Essay by Daniel Culver, Former Henry Veld Professor of Music

Theodore Adorno said (famously) about the music of Gustav Mahler: "Pedestrian the musical material, sublime the execution" (Adorno 61). I would like to take a moment to comment on what all of the fuss was about Mahler. As one gazes intently on the full score of the Second Symphony, the musical images that informed Mahler become clear. Now, I should remind the reader and listener that it was precisely the pedestrian musical material that Mahler employed which caused such consternation among his critics. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, there was an accepted, customary understanding of what was appropriate music for the formal concert hall. The graceful and elegant themes of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms were considered the sine qua non of musical utterance. Enter Gustav Mahler with his extraordinarily fertile imagination, along with a penchant for irony and paradox. His audacious inclusion of folk song, Heuriger Musik (music of the wine tavern), military marches, natural sounds (cowbells and bird calls), and the use of Klezmer music from the Shtetl all served as the musical idea for his thematic material.

This all goes to the question of originality—that final arbiter of worth and force in the late 19th century. The severest judges of Mahler assessed his music as nothing more than a haphazard agglomeration of sound. The seeming heterogeneity of style for which Mahler was accused was something of which he was aware. Perhaps the criticism had to do with a kind of schizophrenic character shift in the symphonies; one only has to contrast theme groups in any of his first movements to understand an almost apocalyptic change of mood within movements. The contrasts of moods and mode, banal and serious, lyric and aggressive were considered by some as a profanation of the symphonic ideal. Maybe a dose of regrettably ugly and vulgar anti-Semitism was also at play. Whatever the criticism, it was precisely these observations regarding his music which, for many, were the touchstone of his genius. Some have tried to categorize all of his material—a peculiar central European fixation. For example, the consummate Mahler biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, has identified the following categories descriptive of Mahler's output: quotation, quotation from memory, self-quotation, borrowing, allusion, echo or reminiscence, similarity, and homage (de La Grange 127). Obviously, scholars of Mahler seldom agree on much of anything. However, it is safe to say that the idea of "Music about music in Mahler" (Ibid.) is central to a deeper understanding of the score and its musical intentions—intentions, which if we are to believe Mahler himself, are devoid of program and simply an expression of Mahler's world.

The use of the banal in a high art, as music was considered to be, was for some an inexcusable intrusion on artistic sensibilities. For others, like Theodore Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg, and Luciano Berio, transformation of the ordinary into the magisterial was the true genius of Gustav Mahler. The score shown here of the opening statement of the Klopstock Ode appears on the surface to be a harmless enough setting of a highly regarded text proclaimed by a chorus of many. But, closer examination reveals that Mahler does not merely state the obvious. Rather, he continually and subtly recasts the original material so that a wonderful transmogrification of the gesture is illuminated. Mahler, it becomes abundantly clear, is incapable and unwilling to simply quote himself directly. The spinning out of the musical material, yes, sometimes mundane musical material, achieves an artistic transformation that still moves us in a sensuous way, impossible to describe adequately. Ludwig Wittgenstein, no advocate for the music of Gustav Mahler, at least got it right when he said at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" (Wittgenstein 89).