Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T03:47:58.516Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Classical Style, Childhood and Nostalgia in Mahler's Fourth Symphony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2011

Ryan R Kangas
Ryan R Kangas*
Affiliation:
University of Houston
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

According to the critical consensus on Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony, Mahler seems, through both his orchestration and musical material, to be evoking both the composers who preceded him and childhood. Many scholars have claimed to hear specific allusions in the first movement to pieces composed in a classical style, and Mahler's use of simple themes with ornamented melodies in the Fourth Symphony also seems to suggest a classical style.

At the same time, however, most writers hear a disparity in the movement between Mahler's nominal late romantic compositional style and his use of simpler or more naïve-sounding materials. Nostalgia – defined here as a simultaneous acknowledgment of and rebellion against the irreversibility of time – offers one way of examining Mahler's juxtaposition of traits of music from the past and present. Using nostalgia as a theoretical frame, we can examine how music might be able to suggest a relation between the past and present akin to memory.

In the first movement, Mahler's late romantic treatment of ‘classical’ materials seems to depict an unsuccessful attempt to recapture an idealized past, and the fourth movement‘s depiction of heaven in childlike terms set predominantly in the style of a lullaby suggests the irretrievable – perhaps even non-existent – past in which the soothing tones of a mother's voice hold the promise of calming all worry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 8 , Issue 2: Mahler: Centenary Commentaries on Musical Meaning , 24 November 2011 , pp. 219 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mahler, Alma, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Viking Press, 1969): 24Google Scholar.

2 Hirschfeld, Robert, ‘Vierte Symphonie von Gustav Mahler’, Wiener Abendpost (14 January 1902): 2Google Scholar. Für Mahler's affectierte Volksthümlichkeit, zubereitete Naivetät, künstliche Kindlichkeit fehlt mir die sympathische Empfindung. Man meint Vater Haydn im Automobil mit brenzlichen Benzindämpfen vorüberholpern zu sehen.

3 Helm, Thedor, Musikalisches Wochenblatt (23 January 1902): 69Google Scholar. ‘Anscheinend hat er sich diesmal angelegen sein lassen, mit möglischt einfachen volksthümlichen (oder doch volksthümlich gemeinten), altväterischen, selbst kindlichen Melodien zu arbeiten’.

4 Ritter, William, ‘Souvenirs sur Gustav Mahler’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung 101/1 (1961): 30Google Scholar. Ellipses appear in the original. My thanks to this journal's anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this reference. ‘Un grelot accompagné de deux flûtes staccato, et la clarinette en la esquisse au ralenti un dessin révérencieux … Et aussitôt le premier thème … Mais tel que depuis Haydn – seulement avec quelles épices! – jamais symphonie n’en a eu de si gracieux, de si alliciant, si mélodique, et si prolongé … C’est à la fois enfantin et, ma fois, pas rosse à demi … et surtout rien moins qu’innocent … Comme quand, au théâtre, l’ingénue est jouée par la plus corrompue de la troupe.’

5 Adorno, Theodor W., Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 56.

6 Kennedy, Michael, Mahler (London: Dent and Sons, 1974): 106Google Scholar.

7 Cooke, Deryck, Mahler: An Introduction to His Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 67Google Scholar.

8 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 4 vols., vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 763Google ScholarPubMed.

9 Johnson, Julian, Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hirsch, Marjorie, ‘The Spiral Journey Back Home: Brahms's “Heimweh” Lieder’, The Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 455CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 470.

11 Ibid., 456.

12 Tannock, Stuart, ‘Nostalgia Critique’, Cultural Studies 9 (1995): 456CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Ibid., 456.

14 For a summary of the early history of nostalgia, see Boym, Svetlana, ‘From Cured Soldiers to Incurable Romantics: Nostalgia and Progress’, in The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 3–18Google Scholar and Davis, Fred, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (London: Free Press, 1979): 1–4Google Scholar.

15 Zwinger, Theodor, ‘De Pothopatridalgia’, in Fasciculus dissertationum medicarum selectiorum (Basel, 1710)Google Scholar. Quoted in Starobinski, Jean, ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’, trans. William S. Kemp, Diogenes 14/54 (June 1966) 90Google Scholar.

16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Complete Dictionary of Music: Consisting of a Copious Explanation of All Words Necessary to a True Knowledge and Understanding of Music, trans. William Waring (London: Fielding and Walker, 1779): 266–267Google Scholar.

17 Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974): 281Google Scholar. ‘Le nostalgique est en même temps ici et là-bas, ni ici ni là, présent et absent, deux fois présent et deux fois absent; on peut donc dire à volonté qu’il est multi-présent, ou qu’il n’est nulle part: ici même il est physiquement présent, mais il se sent absent en esprit de ce lieu où il est présent par le corps; là-bas, à l’inverse, il se sent moralement présent, mail il est en fait et actuellement absent de ces lieux chers qu’il a autrefois quittés.’

18 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv.

19 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 4.

20 Jankélévitch, L'irréversible et la nostalgie, 299Google Scholar. ‘Le véritable objet de la nostalgie n’est pas l’absence par opposition à la presence mais le passé par rapport au présent; le vrai remède à la nostalgie n’est pas le retour en arrière dans l’espace, mais la rétrogradation vers le passé dans le temps.’

21 Wilson, Janelle L., Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005): 7Google Scholar.

22 Knapp, Raymond, Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003): 210Google Scholar.

23 Henry-Louis de La Grange, ‘Music about Music in Mahler: Reminiscences, Allusions, or Quotations?’ in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen Hefling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 148Google ScholarPubMed.

24 La Grange's translation of Sehnsucht [longing] as ‘nostalgia’ is perhaps emblematic of the frequent conflation of nostalgia with a more general form of longing. Adorno, Theodor, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1960), 83Google Scholar: ‘…keine Transzendenz ist übrig als die von Sehnsucht’; La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 772: ‘…all that remains of transcendence is nostalgia’.

25 Knapp, , Symphonic Metamorphoses, 217Google Scholar, 222, 224, 225.

26 Constantin Floros, Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon and Jutta Wicker (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 1993): 119.

27 All musical examples are derived from Gustav Mahler, Symphony Nr. 4 in vier Sätzen für grosses Orchester und Sopran-Solo, Sämtliche Werke kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1963).

28 Julian Johnson notes this premature close and other ‘gentle incongruities’ between the first movement of Mahler's Fourth and the classical style. See Johnson, , Mahler's Voices, 110–113Google Scholar.

29 Johnson, , Mahler's Voices, 111Google Scholar.

30 La Grange, , Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 762Google Scholar.

31 Johnson, , Mahler's Voices, 112Google Scholar.

32 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. Peter Franklin, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber & Faber, 1980): 147Google Scholar. This quotation is drawn from comments Mahler made on the music of Franz Schubert: ‘No elaboration, no artistically finished development of his original idea! Instead, he repeats himself so much that you could cut out half the piece without doing it any harm. For each repetition is already a lie. A work of art must evolve perpetually, like life. If it doesn't, hypocrisy and theatricality set in.’

33 Adorno, , Mahler, 57Google Scholar.

34 Harper, Ralph, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfillment in the Modern Age (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1966): 26Google Scholar.

35 Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright 6 vols., vol. 6, Time Regained (New York: The Modern Library, 1999): 260Google Scholar.

36 Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 178Google Scholar.

37 Grange, La, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 768Google Scholar.

38 Adorno, , Mahler, 53Google Scholar, 55.

39 For a discussion of the use of toy instruments in late eighteenth-century Vienna see Rice, John A., Empress Marie Therese and Music and the Viennese Court 1792–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 143–151Google Scholar.

40 Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996): 173Google Scholar.

41 Bonds, After Beethoven, 175. Chris van Allsburg, The Polar Express (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)Google ScholarPubMed.

42 Knapp, , Symphonic Metamorphoses, 41Google Scholar, 46.

43 Knapp, , Symphonic Metamorphoses, 227, 296–97Google Scholar.

44 Pierpont, James, ‘The One Horse Open Sleigh’ (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1857) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/sm1857.620520 (accessed 20 April 2010)Google Scholar.

45 ‘Two forty as his speed’ means the horse would cover one mile in two minutes and forty seconds.

46 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 104Google ScholarPubMed.

47 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brother's Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002): 109Google Scholar.

48 Benjamin, Walter, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): 92Google Scholar.

49 Hirschfeld, , ‘Vierte Symphonie von Gustav Mahler’, 2Google Scholar.

50 Frisch, Walter, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 206Google Scholar.

51 Bonds, After Beethoven, 181Google Scholar.

52 Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 230Google Scholar.

53 Bonds, After Beethoven, 181Google Scholar.

54 Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 230Google Scholar.

55 Adorno, Mahler, 56Google Scholar.

56 Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995): 89Google Scholar.

57 Harper, , Nostalgia, 28Google Scholar.

58 Riley, Matthew, Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 117Google Scholar.

59 Schiff, David, ‘Jewish and Musical Tradition in the Music of Mahler and Schoenberg’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 9 (1986): 217Google Scholar.

60 Proust, , In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, 15Google Scholar.

61 Proust, , In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, 49Google Scholar.

62 Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, 139Google Scholar.

63 Jankélévitch, L'irréversible et la nostalgie, 298. ‘On peut certes dire que la profondeur de la nostalgie est une profondeur biologique, et que cette profondeur s'appelle: rupture du cordon ombilical, separation du nouveau-né de l’organisme maternel, attachement à la mère.’

64 Tannock, ‘Nostalgia Critique’, 457.