Chapter 14 - Intertextuality in Mahler

Summary

Much of the difficulty encountered by Mahler’s compositions during his lifetime can be attributed to their referential qualities: references, allusions, quotations, or borrowings from the widest varieties of music, from popular (“lowbrow”) military marches or ländlers to cultivated (“highbrow”) compositions such as Brahms’s, Tchaikovsky’s, or Wagner’s. That this propensity embodied modernist impulses has become increasingly clear in the intervening century, as the problematized nature of originality across the various arts ca. 1900 has received critical attention. A closer look at the history and evolving meaning of the term “intertextuality” here advances that process, by highlighting the differences between older formalist interpretive traditions and “translinguistic” practices, which recognize that (in the words of Julia Kristeva) “any text constitutes itself as a mosaic of quotations, any text is an absorption and transformation of another text.” Paradoxically, tactics for discovering new and relevant intertexts illuminate constructions of meaning that are unique to Mahler’s works.