No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2011
Part I of this article explores instances in Mahler's symphonies where the composer allows the continuity of the musical voice to break and to fall temporarily into silence. It analyses these in terms of seven different categories or compositional strategies – violent strikes, abysmal silence, draining away/falling apart, drowning out, hyperintensity, fragmentation, and strained voices. Part II considers the wider context for this breaking of the voice in literary and philosophical self-critiques of language contemporary with Mahler's work, specifically Austro–German forms of Sprachkritik as in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Fritz Mauthner, but also extending the parallel in less obvious directions to include Samuel Beckett. Taken together, the two parts of the article thus provide both evidence and historical context for a radical suggestion about Mahler's music, that at the heart of the symphonic is a constant threat of the aphonic – a complete loss of voice. While such moments are rare in Mahler, they might be read as extreme manifestations of the self-consciousness of language to which all his music is subject.
1 Theodor W Adorno, Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992): 20Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 137.
3 Ibid., 166. Peter Franklin cites this line in the title of an article in which he assesses the importance of Adorno's reading of Mahler. See ‘ “…his fractures are the script of truth.”– Adorno's Mahler’, in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 271–94.
4 Johnson, Julian, ‘The Status of the Subject in Mahler's Ninth Symphony’, 19 th-Century Music 18 (1994–5): 108–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Ibid., 120.
6 Johnson, Julian, Mahler's Voices. Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Sound is explored as a central category by Sheinbaum, John S. in ‘Adorno's Mahler and the Timbral Outsider’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131 (2006): 38–82Google Scholar, and also in Thomas Schäfer, Modellfall Mahler: Kompositorische Rezeption in zeitgenössischer Musik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999): 211ffGoogle Scholar.
8 Botstein, Leon discusses these divergent readings in ‘Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History’, in Mahler and his World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 1–53Google Scholar.
9 In the first edition, Mahler gave the following performance direction at Fig. 32: ‘This passage must be played by the strings with the greatest power, so that the individual strings, as a result of the violent vibration, almost come into contact with the fingerboard. The Viennese call this “schöppern”. A similar effect applies to the horns.’
10 For contemporary cartoons drawing attention to Mahler's noisiness and expansion of the percussion section, see Die Muskete, 19 January 1907 and Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, no. 88, 31 March 1907.
11 Mann, Thomas, Doctor Faustus, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949)Google Scholar.
12 Letter from Beckett to Axel Kaun in 1937. See Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 95 (1980): 183–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 189.
13 See Figs. 49.7 to 50.3 in the Finale of the Second Symphony, and Figs. 218–19 at the close of the Eighth Symphony.
14 Something very similar occurs in the Finale of the Sixth Symphony, Figs. 131–3.
15 Specht, Richard, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913): 28Google Scholar.
16 Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938. A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 107Google Scholar.
17 Mahler was apparently so disturbed by noisy birds around his composing hut at Steinbach that he had them shot. See also his letter to Alma of 14 June 1909, from Toblach, in Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife, ed., Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss, with Knud Martner. Rev and trans., Antony Beaumont (London: Faber, 2004): 319.
18 Weiner, Marc, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993): 75–76Google Scholar. Cited in Knittel, K.M., ‘Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven's Late Style’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51 (1998): 49–82Google Scholar, esp. 79.
19 For example, four bars before Fig. 18 in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, where the same line is doubled by 4 flutes, 2 oboes and 4 clarinets.
20 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. Peter Franklin, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber, 1980): 160Google Scholar.
21 Ben-Zvi, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language’.
22 Ibid., 183.
23 Ibid., 188.
24 A good example is the Wunderhorn song, ‘Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?!’.
25 Cited from Mauthner's autobiography, Prager Jugendjahre, pp. 21–33, in Elizabeth Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge: Language and Thought in Mauthner's Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992): 17.
26 This includes a parody of Wagner, in a piece titled, ‘Der unbewusste Ahasverus oder Das Ding an sich als Wille und Vortstellung. Bühnen-Weh-Festpiel in drei Handlungen’. See Vierhufe, Almut, Parodie und Sprachkritik: Untersuchungen zu Fritz Mauthners “Nach berühmten Mustern” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999): 93ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 See Stern, Martin, ed., ‘Der Briefwechsel Hofmannsthal–Fritz Mauthner’, Hofmannsthal-Blätter 19–20 (1978)Google Scholar, cited in Morton, Michael, ‘Silence Audible: Mauthner, Hofmannsthal, Wittgenstein, and the Vindication of Language’, in Fictions of Culture: Essays in Honor of Walter H. Sokel, ed. Steven Taubeneck (New York: Peter Lang, 1991): 215–243Google Scholar.
28 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Syrens, 1995): 14Google Scholar.
29 ibid, p.16.
30 Morton, ‘Silence Audible’, 221.
31 Cited in Morton, 224.
32 Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973): 192Google Scholar.
33 Janik's and Toulmin's claim, that Mahler was a regular visitor to the Palais Wittgenstein between 1897 and 1907, has since been refuted, but Mahler was certainly a guest there on occasion. On the musical nature of the Wittgenstein family, see Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, 170–75Google Scholar.
34 In a note from 1948, Wittgenstein referred to Mahler's symphonies as ‘worthless’. See Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989): 67e. Instead, he praised the music of Josef Labor, composer and organist, friend of the Wittgenstein family and the first composition teacher of the young Alma Schindler (62e).
35 Wittgenstein claimed he had found a ‘final solution’ to the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus; at around the same time, Schoenberg claimed that his Method would define German music for the next hundred years.
36 Gellner, Ernest, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Janik and Toulmin suggest a close parallel between Schoenberg's Harmonielehre and Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. See Wittgenstein's Vienna, 107.
38 Wittgenstein employs the metaphor of a ladder at the end of the Tractatus (6.54): ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)’ See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981): 189Google Scholar. Mauthner had made use of the same metaphor earlier in his Beiträge.
39 Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, 126Google Scholar.
40 Mauthner, Beiträge III, 634, cited in Weiler, Gershon, Mauthner's Critique of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970): 177Google Scholar.
41 Mauthner, Fritz, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1902): 650Google Scholar.
42 Mahler's title for the third movement is given in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 4 vols., vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 766. For an extended discussion of childhood and death in Mahler see Knapp, Raymond, ‘Suffering Children: Perspectives on Innocence and Vulnerability in Mahler's Fourth Symphony’, 19 th-Century Music 22 (1998–9): 233–267CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 See McGuinness, Patrick, Introduction to Stéphane Mallarmé: For Anatole's Tomb (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003): vii–xGoogle Scholar.
44 Massimo Cacciari suggests that Rückert's literary art was already self-reflective: ‘His language game is contemporary with Schopenhauer's pessimism about classical and romantic conceptions of art. That is, by now art can be nothing but cultural reworking, virtuoso philology, a linguistic game – despairing, finally, of any ethical or existential content anicillary to Nirvana. It is this essential despair that Mahler finds in Rückert's poetry.’ See Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Roger Friedman (Stanford: California University Press, 1996): 52.
45 Cited by Cacciari, , Posthumous People, 97Google Scholar.
46 ‘The feeling persists that Mahler's ascent towards the inexpressible belongs as much with Puccini and Massenet as with Goethe.’ John Williamson, ‘The Eighth Symphony’, in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 417.
47 Theodor Adorno, see note 1.