgensis and Plaudite tympana in 53 parts (1682?), were rediscovered in 1870 and attributed to Heinrich Biber in 1975. In terms of sheer size, they sit side by side with Alessandro Striggio’s Missa sopra Ecco si beato Giorno for 40 and 60 voices (1586?), which received its first modern performance in 2007.

The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music ed. by Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music ed. by Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight Peter Höyng Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxxi + 581 pp. The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music will long serve as a primary reference on musical creations made for Goethe's Faust, as well as adaptations and reception of the poetic drama, constituting a standard for this rich artistic crossing between poetic and musical inventions. The editors Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight and Oxford University Press have invested in an exemplary apparatus for the volume's twenty-five contributions, allowing the reader to efficiently navigate and mine the essays. This apparatus includes a list of both images and musical excerpts—at least two of the latter appear in each chapter, with an average of four or five—while also providing extensive and well-outlined tables, from a list of symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo Faust compositions discussed in the essays, to tables that help readers delineate, for example, the complex process of a musical creation such as Robert Schumann's Scenen aus Goethe's Faust (1847–1853) or Helen Gifford's various text sources from Marlowe's play for her 1983 opera Regarding Faustus. The editors also maintain a welcome consistency in quotes from Goethe's play; they appear first in German—using the Frankfurter edition by Albrecht Schöne—and then in English, from Stuart Atkin's English translation. Each essay includes an extensive bibliography, and the volume as a whole is rounded out by a helpful index. These user-friendly components indicate that Lisa Fitzsimmons, a highly regarded Faust scholar, and Philip McKnight, a musician and musical historian, meticulously prepared and curated their edition, clearly seeking to provide as comprehensive a handbook on Goethe's Faust in music as was feasible. And they certainly delivered, organizing the extensive scope of musical compositions into three parts: (1) the symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo Faust works; (2) operatic renditions of Faust; and (3) Faust in ballet and musical theater (with the latter the shortest of the three parts). The usual suspects are notably covered, such as Franz Schubert's setting for Faust I, Liszt's various Faust compositions, and Mahler's magnanimous Eighth Symphony, one of the few compositions that draws the listener toward the last part of Faust II. Gounod's and Busoni's productions of Faust feature in the discussion on opera, as do Alfred Schnittke's life-long interest in the Faust complex, prompted by his reading of Thomas Mann's 1947 novel, and John Adams and Peter Sellars's Doctor Atomic (2005). [End Page 383] What makes this handbook stand out, however, is its inclusion of neglected, forgotten, and largely unknown or overlooked compositions related to Goethe's dramatic poem. Examples include Louis Spohr's Faust (1816), which Clive McClelland describes as an "unjustly neglected masterpiece," and Hanns Eisler's Goethe-Rhapsodie, written for Goethe's bicentennial in 1949 and including text from Faust II, which has remained "little known," as Joy H. Calico observes, much like the Czech composer Josef Berg's opera Johannes Doctor Faust (1963–69). Havergal Brian's long-forgotten Gothic opera Faust (1956), also discussed, was slated to be recorded for the first time only in 2019—but, as far as I can ascertain, it remains unrecorded. Goethe's influence on American musicals and rock music has also been generally ignored, as Elizabeth L. Wollman notes in her discussion of musicals such as Randy Newman's Faust, Tom Sankey's The Golden Screw, and the short-lived rock opera Soon, all of which are marked by rock music's "tensions between authenticity and commercialism." While it is possible to dig up other forgotten Faust-related works, such as Hermann Reutter's Doktor Johannes Faust (1936), in the major online encyclopedias Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and the Grove Music Online, this handbook is as rich in scope as it is reasonable. In addition to the high degree of scholarly care evident in the book's apparatus and in the editors' introduction and conclusion, as well as the frankly astounding—and scrupulous...

The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson

Reviews 181 The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. By Stephen Johnson. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. 314 pp. Paperback £10.99. ISBN 978–0-571–36752–8. The premiere of the Eighth Symphony at Munich’s Musik-Festhalle in September 1910 brought Mahler the greatest success of his life. Opened in 1908, this cavernous space now forms the ‘Verkehrszentrum’ of the Deutsches Museum and hosts a collection of vintage buses, trams and cars. Given Mahler’s love of the unpredictable and paradoxical, this development might well have appealed to him. Within nine months of the concert, however, the composer was dead. Thomas Mann, who had witnessed the triumph, was so shaken by the composer’s untimely death that Gustav von Aschenbach, the tragic artist in Der Tod in Venedig (1912), not only resembles Mahler physically, but even bears his forename. In this innovative study Stephen Johnson writes as both musicologist and cultural historian, championing what is probably Mahler’s most popular symphony but also his most critically contested. Completed in 1906, this twomovement choral work was to be the last piece premiered in Mahler’s lifetime. Dubbed the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ because of the vast forces deployed at the premiere (858 singers, 171 instrumentalists), this work in its opening movement sets the hymn Veni, creator spiritus, attributed to the ninth-century German monk Rabanus Maurus. The second movement sets the final scene of Goethe’s Faust II. The ‘true connection’ between these very disparate halves is the driving force of love, both Platonic and physical: ‘In the words of the ancient Latin hymn Mahler had read the message that had evidently struck Goethe too: fired by love, real erotic love rather than some disembodied ideal, we too can follow Socrates and scale the Heavens’ (p. 45). By 1910, however, Mahler’s world had been shaken to its core. In 1907 his infant daughter Maria had died; shortly afterwards, he escaped Vienna for New York, only to be diagnosed there with severe coronary disease. On top of this, his wife Alma was sleeping with the architect Walter Gropius, the composer’s junior by twenty years. In despair, just days before the Munich concert, Mahler met with Sigmund Freud who concluded he was suffering from a ‘Holy Mary complex (mother fixation)’. As Freud’s pupil Theodor Reik observed, ‘this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Part II of the Eighth Symphony’ (p. 277). Johnson’s examination of Mahler’s private catastrophe and public acclaim is searching and sympathetic. The examination of the Eighth’s genesis and purport is followed by a rigorous defence of the Tenth Symphony left incomplete on Mahler’s death. Once more, Johnson reveals the autobiographical impulse of the music, stressing the interplay between the composition and its creator’s attempts to regain his wife’s affections. Near the end of the score, he despairingly inscribed the manuscript with the dedication ‘Für dich leben! Für dich sterben! Almschi!’ [To live for you! To die for you! Almschi!]. The symphony remained unperformed for fifty years, until Alma sanctioned its performance in versions prepared by various Reviews 182 musicologists. Dismissing conductors who reject these versions as unauthentic, Johnson insists that there is far more genuine Mahler here ‘than there is genuine Mozart in Mozart’s fragmentary Requiem’, performed across the world in Süssmayr’s pastiche completion (p. 245). The seminal chapter ‘Questions of Identity’ opens by citing Mahler’s famous remark (as reported by Alma) that he was thrice homeless — as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world: ‘Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed’ (p. 145). Proceeding from this cri de cœur, Johnson examines the composer’s relationship with pan-German identity and culture, the status of Vienna in particular within that culture, and the city’s strained relationship with its Jewish community. This chapter reveals the range of Johnson’s research and his ability to synthesize complex non-musical issues in accessible prose. An additional pleasure of this study is the author’s skill in conveying how music works and sounds in language comprehensible to nonspecialists . Given that The Eighth is so generously indexed...

Вокальные и хоровые симфонии и размышления о представлении текста в музыке

The article examines the genres of the vocal and the choral symphony in connection with the author’s vocal symphony Finland for soprano, tenor and orchestra set to Evgeny Baratynsky’s poem with the same title. It also discusses the issue of expression of the literary text in vocal music, as viewed by a number of influential 19th and 20th century composers, music theorists and artists. Among the greatest examples of the vocal symphony are Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Lyrische Symphonie. These works combine in an organic way the features of the symphony and the song cycle. The genre of the choral symphony started with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and includes such works as Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony, Scriabin’s First Symphony and Mahler’s Second, Third and Eighth Symphonies. Both genres exemplify composers’ attempts to combine the most substantial genre of instrumental music embodying the composers’ philosophical worldviews with that of vocal music, which expresses the emotional content of the literary texts set to music. The issue of expressivity in music is further elaborated in examinations of various composers’ approaches to it. Wagner claimed that the purpose of music was to express the composers’ emotional experience and especially the literary texts set to music. Stravinsky expressed the view that music in its very essence is not meant to express emotions. He called for an emotionally detached approach to music and especially to text settings in vocal music. Schoenberg pointed towards a more introversive and abstract approach to musical expression and text setting in vocal music, renouncing outward depiction for the sake of inner expression. Similar attitudes to this position were held by painter Wassily Kandinsky and music theorist Theodor Adorno. The author views Schoenberg’s approach to be the most viable for 20th and early 21st century music.

Musical Work in Perception and Evaluation of the Composer, Performer, Researcher on the Example of the First Piano Sonata and the Eighth Symphony by D. D. Shostakovich

Musical Work in Perception and Evaluation of the Composer, Performer, Researcher on the Example of the First Piano Sonata and the Eighth Symphony by D. D. Shostakovich

Review: From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, by Seth Brodsky

From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious , by Seth Brodsky. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xvi, 344 pp. An unspoken mystery haunts From 1989 : why, after so many shifts in critical taste and so many cultural revolutions, does musical modernism endure? Seth Brodsky's monumental effort maps the entwined destinies of music, psychoanalysis, modernism, and the year 1989. In one sense it explains the curious survival of European musical modernism as a persistent itch beneath the skin of our dominant musical culture. The introduction models the oblique line of argumentation that will follow, as questions that hover over select musical works or performances open out into a larger dialogue. Thus Brodsky's forced choice one Berlin evening between a performance of Nono's Prometeo and Mahler's Eighth Symphony ushers in a general discussion of modernism. The book is divided into fifteen chapters that fall into three parts, marked “Free,” “New,” and “Again.” In the manner of Lacan's psychoanalytic practice, the chapters are of variable length, and incorporate internal repetition of several types. From 1989 's dense critique frequently pauses and doubles back to revisit and reflect on key works, debates about aesthetic modernism and the “end of history,” and shifts in the content and reception of Lacan's thought. And Brodsky notes those 1989 publications and performances whose coincidence seems retroactively—as Lacan himself might have predicted—to have “always already” prepared the revolutionary event at the year's end. Several well-chosen interlocutors greatly aid Brodsky in his task, foremost among them art historian T. J. Clark and the Fredric Jameson of …

Why can’t I change Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony?

Musical works change. Bruckner revised his Eighth Symphony. Ella Fitzgerald and many other artists have made it acceptable to sing the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” without its original verse. If we accept that musical works genuinely change in these ways, a puzzle arises: why can’t I change Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony? More generally, why are some individuals in a privileged position when it comes to changing musical works and other artifacts, such as novels, films, and games? I give a view of musical works that helps to answer these questions. Musical works, on this view, are created abstract objects with no parts. The paradigmatic changes that musical works undergo are socially determined normative changes in how they should be performed. Due to contingent social practices, Bruckner, but not I, can change how his symphony should be performed. Were social practices radically different, I would be able to change his symphony. This view extends to abstract artifacts beyond music, including novels, films, words, games, and corporations.

A Bequest and a Legacy: Editing Anton Bruckner’s Music in ‘Later Times’

The present study has been prepared on the occasion of the publication of theNew Anton Bruckner Collected Works Edition’s first volume, Thomas Röder’s score of the Linz version of the First Symphony. The article re-evaluates a fundamental precept of the oldGesamtausgabeof Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak – the supremacy of the readings in Bruckner’s autograph manuscripts over those in his first prints. It begins with a brief history of the “Bruckner-Streit” of the 1930s and 40s and a summary of more recent challenges to the Haas-Nowak policy. An overview of the composer’s relationship with the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk, who were responsible for the production of many of his early editions, demonstrates that they worked closely with him at first, but began to make alterations without consulting him towards the end of the 1880s. Distinguishing Bruckner from his editors in the Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies is difficult, if not impossible. From an editorial perspective, it is pointless because, in these scores, the composer accepted their suggestions and made them his own. Later publications are a different matter. The discussion leads inevitably to a re-examination of a clause in Bruckner’s will which exercised a controlling influence over the oldGesamtausgabeand remains a seminal factor in any editorial considerations regarding Bruckner. The article demonstrates that the composer never intended his will to have a bearing on post-mortem editorial issues or to dictate the hierarchy of versions of his pieces.

Criteria for a Theory of Nineteenth-Century Sonata Form

Thanks to the work of Janet Schmalfeldt, James Hepokoski, Steven Vande Moortele, and others, progress toward a theory of form for nineteenth-century instrumental music has accelerated in recent years. This article addresses some of the theoretical and methodological issues to which this project gives rise. Taking medial-caesura usage in the chamber and solo sonata forms of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms as a representative corpus study, it focuses on questions of what constitutes a norm in Formenlehre, how we determine the criteria for establishing a practice as normative, and how these criteria relate to concepts of normativity in the human sciences. Finally, it offers a comparative analysis of how these issues affect sonata-formal strategies in the first movements of Brahms's First Symphony and Bruckner's Eighth Symphony.

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony: An Interplay of Darkness and Light

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony: An Interplay of Darkness and Light David Greene Those who love Anton Bruckner’s last completed symphony love it greatly, and put it on a par with Beethoven’s and Mahler’s final masterpieces. Many of them say they hear things like “sublime darknesses” and “equally transcendent light” when they listen.”(Stanislaw Skrowaczewski’s presentation of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is accessible online and recommended for this reflection.)1 Yet, they do not hear light driving darkness away. Rather, darkness and light “come together,” mysteriously continuous from one to the other, distinct and still somehow identical. They say that darkness is both “vindicated” and “vanquished,” and light is also both “vindicated” and “vanquished.” Although I would not have come to these descriptions on my own, they ring true to what happens when I hear the piece. Words like “sublime,” “transcendent,” and “mysterious continuity” help me realize that something in the music points me to the Transcendent. Or maybe it is the other way around: relating to the Transcendent empowers me to connect to the music and to hear something I might otherwise not perceive. Two distinctions may help me explain what these “somethings” might be. The first is the well-known difference between mere sounds and musical sounds: to hear music is not to hear just sounds, but to hear sounds interrelated with one another—repeating, contrasting, building to a climax, summoning and answering one another, coming to an end. To hear music is to hear sounds-in-relation.2 The second is the difference, less well agreed upon, between passive and active listening. One is what Buber might call an I-It experience: I hear the interrelated sounds, but they remain something external to me. The other is what Buber calls an I-Thou relationship:3 I relate myself to the interrelating sounds, and as with my relationships with other persons, sunsets, and storms, relating to music defines me for the time of listening and beyond; hearing the music is woven into who I am. If the sounds-in-relation somehow point me to the Transcendent, then relating myself to them is also a relationship with the Transcendent.4 Those who do not love Bruckner’s Eighth dislike it greatly. They complain that the sounds do not relate themselves convincingly to one another, and that the piece is flawed by so many meaningless discontinuities that it is impossible [End Page 181] for them to relate to it. They do not get beyond I-It experience. The group includes some famous critics and conductors, including Herman Levi, who was Bruckner’s first choice to conduct the premiere. Click for larger view View full resolution Piano © 2017 Pal Sovány. I agree: the musical flow does indeed undergo discontinuities, but they do not bother me. That they are problematic for some listeners, however, makes me realize I should think carefully about them. Perhaps what upsets others may be a clue to the “somehow” by which the music, the Transcendent, and I are interrelated. Broken continuity may be the darkness that some of us hear as sublime and that is both vanquished and vindicated. I have looked at the ruptures to see exactly what is occurring at the disjointed places; I have wondered whether something is interrelated with these gaps that warrants calling them “sublime” as well as “dark.” I have asked, is there something like transcendent light woven into the dark ruptures, bringing about a continuity that is so original as to be elusive? Each movement gives me a different answer. For readers to hear these answers, it is obvious they need to hear the music. Fortunately, many good performances are available online at YouTube. com, including my preference, Skrowaczewski’s reading, previously mentioned.5 In the following I try to identify the places where many of us hear darkness and light by citing the number of minutes from the beginning of a movement to these moments. [End Page 182] The opening movement consists of a series of passages each of which suffers a non-sequitur that breaks the continuity, as though it were weaving a story but leaves threads dangling. An example is the...

Introduction

Introduction Steven Chase What is a “spiritual classic”? How are spiritual classics embedded in contemporary spirituality? Each article in this issue of Spiritus offers commentary on diverse paths of wisdom that continue to shape our Christian traditions and contemporary spiritual life. Claire Wolfteich opens with a beautifully crafted essay from her presidential address given to the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 2016. The essay focuses on the place of motherhood in Christian spirituality and raises several challenging questions: “How do we, as scholars of Christian spirituality, retrieve, adapt, name, and/or construct a fund of spiritual vocabulary, imagery, and practice rich enough, resonant enough, moving enough, to speak to and to give voice to contemporary people? . . . How might we articulate more fully the complexity of mothering as a dimension of Christian spirituality, as a spiritual practice? How might we identify and critically engage maternal spiritual wisdom (or lack thereof) from the Christian tradition?’” Using autobiographies or women’s life writings as case studies, Wolfteich makes a strong argument that, “the critical retrieval and reconstruction of mothering practices, experiences, struggles, and spiritual knowing remain a significant task for Christian theology, spirituality studies, and the church.” Summarizing the complexity of vocation and Christian spirituality in practice, particularly at the intersection of gender, race, mothering, and public life in different social-historical-cultural contexts, Wolfteich concludes that “retrieving and critically engaging the narratives of mothers is an important task for theology and spirituality studies.” Finally, in her closing notes on the nature of maternal narratives, Wolfteich points out how spiritual classics are the deep roots of ongoing contemporary spiritual practices: “maternal narratives make visible the highly contextualized and culturally-specific spiritual challenges and insights embedded in the practice of mothering.” Without doing so explicitly, Matt Ashley also explores the borders of the meaning of “spiritual classic” in the context of the relation between spiritual life lived and the spiritual life thought. In his essay on Pope Francis as an interpreter of Ignatius of Loyola, Ashley opens with words from the pope that [End Page VII] resonate with the dichotomy between the pastorally minded and the more academically oriented: What gets generated in this way is a false opposition between the so-called “pastorally minded” and the “academics,” between those on the side of the people and those on the side of doctrine. What gets generated is a false opposition between theology and thinking pastorally, between believing reflection and believing life. And then life has no room for reflection and reflection finds no room in life. As Ashley points out, Pope Francis states that one of the main contributions of Vatican II was the overcoming of this opposition: “This meeting of doctrine and the pastoral mindset is not optional, it is constitutive of a theology that aims to be ecclesial.” Ashley does not diminish the importance of continued discourse between spiritual theology and spiritual practice. In fact, he turns to Ignatius of Loyola as an integrator of the doctrinal element of faith and the pastoral element of a life of faith. He makes the case that Ignatius’s Exercises provide a hermeneutical lens for deepening our understanding of Pope Francis’s theological assertions. Ashley applies the pope’s perspective on mercy and justice as the primary hermeneutical lens for dissolving the false dichotomy in which “life has no room for reflection and reflection finds no room in life.” Utilizing both personal experience and cognitive reflection, Ashley writes that, “creativity, depth, and Christian force of Francis’s ‘theology of mercy’ comes from an embrace of the mystery of God’s merciful response to our world’s situation that is configured by his own experience and appropriation of the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola.” David Greene’s article also pushes the perimeters of a “spiritual classic” giving us an entry-point into creative spirituality in the form of Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. Greene compares Bruckner’s work with Beethoven and Mahler’s final masterpieces. Many connoisseurs of Bruckner’s work use the language of “sublime,” “transcendent,” and “mysterious continuity” to describe his masterful music. Greene agrees. Reminding us of the medieval...

Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision by Lewis Lockwood

Reviewed by: Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision by Lewis Lockwood Bryan Proksch Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision. By Lewis Lockwood. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. [ xxvi, x285 p. ISBN 9780393076448 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9780393353853 (paperback), $18.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes, musical examples on external website. My first thoughts on seeing this book—Lewis Lockwood knows his Beethoven, but do we really need another middlebrow overview of the symphonies?—were evidently predictable given the author's immediate justification in the book's preface. The greatest Beethoven scholars of every generation have seen fit to write exactly this type of book, or "series of historically informed critical essays" as he would have it (p. xv). It is no overstatement to acknowledge that the scope of Lockwood's knowledge and expertise warrant adding his name to a list that includes Hector Berlioz, George Grove, and Donald Tovey. At the same time, Lockwood also risks having his book end up as the newest addition to a [End Page 100] much larger stack of forgettable tomes rehashing the same worn ideas. While I cannot predict where this book will ultimately reside, I am happy to say that it has a better chance of beating the odds and ending up on the short list of must-reads than I initially thought. The appeal of this book, or at least the way that it most clearly distinguishes itself from the others out there, lies in Lock -wood's unsurpassed knowledge of Beethoven's sketchbooks and conversation books. He made a career out of deciphering a significant percentage of these notoriously difficult documents, most notably in his Beethoven's "Eroica" Sketchbook: A Critical Edition co-edited with Alan Gosman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1992). In the present book, he redirects his efforts to create a compelling narrative that speaks effectively to the graduate or even undergraduate student, with the potential of serving as a tantalizing first introduction to both Beethoven's creative process and the relevance of sketch studies to our understanding of these works. The value of primary sources to Lock -wood's viewpoint is most evident in his discussion of the Third Symphony. He argues in this chapter that the "heroic" programmatic qualities were not a part of the original "ur-Eroica" plans laid out by Beethoven in 1802, but that they quickly entered the picture once sketching began in earnest. He also notes that the finale was not a problem for Beethoven in this symphony as it was with many of the others; rather it was "the anchor against which he composed the rest of the symphony" (p. 75) rooted as it is in his "Eroica" variations, op. 35. Lockwood recognizes the apparent contradiction in the heroic narrative, in that the final two movements of the symphony seem not to fit so neatly with the first two movements, which have been perceived as strongly programmatic. He is almost too quick to explain away the difficulties by stating that "Beethoven was not writing a sequential biography of a single hero, but composing a transcendent symphony of the subject of the heroic that would offer different perspectives on this ideal" (p. 71). Why revert to a traditional interpretation when the documents appear to hint at a number of viable alternatives? Clearly there is room for a heated in-class discussion on how the weakest movement programmatically can somehow serve as the conceptual cornerstone of the entire work. The majority of the symphonies offer Lockwood similar opportunities to hear the familiar masterworks anew. The Eighth Symphony's origins as a piano concerto (a manuscript source for a cadenza survives) offer a refreshingly new take that avoids the traditional idea that the work is an updating of Haydn's humorous rhetoric. Indeed, his entire discussion of the Eighth points to its innovative features rather than to a harkening back to Classicism. Beethoven's increasing deafness virtually forced him to convert the work to a different genre, Lockwood argues. But there is room for broader discussions of implications of genre and the awkward way in which this work has almost always...

Zyklusbildung in Beethovens letzten Sinfonien

The article discusses the theory that Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, worked out in the so-called Petter sketchbook of 1811/12, are not a pair like the Fifth and Sixth but rather the first two parts of a symphonic “triptych” that reached completion in 1824 with the Ninth Symphony. That this conspicuous relationship between the last three symphonies has gone unnoticed in spite of ample research on the subject are due to two causes: the particular point of view of specialists for this sketchbook, and the irrefuted opinion that the earliest notations for the Ninth are located in the Scheide sketchbook of 1815/16. However, a closer reading of the documentation in the Petter sketchbook reveals the possibility that a symphonic triptych was conceived at that earlier date, which in turn leads to a revisioning of the respective aesthetic implications involved.

Myth, Metaphysics and Cosmic Drama: The Legacy of Faust in Lipiner's Hippolytos and Mahler's Eighth Symphony

����� ��� Many myths surround the composition of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. The composer established a number of these legends himself, as his wife Alma, the conductor Bruno Walter, and the music journalist Richard Specht all recall Mahler telling of his sudden inspiration in the summer of 1906 to set the medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus to music. 2 Shortly afterward he began composing a setting of the final scene of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II, and what emerged eight weeks later was a two-part vocalsymphonic masterpiece pairing the two musical settings, which he called “das Gro ¨ste, was ich bis jetzt gemacht” (GMB 335). Since its highly successful premiere on 12 September 1910 in Munich, this work, the story of its genesis, and the ideas behind it have inspired a cult-like fascination, sparking questions about why the composer would choose to pair Goethe’s secular drama with a Christian hymn. As is often the case when attempting to interpret the extramusical ideas in Mahler’s works, his own words on the subject via correspondence and anecdotes to friends are captivating sources, yet they also tend to be misleading. He frequently revised his ideas, gave contradictory explanations, or, as in the case of the famous letters to Alma from 1909, he tells a version of the story years later that may or may not correspond with what he was actually thinking while composing the work. Yet at the same time, these sources are difficult to ignore because they paint an intriguing picture of this artist, his relationship to his work, and the intricate web of philosophical and literary influences that shaped the world in which he lived. Thus, to understand Mahler’s interpretation of Faust and to draw conclusions about the meaning of Goethe’s work in the composer’s time, one must look to another story behind the Eighth Symphony, one that begins long before that fateful burst of creative energy in the summer of 1906. Indeed, one must turn to Mahler’s friend and mentor, the poet Siegfried Lipiner. Lipiner has been all but forgotten in German literary history today, yet he was acknowledged as a gifted poet and scholar in his time, and is consid

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

Reviewed by: Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna James L. Zychowicz Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. By Carl Niekerk. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. x + 312 pages. $75.00. A century after the composer's death in 1911, Gustav Mahler has become an iconic figure in modern culture through his influential work as an innovative conductor and his enduring legacy of songs and symphonies. Modern approaches to Mahler often derive from the groundbreaking study by Theodor Adorno, Mahler. Eine musikalische Physiognomik (1960), which departs from the conventional life-and-works approach (predictably divided into early, middle, and late), to pursue instead a topical investigation that focuses on themes in the composer's oeuvre, such as narrative, fanfares, and other elements that convey musico-semiotic interpretations. While such a thematic approach is behind Reading Mahler by Carl Niekerk with its stated focus on Mahler's "interest in and use of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts" (1), the present study is problematic because of the idiosyncratic stances expressed throughout. Yet that does not detract from the need for a study focused on both the texts that inspired Mahler's vocal music, and also the literature the composer actively read. The composer's songs are based on three primary sources: the early nineteenth-century anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, selected verse by Friedrich Rückert, and the Chinese-inspired poetry of Hans Bethge; with Mahler's symphonic music including the setting of a text from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra (in the Third Symphony) and, in the Eighth Symphony, the Latin hymn text "Veni, creator spiritus" along with the final scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust. Mahler's music is not limited to those literary models, but involves references to Jean Paul through the designation of the First Symphony as "Titan" and to E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose musical writings fascinated the composer and which inspired connections in Mahler's music with his audiences. From this perspective, a survey of the literary aspects of Mahler's music may parallel an overview of nineteenth-century literature. Mahler's reading also emerges in the documented conversations with his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner, his widow Alma Mahler, and in other reminiscences. As such, Mahler study would be served well by a literary companion to supplement studies focused on music, as Niekerk promises later in his introduction. At some point, though, the present study goes beyond such a literary companion to include, as stated in the subtitle, "German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna," the latter limiting the scope of the investigation to a locus that was Mahler's home during the decade he led the Vienna Hofoper. (Such a companion would work well, especially if organized encyclopedically.) Rather, the volume contains a series of specialized essays. Niekerk specifically discusses Mahler's music in six chapters, which are divided into two sections. The first section, entitled "The Crisis of German Culture," contains three essays, "Titan: Symphony of an Anti-Hero," "Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Rediscovering the 'Volk'," and "Nietzsche and the Crisis of German Culture." In these three essays, the author essentially reviews Mahler's works through his Fourth Symphony. The second section is entitled "German Culture and Its Others," with chapters concerning "Rembrandt and the Margins of German Culture," "Goethe against German Culture" and "The Two Faces of German Orientalism." The second part mainly concerns the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, along with the symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, with references to other works throughout. [End Page 140] Mahler's artistic legacy is primarily musical, and while an investigation with a literary focus is important, it is difficult to account for Niekerk taking issue in his introduction with the idea that "[t]he assumption, implicit or explicit, is often that Mahler's interest in literature and culture merely mirrors his musical preferences" (1). This statement is sufficiently intriguing to merit explication by either citing the composer's statements about personal musical choices or the evidence for this that could be inferred from the repertoire he conducted, the latter qualified by an understanding of...

Gustav Mahler und Wien: „Leider bleibe ich ein eingefleischter Wiener" , and: Mahler's Concerts , and: Mahler Handbuch , and: „Verehrter Herr College!" Briefe an Komponisten, Dirigenten, Intendanten (review)

Gustav Mahler und Wien: Leider bleibe ich ein eingefleischter Wiener. Edited by Reinhold Kubik and Thomas Trabitsch. Vienna: Brand - statter, 2010. [359 p. ISBN 9783850333771. i39.90.] Illustrations, index. Mahler's Concerts. By Knud Martner. New York: Kaplan Foundation, 2010. [xx, 387 pp. ISBN 9781590203927. $50.] Facsimiles, indexes. Mahler Handbuch. Edited by Bernd Sponheuer and Wolfram Steinbeck. Stuttgart: Metzler; Kassel: Barenreiter, 2010. [xxx, 504 p. ISBN 9783476022776 (Metzler) and 9783761820513 (Barenreiter). i64.95.] Music examples, illustrations, indexes. Herr Briefe an Komponisten, Dirigenten, Inten - danten. Edited by Franz Willnauer. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2010. [422 p. ISBN 9783552054998. i24.90.] Indexes. Mahler's dual anniversary years, with the sesquicentennial of his birth in 2010 and the centenary of his death in 2011, offer an excellent opportunity to commemorate the composer's lasting influence and enduring popularity. Celebrations take various forms, and several recent publications reveal aspects of Mahler research in an edition of letters, a comprehensive guide to his works, a reference on Mahler's conducting activities, and a catalogue of an international exhibit held in Vienna. Among these publications, the release of another collection of letters suggests the need for a uniform edition of these important documents. The venerable Mahlerian Franz Willnauer's edition Verehrter Herr College! collects published letters from Mahler to other musicians to convey his relationships with fellow composers and conductors, along with artistic directors (Intendanten) and others. Through this focus, Willnauer demonstrates the active role Mahler had in the musical culture of his time. Willnauer's introduction is useful for its discussion of the challenges of editing Mahler's correspondence with regard to dating letters without explicitly inscribed dates or letters that have become detached from their envelopes (see pp. 15-16). Of further significance is his exploration of Mahler's handwriting (pp. 16-18), familiarity with which is necessary in establishing the texts of the letters. As to the specific contents of this volume, Willnauer has arranged the volume in three parts, the first containing letters from 1880 through1896, the years before Mahler led the Vienna Hofoper; the second, from 1897 to 1907, his time in Vienna; and the third from 1908 to 1911, from his resignation from the Hofoper until his death. Those early years divide easily according to the various places where Mahler worked, a logical organization that makes it possible to follow his career. This arrangement also gives prominence to the Vienna years, a time when Mahler not only led the prestigious Hofoper in conducting the repertoire of the company in venerable productions, but supported new productions as well; more than that, Mahler was responsible for premieres of new works. The influence Mahler had is impressive, and through these letters it is possible to gain a firsthand sense of how he worked. The latter perspective emerges in Willnauer's commentary, which occurs both at the beginnings of the various sections of this volume, as well as between individual letters. In addition, each letter is annotated in the style of Herta Blaukopf's edition of Mahler's Briefe (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1982; rev. ed, Vienna: Zsolnay, 1996), to which Willnauer also refers at various points in this book. Those familiar with Mahler's letters may find that some of the ones to various conductors are absent, such as the one to Willem Mengelberg from August 1906 in which he announced the completion of the Eighth Symphony and described it as setting planets and suns whirling, or the letter to Bruno Walter from summer 1909 in which Mahler announced the completion of his Ninth Symphony. Nevertheless, Willnauer has created a convincing portrait of Mahler's professional relationships. Mahler's letters are just one aspect of research, and the Mahler Handbuch of Bernd Sponheuer and Wolfram Steinbeck provides an overview of the composer's life and works in a single concise volume. …

Vienna Around 1900 and the Crisis of Public Art: On Text and Music in Klimt, Mahler, and Schnitzler

Scholarship often has emphasized the importance of the notion of crisis for understanding the dynamics underlying the culture and literature of fin-de-siecle Vienna. The following essay rethinks this notion, taking as its point of departure the ‘crisis of public art’—the idea that art has lost its public function—that manifests itself in Vienna around 1900. The paper examines Klimt’s Beethoven-frieze, Schnitzler’s novella Leutnant Gustl, and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, focusing in particular on the nexus between text and music in each of these works. While these works of art on a textual level indeed each document an element of alienation in the relation between art and its public, this essay argues that they also conceive of the relationship between art and its audiences in new ways: they reconsider how art addresses the public. Music plays a key role in the debate on the public function of art because it invites audiences not only to experience art directly, but also to participate in its creation.