Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 8 (2011), pp 237–254.
r
Cambridge University Press, 2011
doi:10.1017/S1479409811000279
Narrative Form and Mahler’s Musical
Thinking
Robert Samuels
The Open University
Email: r.samuels@open.ac.uk
The close relationship between music and other art forms is a well-established feature of fin-de-sie`cle
Vienna. Interdisciplinary study since the 1970s, of the relationship between literature and music,
reflects among other things a recovery of nineteenth-century concerns. This article equates
Mahler’s development of symphonic form with a development of narrative form within his works,
by linking three phases of his symphonic output with his literary interests. The first phase links the
early symphonies with the early nineteenth-century author Jean Paul. His novel
Titan provides the
subtitle of Mahler’s First Symphony, and correspondences can be discerned between the character
of Albano, the hero of the novel, and Mahler at this stage of his career (1888). The opening of the
Finale of the symphony shows narratological similarity to the opening of the final volume of the
novel. The second phase links the middle-period instrumental symphonies with Dostoevsky, who
became Mahler’s greatest literary and moral hero. The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies exhibit
narrative structures different from those of the earlier symphonies; rather than ending with
indivdualistic triumph, after the manner of Jean Paul, they pose the Dostoevskian question of
whether some sort of redemption of their material is possible. The third phase links the late works
with Mahler’s contemporaries Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. In this context, the ending of
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a adaptation of musical narrativity analogous to the
Modernist extension of the lengthy novels of these two authors.
Apparently trivial anecdotes of musical history sometimes sum up moments of far
greater cultural significance than at first seems the case. The evening that Mahler
spent talking and drinking with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, among others, is just
such an example. It took place some time between 1907 and 1910,atthe‘zum
Schutzengel’ restaurant in the Do¨bling district of Vienna.
1
Mahler had assembled
‘young people’ of the Viennese musical scene with the help of Schoenberg and
Zemlinsky,andheldforthatlength, particularly on the subject of his favourite
author, a writer whom he had loved since his adolescence. On becoming increasingly
frustrated at the evident lack of acquaintance with the works he was discussing,
Mahler eventually turned to Schoenberg in exasperation, and asked: ‘Have your
pupils read Dostoevsky? That is more important than counterpoint!’ What one
imagines to have been an embarrassed silence was, according to Berg, timidly
broken by Webern, who ventured the apologetic, ‘Please, we’ve had Strindbergy’.
1
Accounts of this evening exist from Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Richard Specht and
Paul Stefan. Alma gives the earliest date, 1907, shortly before Mahler’s departure for
America; her memories are of a considerably more raucous and lively occasion than those
of the young musicians present. They all place it during the spring of one of the following
years. The various accounts are well summarised in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered
(London: Faber & Faber, 1987): 219–22.
Apart from the appealing vividness of this exchange, coloured variously by
reverence, respect and nostalgia in the differing recollections of it, there are various
ways in which it emblematises intellectual and creative life of early twentieth-
century Vienna. That music and prose, and indeed poetry, drama, painting and
philosophy are all of a piece in fin-de-sie`cle culture is hardly a new contention. Since
the 1970s in particular, studies of their inter-relationships have become seminal
for a generation of scholars.
2
This in part reflects the fashion in scholarship of
the last 40 years for inter-disciplinary topics; but it is also a recovery of an aspect of
the nineteenth-century intellectual climate which had been largely effaced by the
specialisation and positivism of the mid twentieth century. The fact that there is
relatively little scholarly writing that compares Mahler ’s musical thought with the
practice of contemporary or earlier literary authors, is as much as anything an
indication of how far the concerns of music analysis have been determined by two
other Viennese thinkers of the fin-de-sie`cle, Schoenberg and Schenker. This has
begun to change more recently, as the influence of literary theory and narratology
has been felt in music analysis as in the other humanities disciplines.
3
To look within literary texts for analogies with Mahler’s musical texts, then, is
both justifiable historically and in line with much of our own contemporary
theoretical practice. The suggestion that there are specific narrative tropes common
to novels and Mahler’s symphonies has suggested itself to several scholars.
Anthony Newcomb, one of the pioneers of this sort of inquiry, has explored
parallels which he hears between the Ninth Symphony and the Bildungsroman,
4
and the present author has not been immune to the seductive force of such
speculation.
5
What this essay aims to do, however, is to trace a developing history
within Mahler’s engagement with different models of narrative. Studies such as
Newcomb’s have sought to place Mahler’s works alongside a generic formal
model, such as the Bildungsroman, which can be deemed to be characteristic of the
nineteenth century as a whole; the assumption is that this is such a typical and
well-used method by which a narrative articulates and interprets lived experience,
that its appearance as a point of reference for symphonic form is an inevitable
outcome of the music’s participation in the artistic life of its time. What is at stake is
a matter of archetypes, rather than the influence of specific writers or works upon
the individual composer. While I would accept most of these assumptions, I think
it would nevertheless be wrong to assume that narrative archetypes simply exist as
a ready-made stock for the nineteenth-century artist (writer or composer) to draw
upon, any more than musical forms function in this way. Mahler’s approach to
musical form develops and changes throughout his composing career, and indeed
contributes decisively to the use of the forms he employs. This is particularly true
regarding the twentieth-century use of symphonic form. The intention of this essay
is to sketch briefly this development in Mahler’s thinking, in terms of a changing
relationship to narrative as an organising force within musical form.
2
See in particular Allan Janik, and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), and Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: Politics and
culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
3
See for instance the series Word and Music Studies, ed. Walter Bernhart, Werner Wolf
and others (Amsterdam: Rodopi).
4
Anthony Newcomb, ‘Narrative archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony’, in Music and
Text: Critical inquiries, ed. Peter Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 118–36.
5
Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A study in musical semiotics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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Nineteenth-Century Music Review
At this point it is worth defining a little more closely what is meant by a
‘narrative’ description of musical form. What is at stake is more than simply an
alternative method of analytical interpretation in the sense of a technique to be
applied. To think of complex structures in music as the outworking of an impulse to
narrate is, as I have argued, consonant with the environment that produced the
works. Equally, not every sort of musical form can profitably be described in this
way. So, what are the features that might indicate a narratological impulse on the
part of the composer? For one thing, such an analysis is founded on the observation
thatmeaninginthemusicarisesnotoutofrepetitionofmaterial,butoutofits
significant transformation. If a story is being told, then this implies change, action,
event; the final state cannot be identical with the opening. This is precisely the
observation that leads Theodor Adorno to entitle two of the chapters of his
monograph on Mahler ‘Characters’ and ‘Novel’ respectively.
6
But while Adorno
makes acute observations concerning the consequences of the typically Mahlerian
techniques of constant variation of themes and manipulation of traditional form, he
is not concerned to draw many specific parallels between individual works of
literature and Mahler’s works. His main concern is to demonstrate what he terms
Mahler’s ‘nominalism’ of form, where a stultifying reliance on inherited models is
ceaselessly avoided through the inventiveness of the handling of materials. The
claimofthepresentessayisthatthisobservationcanbebroadenedthrough
looking at different stages of Mahler’s formal thinking.
I am going to discuss three distinct phases of Mahler’s creative output,
roughly corresponding to well-established divisions of his symphonic œuvre.
These phases not only reflect observable changes in his compositional techniques,
they also, to my mind, reflect changes of emphasis in his literary enthusiasms.
The devotee of Jean Paul: the First Symphony
The story of Mahler’s engagement with narrative form in the symphonies begins
with the subtitle of the First Symphony, Titan. This names the novel by Jean Paul
as the point of reference for the young Mahler’s first attempt to sustain the span
of symphonic form. The exact significance of this ‘point of reference’, however,
has been a subject of debate. Indeed, one of the most sensitive of Mahler’s post-war
biographers, Kurt Blaukopf, could not countenance any connection at all:
Mahler knew and loved the writings of Jean Paul, but anyone who has ever read
any of the latter’s work must conclude that there is no trace of his mannered style
in Mahler’s symphony.
7
Blaukopf goes so far as to suggest that the title Titan, which certainly had
Mahler’s acquiescence, even if it was not published at the symphony’s premiere,
8
must refer in a much less specific manner to an ideal of ‘Titanism’, in a gesture
6
Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Ein musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1960), trans. Edmund Jephcott, as Mahler: A musical physiognomy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
7
Kurt Blaukopf, Mahler, trans. Inge Goodwin (London: Allen Lane, 1973): 76.
8
The work was premiered in Budapest in November 1889. The title Titan was
published, along with a programmatic description of the whole work, for the second
performance, in Hamburg in 1893. Both these performances included as the second
movement the later discarded Andante entitled Blumine.
239Samuels: Narrative Form and Mahler’s Musical Thinking
analogous to the title Eroica in Beethoven.
9
That this is quite incorrect, is shown
by the programmatic description of the symphony, prepared by Mahler with his
friend Ferdinand Pfohl and published in the programme for the second
performance. The title is given as ‘Titan, a tone poem in symphony form: ‘‘From
the days of youth’’, Flower-, Fruit- and Thorn-pieces’, which refers to two of Jean
Paul’s novels (the full title of the novel Siebenka¨s describes the book as ‘Flower-,
Fruit-, and Thorn-pieces’).
10
Blaukopf’s complete bafflement, in placing the novel
Titan alongside Mahler’s symphony, is indicative both of the gap between
nineteenth-century and twentieth-century conceptions of the ‘purity’ of the
symphony as a communicative art form, and of the fate of Jean Paul as an author.
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) can accurately be described as one of
the most famous and least read authors of German Romanticism. He adopted the
pen-name ‘Jean Paul’ in homage, partly, toRousseau;anindicationbothofthe
international context and the philosophical seriousness which he regarded as proper
to his work. He was the author of works of aesthetics and educational theory, and
edited the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci; but his fame rests on his novels. He cited
Sterne and Richardson as principal influences, and his writing is m arked by
extraordinary density of plot and descriptive detail. In particular, he consistently
uses the motif of the Doppelga¨nger: characters are accompanied by their doubles, who
may have similar names, or even exchange names with them, so that the potential
confusion for the reader is immense. Jean Paul’s style is also marked, however , by
verbal brilliance, wit and humour, which attempts to draw the reader into an
enveloping, absorbing, yet endlessly de-centred and quirky narrative universe. In the
prefa ce to Siebenka¨s he jokes that he respects the Aristotelian principle that his book
may be read in a single day, but he has in mind the six-month day of the frozen North.
The combination of intellectual seriousness, perv asive humour , and fascination
with unstable, shifting identity explains immediately the appeal Jean Paul had for
the composer most notable for his devotion to him, Robert Schumann. Schumann’s
famous epithet for Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, that it is of ‘heavenly length’, is
followed in the next sentence of his article by a comparison of it with ‘a four-
volume novel by Jean Paul’.
11
Mahler’s own admiration for Jean Paul may have
arisen independently (as did that of Brahms, for instance), but can only have been
confirmed and strengthened by his love of Schumann’s music and writings.
What, though, is the legacy of Titan within Mahler’s First Symphony? This is a
complex issue, which has been recently addressed by more than one scholar,
although studies have tended to emphasise the heterogeneity of intertextual
references in Mahler’s symphony – something which, not surprisingly, is found
to be as true of his glances towards literature or visual art as it is of his allusions
to musical influences and forebears.
12
The role played by Jean Paul’s works, in
9
Blaukopf, Mahler.
10
The whole programme is translated in Peter Franklin, The Life of Mahler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 89–90.
11
Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York:
Norton, 1946): 107–112. Schumann’s article dates from 1840.
12
Herta Blaukopf, ‘Jean Paul, die erste Symphonie und Dostojewski’, in Gustav
Mahler: Werk und Wirken: Neue Mahler-Forschung aus Anlass des vierzigjahrigen Bestehens der
Internationalen Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft (Vienna: Vom Pasqualatihaus, 1996): 35–42;
Federico Celestini, ‘Literature as De´ja` Vu? The Third Movement of Gustav Mahler’s First
Symphony’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa
(Oxford: Legenda, 2006).
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Nineteenth-Century Music Review
particular, remains a fascinating question. For present purposes, the issue at stake
is the extent of the reflection of Jean Paul’s narrative within the musical process.
Despite Kurt Blaukopf’s dismissal of any connection between Mahler’s musical
style and Jean Paul’s manner of writing, there are elements within Titan that suggest
themselves immediately as things which must have resonated with the young,
ambitious composer’s own aspirations in the early 1880s, when the First Symphony
was gestating. The central character in this immense novel (it is Jean Paul’s longest)
is Albano, son of the Prince of Hohenfließ, from whom he is separated immediately
after his birth. The novel finally ends with Albano’s accession to his father’s title,
following his eventual discovery of his true identity and the death of his elder
brother. This basic Bildungsr oman frame surrounds a narrative of incredible
complexity. Much of the story concerns Albano’s relationship with the character
Roquairol, whom he first encounters as a model held up to him during his
education, and whom he later meets and befriends when he moves to Pestitz, the
capital of Hohenfließ (a location based on Leipzig). Roquairol is, typically of any
Jean P aul narrativ e, Albano’s Doppelga¨nger, able to imitate his voice and hand-
writing perfectly; he is also the villain of the story, who seduces both Albano’s foster
sister and, later, Albano’s intended wife Linda. Roquairol and Linda are both, in
fact, ‘Titans’ in the sense of the book’s title. They behave immoderately, and end by
‘finding their own hell’ as Jean Paul described it in a letter.
13
Their immoderation,
however, forms a part of their characters as geniuses, cultivating energy and
creativity ‘for their own sake’.
14
The philosophical premise of the novel is to attack
the idea that this manner of being is praiseworthy, or even sustainable. Albano
ultimately wins by ‘coming close’ to titanic stature, while yet harnessing his aims
to practical and humanitarian purpose. This purpose is fulfilled in his eventual
union with his beloved – not Linda now, but Idoine, the widow of Albano’s brother,
Crown Prince Luigi; inevitably, Idoine is another Doppelga¨nger, uncannily
resembling Linda and loving Albano no less. The union is sealed in a final chapter
illuminated by moonlight, with Luigi’s funeral as its backdrop. The closing
peroration celebrates universal brotherhood, and its language shows the longevity
of Jean P aul’s (and in particular , this book’s) influence over Mahler, since it is
strikingly similar to the close of DasLiedvonderErde,attheoppositeendofhis
output to the First Symphony. Here is the final sentence of the novel:
‘‘Look up to the fair heaven!’’ cried the sister to the lovers, in the ecstasy of her joy;
‘‘the rainbow of eternal peace blooms there, and the tempests are over, and the
world is all so bright and green. Wake up, my brother and sister!’’
15
And here is Mahler’s own transformation of Bethge’s poetry at the end of
‘Der Abschied’:
The lovely earth blooms everywhere in spring and is made green once more!
Everywhere and forever, forever the distance turns blue and bright!
Forever y forever!
16
13
The foregoing description is based on the summary of the novel in Timothy J.
Casey, Jean Paul: A reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 22–27.
14
ibid., p. 22.
15
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (‘Jean Paul’), Titan, 4 vols. (Berlin: Matzdorff,
1800–03). English edition: Titan: A romance, trans. C.T. Brooks (Boston: Ticknor and Fields,
1862): vol. 2,p.521 (Chapter given as ‘Thirty-fifth Jubilee, 146
th
Cycle’).
16
‘Die liebe Erde allu¨ berall blu¨ ht auf im Lenz und gru¨ nt aufs neu! allu¨ berall und
ewig, ewig blauen licht die Fernen, ewig, ewig y ewig, ewig y ewig, ewig y ewig!’
241Samuels: Narrative Form and Mahler’s Musical Thinking