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, the absence of a bibliography is puzzling. Further, there is no consistency in citations from secondary sources, some being adequately referenced, but many not. The Latin and German texts used in the symphony are quoted extensively, but Goethe’s verse is frequently mangled by misprints. For readers with no German, this may matter less than the reliability of the (unattributed) English translations. Although these are mostly serviceable, one wonders what meaning, if any, anglophone readers will extract from versions like this: Gerettet ist das edle Glied Saved is the noble limb Der Geisterwelt vom Bösen Restored from evil to the spirit world (p. 118). Notwithstanding its rough edges, however, some of which may stem from the publisher’s need to economize, The Eighth is a stimulating, highly readable contribution to an understanding of Mahler’s later life and work. These were shaped by intractable forces, both political and personal, the most powerful of which was probably his wife. Andrew Barker University of Edinburgh Robert Musil and the Question of Science: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Problem of the Two Cultures. By Tim Mehigan. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. 180 pp. £75. ISBN 978–164014 –066–0. The impact of the late nineteenth-century revolutions in science on the life and works of Robert Musil, author of a 1908 dissertation on the philosopherscientist Ernst Mach as well as of the sprawling novel-project Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (henceforth MoE, 1930; 1933), has been a recurrent focus of research ever since David Luft’s magisterial 1980 study of the writer’s intellectual formation. The topic has also been a long-term preoccupation of Tim Mehigan: Reviews 183 chapters 2–9 of this book, along with a portion of its introduction, are derived from stand-alone pieces that appeared between 1995 and 2018. This genesis has left its mark on the final product, which contains some unnecessary repetitions, and whose chapter-sequence is somewhat disjointed. While emphasizing Musil’s belief in the value of science and his instinctive desire to bring ‘the sensibility of the writer’ and the scientist’s quest for knowledge ‘into dialog’ (p. 3), Mehigan’s introduction counteracts the latter impulse with a striking claim for the disruptive part played by science, both in Musil’s world-view and in the multifaceted cultural crisis of his time. The late nineteenth century’s anti-Cartesian ‘turn against empiricism in science by scientists themselves’ (p. 5) (Mach’s psychophysical monism; functionalism; probability theory) in fact ruptured the modern era’s long-established link between the experience and ethics of everyday life on the one hand, and scientific reason on the other, thereby ushering in the radically disorientated post-humanist order of the present. (Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief, generally seen as performing the internal crisis of its young author’s solipsistic aestheticism, is instead construed by Mehigan as an epoch-inaugurating document of the ‘impact of science on the settled domain of the rival culture, art’ (p. 5).) Nietzsche, a key influence on Musil but sidelined in this introduction, is later given his due in chapters 5...
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Jul 19, 2024
Aceng Badruzzaman + 3
Open Access
