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Adorno's Mahler and the Timbral Outsider

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John J. Sheinbaum
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Abstract

Orchestral colour can be read as an important part, both literally and metaphorically, of Theodor W. Adorno's approach to Mahler. Adorno's examples of ‘breakthrough’, ‘suspension’ and ‘fulfilment’ show that timbre, traditionally considered largely irrelevant to music's deep structure, plays a significant role in his conception of Mahlerian form. For Adorno, these musical relationships resonated strongly with his post-Second World War concern for the plight of the outsider within the homogenizing bounds of modern society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 131 , Issue 1 , 2006 , pp. 38 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2001 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Musicological Society (Provo) and at the 2001 meeting of the American Musicological Society (Atlanta). I thank James Webster, Annette Richards, David Rosen, Richard Leppert and Rebecca Sheinbaum for their thoughtful suggestions.

References

1 Adorno, Theodor W., Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1992). This is a translation of the second German edition (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), which, according to Adorno, is unchanged from the first edition with the exception of corrected misprints.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Recent social-psychological studies suggest that such universal practices may be best understood as semiconscious strategies people use to form initial impressions of personality and character. See Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? (Boulder, CO, 1997).Google Scholar

3 The notion of physiognomy was central to the thought of Walter Benjamin, for example. A good overview of this trope in Benjamin can be found in Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit, 2000), esp. Chapter 1.Google Scholar

4 Wells, Samuel R., New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character as Manifested through Temperament and External Forms, and Especially in ‘The Human Face Divine’ (New York, 1872), p. xiii.Google Scholar

5 Such a perspective is largely absent from the secondary literature on Adorno. This includes much of the most recent work on Adorno's musical writings, including Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London, 1998), and Richard Leppert's excellent extended ‘Introduction’ to Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Leppert (Berkeley, 2002), 1–82.Google Scholar

6 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, p. ix. Adorno's address, which in certain ways functions as an overview of the book, is included in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), 81–110.Google Scholar

7 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 109–10; Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main, 1970–), xvi (1997), 349–50: ‘Daß der Ausdruck von Totenmasken trügt, weiß ich wohl: wovon man sich vorspiegelt, es wäre das letzte, wozu ein Leben physiognomisch sich zusammenfaßt, sei nur muskularen Veränderungen zuzuschreiben. Aber die Totenmaske Mahlers, die ich auf der Wiener Gedächtnisausstellung zum erstenmal sah, macht einem solche naturwissenschaftlichen Erwägungen schwer. Auch andere Totenmasken scheinen zu lächeln. Dazu jedoch gesellt sich, in dem zugleich leidend-zarten und befehlenden Antlitz, ein listig Triumphales, als wollte es sprechen: nun habe ich euch doch alle hinters Licht geführt.’Google Scholar

8 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 110; Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 350: ‘Die abgründige Trauer der letzten Werke hätte alle Hoffnung unterboten'; ‘Daß die beiden letzten Werke, die er abschloß, nicht schließen, sondern offen bleiben, übersetzt das Ungewisse zwischen der Vernichtung und dem Anderen in Musik.’Google Scholar

9 See Gillespie, Susan, ‘Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance’, Musical Quarterly, 79 (1995), 55–65. Gillespie argues against conventional wisdom that ‘Adorno's writing … begs to be translated, much as music begs to be performed’ (p. 55). Compare, though, Samuel M. Weber's introduction to the English translation of Adorno's Prismen (Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, London, 1967; repr. Cambridge, MA, 1981, 9–15), entitled ‘Translating the Untranslatable'. Weber argues that ‘Adorno's style … has no place within the intellectual horizons of English’ (p. 12); if it is possible to translate Adorno in any successful way, it is ‘precisely by virtue of his untranslatability’ (p. 14), precisely due to the fact that the stylistic gaps between language and meaning in Adorno are highlighted even further in a language such as English.Google Scholar

10 See Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, 1991), 51–2. Lydia Goehr explores in some detail the metaphorical ways in which Adorno's philosophy can be approached on musical terms; see her ‘Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien – in Thirteen Steps’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 595–636 (pp. 615–19).Google Scholar

11 Ibid.Google Scholar

12 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York, 1977), 131.Google Scholar

13 See, for example, Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 167–8 on Stravinsky (Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 402); 238–9 on Schoenberg (ibid., 465–6); and 135–6 on Schreker (ibid., 373–4); and Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York, 1973), 87–9 on 12-note composition (Gesammelte Schriften, xii (1997), 86–7).Google Scholar

14 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 116–17; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii (1997), 262–3: ‘Seine souveräne Freiheit als Instrumentator trug ihm von früh auf, ähnlich wie Bruckner, den Ruf der Meisterschaft ein, nicht ohne den Beiklang jener hämischen Gesinnung, die an Musik das vorgebliche Gewand, die “Mache”, von Substanz und Echtheit kategorisch auf den ersten Blick zu scheiden sich anmaßt. Von Mache indessen kann bei Mahlers Instrumentation so wenig die Rede sein wie von jener Meisterschaft, die das Cliché meint… . Farbe wird zur Funktion des Komponierten, das sie klarlegt; die Komposition wiederum zur Funktion der Farben, aus denen sie sich modelliert… . Daher kritisiert Mahler jenes Ideal des Wohllauts, das den Klang dazu verleitet, um die Musik sich zu bauschen und sich aufzuplustern. Überdies bedürfen die Mahlerschen Charaktere jener Mannigfaltigkeit, aus deren Artikulation das Ganze aufsteigt, solcher Farben, die charakteristisch sind wie die melodischen oder auch harmonischen Einzelereignisse, nicht wohltuend an sich.’Google Scholar

15 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 116; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 262: ‘das strahlende Orchestertutti, das die neudeutsche Schule bis hinab zu ihren minderen Repräsentanten Wagner ablernte'.Google Scholar

16 In Adorno's terminology this process represents an ‘immanent analysis’, a method of uncovering the social and historical content inherent in any piece. Peter Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”: Adorno's Mahler’, Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (Cambridge, 1997), 271–94 (pp. 276–7). See also Stephen Miles, ‘Critics of Disenchantment’, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 52 (1995), 11–38, esp. pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

17 Karen Painter has demonstrated how contemporary critics focused on timbre in Mahler as emblematic of larger cultural and political concerns. See her ‘The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the Fin de siècle’, 19th Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 236–56, and ‘The Aesthetics of the Listener: New Conceptions of Musical Meaning, Timbre, and Form in the Early Reception of Mahler's Symphonies 5–7’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1996).Google Scholar

18 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York, 1978), 116.Google Scholar

19 See Botstein, Leon, ‘Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History’, Mahler and his World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, 2002), 1–53, esp. pp. 20–33.Google Scholar

20 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 6; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 154: ‘kunstfeindliche'. See also Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”’, 276–8.Google Scholar

21 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 24; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 173: ‘Sie rangiert um so höher, je tiefer sie der Widersprüchlichkeit der Welt innewird.’Google Scholar

22 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41–2; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190–1: ‘Wesentliche Gattungen seiner Formidee'; ‘das Muster von Freiheit'. Cf. Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Music as a Metaphor of Metaphysics: Tropes of Transcendence in 19th-Century Music from Schumann to Mahler’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1994), 398–9. Hoeckner's proposed definition of ‘fulfilment’ – ‘a more extended and closed episode with a unitary thematic character’ – does not seem to fit Adorno's examples of this category particularly well, and I have replaced it with a more intuitive suggestion that will be used below. It is worth noting that it seems odd for Adorno to refer to these categories as ‘genres’, since they are more like characteristic procedures or categories than anything qualitatively similar to familiar genre labels like ‘opera’ or ‘string quartet'. Perhaps by using such a designation he is privileging those aspects of genre such as form and style expectations, and especially the purpose of a set of works.Google Scholar

23 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 44–5; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 194: ‘Materiale Formenlehre hätte durchweg Formabschnitte Mahlers zum Gegenstand, die anstatt mit Charakteren ausgefüllt, dem eigenen Wesen nach als Charaktere formuliert werden.’ Adorno's perspective should be understood within the more general context of German musicology, in which there is a tendency to emphasize ‘material’ as the most essential domain of music, and ‘logic / deduction / development’ of that material as the primary principle of composition. I thank James Webster for this point.Google Scholar

24 See Revers, Peter, Gustav Mahler: Untersuchungen zu den späten Sinfonien (Hamburg, 1985), 12–14.Google Scholar

25 Ronald Weitzman, ‘An Introduction to Adorno's Music and Social Criticism’, Music and Letters, 52 (1971), 287–98 (p. 294).Google Scholar

26 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 83; Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 325: ‘Seine musikalische Sprache selber ist durch und durch gebrochen. Sie fordert jenes Convenu von der Musik als einer Kunst reiner Unmittelbarkeit heraus.’Google Scholar

27 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 72; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 220–1: ‘zerstören die Fiktion, Musik sei ein reiner Deduktionszusammenhang… . Wo die dramatische Symphonie ihre Idee zu ergreifen glaubt in der dem Modell der diskursiven Logik nachgeahmten Unerbittlichkeit ihrer Verklammerung, sucht die Romansymphonik aus jener den Ausweg: möchte ins Freie.’ Hermann Danuser argues that Adorno's conception of the Mahler symphony as ‘novel’ is a result of Mahler's construction of his own sort of ‘musical prose’ rather than ‘musical poetry'; see his Musikalische Prosa (Regensburg, 1975), 87–117.Google Scholar

28 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge, 1980), 31.Google Scholar

29 See Paddison, Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 54–5.Google Scholar

30 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 96–7; Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 336–8: ‘durchs Fahrenlassen des Anspruchs von Integration'; ‘Solche Charaktere sind die ohne den Trug von Einheit in Partikeln'; ‘Seine Symphonien und Märsche sind keine des disziplinierenden Wesens, das triumphal alles Einzelne und alle Einzelnen sich unterjocht, sondern sammeln sie ein in einem Zug der Befreiten.’Google Scholar

31 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 33; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 182: ‘Einheit sei nicht trotz der Brüche, sondern allein durch den Bruche hindurch'.Google Scholar

32 Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, 64.Google Scholar

33 Hoeckner, ‘Music as a Metaphor of Metaphysics’, 355.Google Scholar

34 Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 334: ‘Einheit jedoch wird unterhöhlt, sobald sie aufhört, Einheit von etwas zu sein; ohne dialektischen Widerpart droht ihr die leere Tautologie.’ Livingstone's translation (Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 94) reads as follows: ‘Unity, however, is undermined as soon as it ceases to unify a plurality. Without a dialectical counterpart it threatens to degenerate into an empty tautology.’Google Scholar

35 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 50–2; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 200–1: ‘Durch den unangefochtenen Primat des Ganzen über die Teile im Wiener Klassizismus gerieten dort die Gestalten vielfach einander ähnlich und rückten zusammen'; ‘Die Verdeutlichung der Einzelstimme geht auf Kosten der Klangtotale'; ‘die emanzipierten … Physiognomik von Instrumenten hinein, die ungebändigt aus dem Tutti herausspringen.’Google Scholar

36 See Subotnik, Developing Variations, 45–6.Google Scholar

37 See, for example, Robert G. Hopkins, Closure and Mahler's Music: The Role of Secondary Parameters (Philadelphia, 1990). Even in a study like that of Hopkins, where the analysis shows how non-pitch factors influence the construction of form in Mahler, timbre is marginalized as the ‘least influential secondary parameter’ (pp. 97, 158).Google Scholar

38 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 72.Google Scholar

39 Cf. Arno Forchert, ‘Zur Auflösung traditioneller Formkategorien in der Musik um 1900’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 32 (1975), 85–98. Forchert posits, as I do, that timbre is decisive in determining the character of the ‘breakthrough’, but then suggests that parameters other than timbre play similar roles for Adorno's other categories (such as rhythm and metre in the ‘suspension’, and harmony and melody in the ‘fulfilment'; p. 86).Google Scholar

40 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190: ‘Wesentliche Gattungen seiner Formidee'.Google Scholar

41 See, for example, Bernd Sponheuer, ‘Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers’, Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers Instrumentalmusik, ed. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (Wilhelmshaven, 1980), 117–64; James Hepokoski, ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated’, Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC, 1992), 135–75; idem, Sibelius: Symphony no. 5 (Cambridge, 1993); and James Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form: The Finale of Mahler's First Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 125–43.Google Scholar

42 Repr. Tutzing, 1969. See, for example, pp. 44, 45 and 62. See also Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form’, 129.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., 129–30.Google Scholar

44 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, trans. Livingstone, 84; Gesammelte Schriften, xvi, 326: ‘Auf dem Höhepunkt des ersten Satzes der Ersten Symphonie durchschlägt eine Fanfare gleichsam die Wand der sicher gefügten Form. Sie will, wider alle Kunst, Kunst in den Schauplatz eines hineinbrechenden Unbedingten verwandeln. Mahlers Musik rüttelt an der selbstgewissen Ordnung des Ästhetischen, der in sich ruhenden Verendlichung des Unendlichen.’Google Scholar

45 Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form’, 130.Google Scholar

46 Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”’, 278–9.Google Scholar

47 Sponheuer, ‘Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers'. See also Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form’, whose perspective is largely indebted to Sponheuer; indeed, Sponheuer's overall approach focuses on Mahler's finales. See his Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing, 1978).Google Scholar

48 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 5; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 153: ‘Der Riß erfolgt von drüben, jenseits der eigenen Bewegung der Musik. In sie wird eingegriffen.’Google Scholar

49 Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form’, 130.Google Scholar

50 Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, 31.Google Scholar

51 Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough” as Critique of Form’, 137, 142.Google Scholar

52 For a more complete discussion of timbre in this passage, see John J. Sheinbaum, ‘Timbre, Form, and Fin-de-Siècle Refractions in Mahler's Symphonies’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 2002), 275–84.Google Scholar

53 See Katarina Markovic-Stokes, ‘To Interpret or to Follow? Mahler's Beethoven Retuschen and the Romantic Critical Tradition’, Beethoven Forum, 11 (2004), 1–40.Google Scholar

54 My perspective is indebted to James Hepokoski's description of the ‘breakthrough deformation'. See his ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero?’ and Sibelius: Symphony no. 5. My perspective is also informed by Anthony Newcomb's narratological approach to Schumann, in which the composer often interrupts a ‘paradigmatic plot’ with a disruption or interruption, thereby transforming how a listener interprets the formal functions of events that follow. See his ‘Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1983–4), 233–50; and ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’, 19th-Century Music, 11 (1987–8), 164–74.Google Scholar

55 At the same time, it is important to reinforce that the movement is not a fully functioning sonata form; though it is often described in this way, Donald Mitchell goes so far as to call it ‘grotesque’ to do so. Provocative along these lines is the fact that Mahler's autograph full score has a repeat after the first cycle of the two thematic areas (which was included in the first published edition), though Mahler later removed it, and though there is no evidence that he ever performed the piece with such a repeat. See Mitchell, Donald, ‘Eternity or Nothingness? Mahler's Fifth Symphony’, The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford, 1999), 236–325, esp. pp. 285–6 (the quotation is from p. 286).Google Scholar

56 Notably, D major is the key of the breakthrough passages in both the first and the last movements of the First Symphony as well. Hoeckner suggests that, in Mahler, the key of D often has ‘special meaning’ related to its frequent use in moments of breakthrough. See Hoeckner, ‘Music as a Metaphor of Metaphysics’, 379.Google Scholar

57 Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker (Portland, 1993), 148–9.Google Scholar

58 This perspective is thus similar to the one taken by Scott Burnham with regard to the E minor theme at bars 288ff. in the midst of the development section in the first movement of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony. As he puts it, ‘the newness of this “new” theme has been challenged … as if the fact that this theme bears latent resemblances to other aspects of the thematic, rhythmic and harmonic arguments of the movement would somehow negate the overwhelming reality that it is, in fact, a new theme. … Analytic methodologies that attempt to demonstrate the presence of a web of thematic relationships … neglect the otherness of the new theme in an aesthetically motivated zeal to assimilate it into a larger organic whole'. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995), 9, 13.Google Scholar

59 Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music (Cambridge, 1980), 82.Google Scholar

60 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 119; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 265: ‘Der Durchbruch, die Vision der Blechbläser im zweiten Satz der Fünften Symphonie ihre Gewalt hat nur, weil diese zuvor geschwiegen hatten.’Google Scholar

61 Goehr has recently argued that Adorno's concept of the ‘suspension’ functions as a way of ‘avoiding the dangers of rationalization, systematization, and dogmatism'; ‘Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien’, 630. Within the context of my discussion, see the final section of this article to follow up on Goehr's assertion that, for Adorno, music which gives itself to such things can be linked to fascism and totalitarianism. Thomas K. Nelson explores passages that function similarly to Adornian ‘suspensions’, especially in Schubert, in ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1998). I thank Berthold Hoeckner for this reference. Like the example discussed in this section, Nelson focuses on works that include moments or passages of a dreamy and elegiac character that evoke the pastoral. However, while Nelson argues that one of the chief characteristics of the ‘Arcadian Pastoral’, as he calls it, is the ♭VI area, the example of ‘suspension’ considered below does not use such a tonal relationship.Google Scholar

62 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190: ‘Die Mahlerschen Suspensionen sedimentieren sich mehr stets zu Episoden. Diese sind ihm wesentlich: Umwege, die rückwirkend als die direkten sich erweisen.’Google Scholar

63 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 43; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 192: ‘Die Suspensionen kündigen die Formimmanenz, ohne die Gegenwart des Anderen positiv zu behaupten; Selbstbesinnungen des in sich Befangenen, nicht länger Allegorien des Absoluten. Retrospektiv werden sie von der Form aufgefangen, aus deren Elementen sie gefügt sind.’Google Scholar

64 Thomas Peattie has recently suggested that while the use of pastoral topics was, of course, long established by this time, employing them as a means of seemingly stopping musical time was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and the posthorn episodes in this movement are the ‘paradigmatic examples’ in Mahler. See Peattie, Thomas, ‘In Search of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler's Broken Pastoral’, Mahler and his World, ed. Painter, 185–98 (p. 185).Google Scholar

65 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, i (Garden City, NY, 1973), 805. The same can be said for a later part of the programme, which includes panic brought on by the entrance of humans.Google Scholar

66 Stephen Hefling, ‘Mahler: Symphonies 1–4’, The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York, 1997), 369–416 (p. 395); Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 102. Floros presents some evidence for considering the posthorn episodes along these lines. The mood of the music matches that of several poems of Nicolaus Lenau, including ‘Das Posthorn’ and, especially, ‘Der Postillion’ ('The Stagecoach Driver'; the posthorn is the instrument used by postillions), as that title is written at the beginning of the first episode in Mahler's autograph.Google Scholar

67 This interpretation of the posthorn's function in the movement is derived from Richard Leppert's recent lecture ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Dialectics of Musical Kitsch’ (University of Colorado at Boulder, Music Department Colloquium series, October 2004). I thank Richard Leppert for making his paper available to me.Google Scholar

68 For this reason, Floros finds the ‘scherzo with two trios’ explanation ‘unfortunate'; Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 99–100.Google Scholar

69 For example, Floros's chart of the movement, with an overall ABA′BC(posthorn)DEB′C′Coda shape, leads as much away from a conventional rondo interpretation as towards one (ibid.). On the general topic of this symphony's resistance to conventional categories of genre and form, see Krummacher, Friedhelm, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie: Welt in Widerbild (Kassel, 1991).Google Scholar

70 This is somewhat reminiscent of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony's first-movement coda, though in that case the tonal areas passed through are related to previous tonal and motivic events.Google Scholar

71 For a discussion of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ form in Mahler, see Agawu, Kofi, ‘The Narrative Impulse in the Second Nachtmusik from Mahler's Seventh Symphony’, Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge, 1996), 226–41.Google Scholar

72 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 43; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 192: ‘Die Musik sagt gewissermaßen voilà.’Google Scholar

73 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190: ‘Von den kodifizierten Formkategorien kommt der Mahlerschen von Erfüllung am nächsten noch der Abgesang der Barform.’Google Scholar

74 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 42; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190: ‘als Erfüllung eines musikalischen Zusammenhangs durch ein ihm gegenüber wesentlich Neues, mit der Idee der immanenten Geschlossenheit der neueren Musik kollidierten, deren Ökonomieprinzip alles wie Zinsen vom Grundstock hecken ließ'.Google Scholar

75 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 42; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 190–1: ‘Mahlers Revolte gegen solche Sparsamkeit'; ‘Askese gegen den subjektiven Anspruch, das Ganze aus sich heraus zu schaffen'.Google Scholar

76 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 42; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 191: ‘je weniger die Mittel, die konventionell Erfüllung vorspiegelten, vor allem die Wiederherstellung der Haupttonart, angesichts der anwachsenden Spannungen mehr ausreichten'.Google Scholar

77 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41.Google Scholar

78 This tonal structure was not part of Mahler's initial conception of the movement. The earliest stages show a more conventional strophic structure, with each stanza concluding around A; the rising background progression was arrived at gradually. See Stephen E. Hefling, Das Lied von der Erde’, (Cambridge, 2000), 83–4. For a discussion of the competing aesthetics and often unclear boundaries between expectations of song and symphony in Mahler, see Schmierer, Elisabeth, ‘Zwischen Lied und Symphonie: Zu Mahlers Tambourg'sell’, Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung, 33 (1995), 15–22.Google Scholar

79 See Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 249.Google Scholar

80 See Stephen E. Hefling, ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, The Mahler Companion, ed. Mitchell and Nicholson, 438–66, esp. pp. 447–50. More expansive discussions on this point can be found in Hefling, Das Lied von der Erde, 82–92; and idem, ‘Das Lied von der Erde: Mahler's Symphony for Voices and Orchestra – or Piano’, Journal of Musicology, 10 (1992), 293–341, esp. pp. 303–17. Floros labels this section similarly; see Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 250.Google Scholar

81 Hefling, ‘Das Lied von der Erde, 449; Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 251.Google Scholar

82 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41. For a discussion of timbre during the ‘suspension’ passages of the fifth song in Das Lied von der Erde, see Sheinbaum, ‘Timbre, Form, and Fin-de-Siècle Refractions in Mahler's Symphonies’, 311–21.Google Scholar

83 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 41.Google Scholar

84 Ibid., 42; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 191: ‘ohne Abgesangsfunktion'.Google Scholar

85 Ibid.Google Scholar

86 In this way the recapitulation functions similarly to the notion of ‘thematic completion’ in Beethoven as posited by Joseph Kerman, though he limits his discussion primarily to codas, in which a section has more than a tonal function, but also a ‘thematic function that can be described … by words such as “normalization”, “resolution”, “expansion”, “release”, “completion”, and “fulfilment”'. Joseph Kerman, ‘Notes on Beethoven's Codas’, Beethoven Studies 3, ed. Alan Tyson (Cambridge and New York, 1982), 141–59 (p. 149).Google Scholar

87 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 138, 140; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 283, 285: ‘Die Worte offiziell und Hauptwerk nennen die Angriffspunkte, … den repräsentativen Karton, die symbolische Riesenschwarte'; ‘Totalität … ist zur Tautologie, zur bloßen Verdopplung seiner selbst degeneriert'; ‘der unentwegten und sich selber unglaubhaften Affirmation'.Google Scholar

88 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 140; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 284: ‘In der Achten jedoch hat er … Vulgarisierung … gebeugt.’Google Scholar

89 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 139; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 284: ‘Wollte man, dies eine Mal, von Mahler in Begriffen der Psychologie reden, so wäre die Achte … Identifikation mit dem Angreifer. Sie flüchtet zur Macht und Herrlichkeit dessen, wovor sie sich fürchtet; die zur Affirmation verbogene Angst ist das Offizielle.’Google Scholar

90 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 139; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 284, 283: ‘Sozialstruktur wie Stand der ästhetischen Formkonstituentien verbieten das Hauptwerk'; ‘In der Achten hat er die eigene Idee … verleugnet.’Google Scholar

91 For the links between theatrical gestures and issues of coherence in Mahler, see Charles S. Maier, ‘Mahler's Theatre: The Performative and the Political in Central Europe, 1890–1910’, Mahler and his World, ed. Painter, 55–85, esp. pp. 75–81.Google Scholar

92 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 68.Google Scholar

93 Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 11–23; see also Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, NE, 1995), 11–23. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, iv (1997), 55: ‘Das Ganze ist das Unwahre.’Google Scholar

94 See Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”’, 273.Google Scholar

95 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 3, 166–7; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 151, 309: ‘Die Schwierigkeit, das Urteil zu revidieren, … das Hitler-Regime … über ihn verhängte'; ‘Noch die Märsche werden in diesen Symphonien von dem vernommen und reflektiert, den sie verschleppen. Die aus der Reihe Gefallenen, Niedergetretenen allein… . Ohne Verheißung sind seine Symphonien Balladen des Unterliegens.’ I would therefore disagree somewhat with Leon Botstein's claim that ‘Jewish identity and anti-Semitism … occupied a subsidiary role in Adorno's monograph'. See Botstein, Leon, ‘Whose Gustav Mahler?’, 8.Google Scholar

96 See Leppert, ‘Introduction’, 17–18.Google Scholar

97 See Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 29ff.; Jay, Adorno, 42ff.Google Scholar

98 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 21ff., 42.Google Scholar

99 Talia Pecker Berio, ‘Mahler's Jewish Parable’, Mahler and his World, ed. Painter, 87–110 (p. 89). See also Leon Botstein, ‘Gustav Mahler's Vienna’, The Mahler Companion, ed. Mitchell and Nicholson, 6–38. Botstein argues that Mahler ‘tried to offset’ his sense of being an outsider ‘through an intense psychological engagement with Vienna’ (p. 7).Google Scholar

100 Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”’, 274, 286.Google Scholar

101 Quoted, for example, in Henry A. Lea, Gustav Mahler: Man on the Margin (Bonn, 1985), 14. The source of the quotation is Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam, 1940), 135.Google Scholar

102 Lea, Gustav Mahler, 45ff.Google Scholar

103 Berio, ‘Mahler's Jewish Parable’, 94–8, esp. p. 96; Hoeckner, ‘Music as a Metaphor of Metaphysics’, 385ff.; Lea, Gustav Mahler, 67ff.Google Scholar

104 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 149; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 291: ‘Pseudomorphose ist dieser Osten … als Deckbild von Mahlers jüdischem Element. Auf es läßt so wenig der Finger sich legen wie sonst in Kunstwerken: es weicht vor der Identifizierung zurück und bleibt doch dem Ganzen unverlierbar.’Google Scholar

105 Adorno, Mahler, trans. Jephcott, 150; Gesammelte Schriften, xiii, 292: ‘Den Assimilierten schwankt … der Boden unter den Füßen; durch den Euphemismus des Fremdartigen möchte der Fremde den Schatten des Grauens beschwichtigen. Das, nicht bloß der Ausdruck individueller Todesahnung des Kranken, verleiht den letzten Werken ihren dokumentarischen Ernst.’Google Scholar

106 Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson and William Morrow, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950). The ‘Studies in Prejudice’ series was edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman.Google Scholar

107 See Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 48ff.Google Scholar

108 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Edwina Lawler, Never Again! The Holocaust's Challenge for Educators, ed. Helmut Schreier and Matthias Heyl (Hamburg, 1997), 11–20 (p. 11); Gesammelte Schriften, x/2 (1997), 674: ‘Die Forderung, daß Auschwitz nicht noch einmal sei, ist die allererste an Erziehung. Sie geht so sehr jeglicher anderen voran, daß ich weder glaube, sie begründen zu müssen noch zu sollen. Ich kann nicht verstehen, daß man mit ihr bis heute so wenig sich abgegeben hat. Sie zu begründen hätte etwas Ungeheuerliches angesichts des Ungeheuerlichen, das sich zutrug.’Google Scholar

109 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 11; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 674: ‘Daß man aber die Forderung, und was sie an Fragen aufwirft, so wenig sich bewußt macht, zeigt, daß das Ungeheuerliche nicht in die Menschen eingedrungen ist, Symptom dessen, daß die Möglichkeit der Wiederholung, was den Bewußtseins- und Unbewußtseinsstand der Menschen anlangt, fortbesteht'; ‘Im Zivilisationsprinzip selbst die Barbarei angelegt ist… . Die Zivilisation ihrerseits das Antizivilisatorische hervorbringt und es zunehmend verstärkt.’Google Scholar

110 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 12; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 675: ‘Das nur, um anzudeuten, wie sehr die Kräfte, gegen die man angehen muß, solche des Zuges der Weltgeschichte sind.’Google Scholar

111 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 19; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 689: ‘Das Klima … das am meisten solche Auferstehung fördert, ist der wiedererwachende Nationalismus.’Google Scholar

112 See Painter, Karen, ‘The Aesthetics of Mass Culture: Mahler's Eighth Symphony and its Legacy’, Mahler and his World, ed. Painter, 127–56.Google Scholar

113 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 19–20; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 689: ‘Morgen kann eine andere Gruppe drankommen als die Juden, etwa die Alten, die ja im Dritten Reich gerade eben noch verschont wurden, oder die Intellektuellen, oder einfach abweichende Gruppen'; ‘Schlechterdings jeder Mensch, der nicht gerade zu der verfolgenden Gruppe dazugehört, kann ereilt werden.’Google Scholar

114 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 15–16; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 682: ‘Das Böse von Gebräuchen wie die Rauhnächte und das Haberfeldtreiben und wie derlei beliebte bodenständige Sitten sonst heißen mögen, ist eine unmittelbare Vorform der nationalsozialistischen Gewalttat.’Google Scholar

115 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 18; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 686: ‘daß einer, der ein Zugsystem ausklügelt, das die Opfer möglichst schnell und reibungslos nach Auschwitz bringt, darüber vergißt, was in Auschwitz mit ihnen geschieht'.Google Scholar

116 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 18; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 686: ‘durch und durch kalt'.Google Scholar

117 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 13–15; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 679, 681: ‘Die einzig wahrhafte Kraft gegen das Prinzip von Auschwitz wäre Autonomie, … die Kraft zur Reflexion, zur Selbstbestimmung, zum Nicht-Mitmachen'; ‘Für das Allerwichtigste gegenüber der Gefahr einer Wiederholung halte ich, der blinden Vormacht aller Kollektive entgegenzuarbeiten, den Widerstand gegen sie dadurch zu steigern.’Google Scholar

118 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, trans. Lawler, 18; Gesammelte Schriften, x/2, 687: ‘Unfähigkeit zur Identifikation war fraglos die wichtigste psychologische Bedingung dafür, daß so etwas wie Auschwitz sich inmitten von einigermaßen gesitteten und harmlosen Menschen hat abspielen können.’Google Scholar

119 Carl Dahlhaus describes this perspective in Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge, 1983): ‘The contemplator of history “participates”… . The historian who wishes to understand history “from within” must project himself into the tradition he is studying, not however, by abstracting or disowning his own basic assumptions but simply by being who he is’ (pp. 58–9).Google Scholar

120 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 51.Google Scholar

121 Leon Botstein argues that, for the last generation, what is most often projected from the podium is a ‘consoling, accessible voice’ and a ‘late-romantic aural coherence’, all of which ignore the more historically accurate ‘negativity and resistance’ perceived by Adorno. See Botstein, ‘Whose Gustav Mahler?’, esp. p. 47, n. 30; the quotations are from pp. 9, 47 and ii.Google Scholar

122 See, for example, David Allenby, ‘Saint or Sinner?’, Musical Times, 139 (1998), 24–7. The quotation is from p. 26.Google Scholar

123 For example, Adorno occasionally implies the value of ‘unity’ and ‘totality’ even though his larger argument rests on a critique of those very terms. See Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, 264.Google Scholar

124 In Stephen Hinton's words, Adorno's perspective has such a ‘striking relevance’ for present-day musicologists and music theorists that ‘not discussing Adorno’ in an appropriate context can be considered a ‘conspicuous absence'. See Hinton, Stephen, review of Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London, 1998), Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, 1999), and Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernism, and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London, 1996), in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 198–213 (p. 199).Google Scholar

125 Franklin, ‘“… His fractures are the script of truth”’, 287.Google Scholar