Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony:

Program, Reception, and Evocations of the Popular

by

Timothy David Freeze

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Music Musicology)
in The University of Michigan
2010

Doctoral Committee:
Associate Professor Steven M. Whiting, Co-Chair
Professor Albrecht Riethmüller, Freie Universität Berlin, Co-Chair
Professor Roland J. Wiley
Professor Michael D. Bonner
Associate Professor Mark A. Clague
© 2010 Timothy David Freeze

All rights reserved

To Grit

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The road leading to the completion of this dissertation was longer and more

scenic than I ever intended it to be. It is a great pleasure to acknowledge here the many

individuals and organizations that provided support and encouragement along the way.

I am especially grateful to the co-chairs of my committee. Without the unflagging

support of Steven M. Whiting, whose sage counsel on matters musical and practical

guided me from start to finish, this project would not have been possible. I am equally

indebted to Albrecht Riethmüller, whose insight and intellectual example were a beacon

by whose light this dissertation took shape. I would also like to thank R. John Wiley,

whose extensive and penetrating feedback improved the dissertation and my own

thinking in countless ways, and Mark Clague and Michael Bonner, both of whom

provided valuable comments on content and style.

In Ann Arbor, I would like to acknowledge the support of the entire musicology

faculty at the University of Michigan. Louise K. Stein gave helpful advice in the early

stages of this project. In Berlin, I benefited from conversations with Federico Celestini,

Sherri Jones, and Peter Moormann. In Vienna, Hans-Dieter Roser, Stefan Schmidl, and

Morten Solvik gave generously of their time and expertise, and Norbert Nischkauer

kindly made available many scores in his private collection. In addition, I would like to

thank John Behling, Carlo Caballero, Stephen Hefling, Jason Heilman, David Paul,

iii
Stephen Rodgers, Scott Southard, Ryan Wines, and Jim Zychowicz. Four comrades in

the dissertational trenches—Alexandra Monchik, William Quillen, Christopher Scheer,

and Laurie Silverberg—deserve special recognition for their help over the years.

I had the great fortune to receive generous financial support for research, travel,

and writing from the following sources: a Regents Graduate Fellowship, Rackham

Humanities Candidacy Research Fellowship, Louise Cuyler Award Travel Grant, and

Rackham One-Term Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan; a fellowship

with extension from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at

the Freie Universität Berlin, and research grants from the German Academic Exchange

Service (DAAD) and the Fulbright Program. I would have stumbled on many an

administrative hurdle were it not for the help of Karen Frye, Karin Goihl, and Ulrike

Seiss. I also owe my gratitude to the helpful staff of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin,

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,

Wien-Bibliothek, and Internationale Gustav-Mahler Gesellschaft.

It is with particular pleasure that I recognize three individuals who, more than

any others, endured the vicissitudes of my doctoral career, and did so with unfailing

grace and magnanimity. My parents, David and Jean Freeze, have been a wellspring of

support in these years, as in every one preceding. Finally, I could never fully convey my

indebtedness to my wife Grit Herzmann. Suffice it to say that the road would have been

far bumpier and less scenic had she not come along for the ride. She will forever be the

greatest discovery of my dissertation, which is lovingly dedicated to her.

iv
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

List of Appendices vii

Abstract viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1

Mahler the Idealist: The Program and Promotion of the Third Symphony 9

Genesis of the Third Symphony 13

Mahler’s Aesthetic Views 16

Mahler on Program Music and Programs 30

Influence of Programmatic Ideas on Composition 44

Chapter 2

The Reception and Study of Mahler’s Allusions to Vernacular Music 55

The Early Monographs: Justifying Allusions to Vernacular Styles 57

Influence of Race on the Reception of Mahler’s Vernacularisms 73

Comparative Studies of Mahler’s Vernacularisms 85

Scholarship since the Mahler Renaissance 89

Allusions to Operetta: A Case Study from Mahler’s First Symphony 102

v
Chapter 3

Multivalent Evocation in the Posthorn Solos of the Third Symphony 111

The Posthorn and its Imitations in Art Music before Mahler 117

Popular Models for Mahler’s Posthorn Episodes 128

Multivalent Evocation 135

Chapter 4

Allusions to Operetta and Military Bands in Mahler’s Marches 139

Mahler and Operetta 140

Military Music and Operetta: Two Intertwined Genres 147

Marches in Military Music and Operetta 155

Stylizations of Military and Light Marches in Mahler’s Oeuvre 167

Chapter 5

Mahler the Subversive: The First Movement of the Third Symphony 187

Form as Manipulation of Idiom 188

Allusions, Quotations, and their Meaning 216

Associative Power of Vernacular Styles 243

Appendices 259

Bibliography 346

vi
 LIST OF APPENDICES

Appendix A

Formal Programmatic Commentaries on the Third Symphony 259

Appendix B

Informal Commentaries on the First Movement of the Third 276

Appendix C

Operettas conducted by Mahler 287

Appendix D

Musical Examples for Chapter 2 288

Appendix E

Tables and Musical Examples for Chapter 3 293

Appendix F

Tables and Musical Examples for Chapter 4 302

Appendix G

Figures, Tables, and Musical Examples for Chapter 5 320

vii
 ABSTRACT

GUSTAV MAHLER’S THIRD SYMPHONY:

PROGRAM, RECEPTION, AND EVOCATIONS OF THE POPULAR
by

Timothy David Freeze

Co-Chairs: Steven M. Whiting and Albrecht Riethmüller

This dissertation examines Mahler’s evocations of popular styles in the Third

Symphony. These vernacularisms, long recognized as a hallmark of the work, remain

peculiarly understudied. Here they are considered from a number of perspectives: their

critical and scholarly reception, their sources in the popular musical environment of

Mahler’s day, and their aesthetic function within the symphony.

The study begins with the composer’s own words about his music. Chapter 1

argues that the public programs were a means to promote the symphony at a time when

Mahler lacked a secure position in the concert hall repertory, and that these programs,

though part of the creative process, did not motivate the work’s specific allusions to

popular styles. Chapter 2 shifts focus to reception, demonstrating how strongly the

aesthetic and ideological frameworks of listeners condition which referents they

attribute to Mahler’s vernacularisms. Before World War II, for example, the

intersection of Mahler’s Jewish heritage with ideologies of race greatly influenced

whether writers identified references to folksongs or to popular music. The next part of

the dissertation uncovers allusions to popular styles based on musical and expressive

viii
conventions no longer familiar today. Chapter 3 focuses on the third movement,

identifying elements of posthorn stylizations unique to genres of entertainment music.

Chapter 4 examines the variety of popular march types in the first movement, using as a

basis of comparison sound profiles derived from military music and operetta, a genre

that Mahler enjoyed and knew intimately.

This dissertation proposes that Mahler found folk and popular styles attractive

in part for the manifold associations that lurked behind their deceptive immediacy. His

vernacularisms are thus most typically instances of multivalent evocation: seemingly

referential music that can be convincingly traced to multiple, even contradictory

sources. Chapter 5 places these evocations in the context of an extended analysis of the

formal processes and semantic content of the first movement. Specific allusions to

popular styles do not contribute overtly to the symphony’s meaning as articulated in its

song texts. Instead, Mahler uses multivalent evocation of vernacular styles to trigger

strong emotional reactions, positive and negative, in a maximally diverse audience.

ix
 INTRODUCTION

Mahler’s symphonies teem with allusions to folk and popular styles. These

vernacularisms still speak with an immediacy and clarity of expression to listeners

today, conveying a powerful sense of the rich musical environment in which Mahler

lived.1 Mahler’s allusions to popular styles, though long recognized as a hallmark of the

Third Symphony, remain peculiarly understudied. In fact, they are far more complex

and ambiguous than has been portrayed in the secondary literature. This dissertation

considers the vernacularisms of the Third Symphony from a number of perspectives:

their critical and scholarly reception, their sources in the popular musical environment

of Mahler’s day, and their aesthetic function within the symphony.

Allusions to folk and popular styles cannot be reduced to a purely musical

substrate. Being inherently referential, they are constituted fully only in the act of

listening. For this reason, vernacularisms are particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes

of individual experiences and ideological agendas. As Carl Dahlhaus has claimed, “the

categories that take a formative part in musical perception are just as aesthetically ‘real’

when they owe their impact less to a solid foothold in the musical material than to

associations accumulated over the years.”2 In this dissertation, therefore, an important

1 Consider, for example, the quotation by Robert Morgan below (pp. 98–99).
2 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 41.

1
part of the story of Mahler’s evocations of the popular is the discourses that convey

these categories and ideologies.

The lack of historical examination of Mahler’s allusions to popular music in the

Third Symphony is partially concealed by the prominent role given to this aspect in the

literature. In many instances, ascriptions of folk and popular elements use these

designations not as historical, but as critical categories not unlike claims of “triviality”

and “banality.” Adorno, for example, saw the music’s supposed popular elements and

trivialities as the wellspring of Mahler’s special tone and an invitation to theorize about

the social and philosophical implications of the composer’s works.3 Treating this aspect

as a conduit for broad aesthetic and social concepts, however, disregards two basic

questions that animate this study: how do non-musical factors influence the sources

adduced for Mahler’s vernacularisms, and how do these allusions relate to the popular

music of his day?

Such historical contextualization might seem unnecessary or even pedantic,

given the simplicity of the musical idioms in question and the apparent proximity of

Mahler’s time. Even the youngest listeners today, after all, are but a couple generations

removed from his milieu. As this study shows, however, many of Mahler’s references to

popular music are based on conventions whose details have faded over this short time

span. Identifying such connections to the musical environment in which Mahler

composed requires a mode of inquiry more historical than intuitive.

The richness of Mahler’s music endows it with the ability to sustain sharply

differentiated interpretations. Over the years, it has been held up as the culmination of

3 For example, Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik [1960], in Theodor
W. Adorno: Die musikalischen Monographien, vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2003), ch. 2, “Ton”; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 2, “Tone.”

2
absolute music, as philosophically distended program music, and as revelations of the

inner experiences of a composer obsessed with his childhood and matters of life and

death. Examining how Mahler drew on the popular culture of his day casts the

composer and his work in a less familiar light. In place of the Janus-faced artist, looking

back to the music and formative moments of his childhood and forward to the day when

posterity would finally embrace his works, the Mahler that comes to the fore in these

pages is a self-conscious artist, engaged in his contemporary musical environment and

sensitive to the effect of his music on listeners in his lifetime. Mahler, like many

composers of the nineteenth century, may have subscribed to the cliché that “my time

will come,”4 but his actions and compositional style betray his preoccupation with the

present. His works deserve to be examined in this context.

The dissertation begins with Mahler’s own words about his music. He provided

programmatic guides at early concerts, and more of his private commentaries on the

Third Symphony survive than for any of his other works. Hence the question of

program music is more fraught here than with the rest of his oeuvre. In recent decades,

scholars have often turned to these images and ideas to explicate the symphony’s music

and its vernacularisms. Because of the looming presence of these issues in the

historiography of the Third Symphony, it is necessary to examine them closely at the

outset, even though it will ultimately be argued that programmatic associations did not

motivate the work’s specific allusions to popular styles.

4 Mahler made this oft-quoted statement in 1902 in a letter about the greater success currently

enjoyed by Richard Strauss. Mahler believed that posterity would reverse their relative fortunes and
deem his own works the superior. See Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Vienna:
Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1949), 280; trans. Basil Creighton as Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, rev.
ed., ed. Donald Mitchell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 221; and Henry-Louis de La
Grange and Günther Weiss, eds., Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife, trans. and rev. Antony Beaumont
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 100.

3
 The goal of chapter 1 is to assess the functions that programs served for Mahler,

from inception to performance of the Third Symphony. The chapter begins with a brief

overview of the work’s genesis and of Mahler’s complex aesthetic outlook. At the root of

these views is a belief in the distinction between music’s external form, which is of the

material world, and its intrinsic content, which is a conduit to metaphysical aspects of

the universe. Mahler’s programmatic statements consist largely of his favored

metaphors—nature, mythology, feelings—for this ineffable content. Such programmatic

associations played some role in the composition of the symphony, but documentary

evidence does not generally illuminate whether a particular idea was a positive impetus

to creation or a retroactive description of music already written. A comparison of

manuscripts with Mahler’s statements suggests that he gave musical ideas the higher

priority, bending ideational associations to match the new directions taken by musical

developments. Mahler published programmatic guides based on these associations not

because he considered them necessary for a full appreciation of the music, but in order to

promote the work’s reception at a time when he lacked a secure position in the concert

hall repertory. This constitutes yet another example of Mahler being attuned to the

conditions and audiences of his contemporary audiences.

Chapter 2 shifts focus to the reception of Mahler’s allusions to folk and popular

styles. It is the first extensive overview of the ways that scholars have described this

aspect of Mahler’s works. The chapter argues that Mahler’s vernacularisms act as a kind

of tabula rasa in which writers inscribe their own aesthetic and ideological frameworks

as if inhering in the music itself. When writers attribute sources to Mahler’s vernacular

references, they are usually responding to the expressive effect of the music, not

4
asserting an ethnographically or historically informed relationship between Mahler’s

works and the musical environment in which they were written.

One of the issues that has conditioned which sources scholars attribute to

Mahler’s vernacularisms is a specious hierarchy that emerged by the mid-nineteenth

century between rural folk music, which was viewed as aesthetically superior, and urban

entertainment music, which was thought to be aesthetically and morally inferior.5

Another, which strongly shaped the reception of Mahler’s vernacularisms before World

War II, was race. Three discourses on race identified in this chapter are anti-Jewish,

pro-Jewish, and assimilationist. Anti-Jewish texts were the most prone to take Mahler’s

vernacularisms as allusions to popular music or inauthentic folk styles. Commentary

written from the pro-Jewish perspective claimed that expressive and spiritual traits of

Mahler’s music, especially the vernacularisms, were specifically Jewish. The majority of

Mahler’s early proponents, however, wrote from an assimilationist perspective; that is,

they presented Mahler’s music as culturally German. These texts emphasized musical

connections to folk music and largely side-stepped the issue of allusions to popular

styles. The assimilationist perspective of the early monographs has had a lasting

influence on later scholarship on Mahler’s allusions to vernacular styles.

The closing section of chapter 2 demonstrates how much remains to be

discovered about Mahler’s allusions to popular music by considering the veritable locus

classicus of writing on this trait—the third movement of the First Symphony—in the

context of a popular genre that Mahler knew intimately, but which is largely neglected

as a resource for his works: operetta. The many points of comparison suggest the

promise of further comparative research into Mahler’s allusions to popular styles, and

5 For more on these issues, see ch. 2, pp. 57–63.

5
they also give a taste of the multiplicity of references that are often entangled in his

vernacularisms.

The rest of the dissertation focuses on prominent vernacularisms in the Third

Symphony: the posthorn episodes of the third movement, and the marches of the first

movement. Chapter 3 deals with the more concise of the two references. Scholars have

long described the posthorn melodies as folk-like. After reviewing a number of potential

allusions to folksongs cited in the literature, this chapter examines the solos in the

context of three other repertoires: actual posthorn signals and melodies, representations

of the posthorn in art and popular music, and the lyrical trumpet solos then common in

entertainment music. The chapter identifies musical traits common to popular

representations of the posthorn that the other repertoires did not share. Mahler’s first

posthorn solo is then analyzed alongside two of the most famous representatives of such

pieces: Heinrich Schäffer’s song “Die Post im Walde” and the Rhine Serenade from

Viktor Nessler’s Trompeter von Säkkingen. Mahler almost certainly knew the first song,

and he conducted Nessler’s work over thirty times. The striking similarities to Mahler’s

posthorn solos strongly suggest that he deliberately imitated the instrument as it was

commonly stylized in the popular sphere.

The chapter concludes by proposing a new way to understand Mahler’s

vernacularisms, here called multivalent evocation: seemingly referential music that can be

convincingly traced to multiple, even contradictory sources. Mahler’s posthorn solos are

a radical instance of this technique. They contain compelling allusions to folksong,

entertainment music, instrumental art music, and functional music. Mahler

demonstrably knew all of these repertoires and pieces. What attracted him to vernacular

6
styles, then, was the ambiguity and richness of associations that lurked behind their

deceptive immediacy.

The marches in the first movement of the Third Symphony are further examples

of multivalent evocation. To demonstrate this requires that sound profiles of different

kinds of marches in Mahler’s musical environment first be established. This is the

purpose of chapter 4, which develops sound profiles for military marches and for a kind

of march, here called the light march, that was as typical for operetta as it was contrary

to the sound of military bands. The chapter begins by outlining Mahler’s experience

with operetta, including his opinion of the genre. Unlike many of his contemporaries,

Mahler did not consider folk music to be aesthetically superior to genres of popular

entertainment. He could thus allude to operetta as freely as he did to folksong or

military styles.

The chapter then focuses on the nexus of military music and operetta, which

were closely related genres. The essential musical traits of military and light marches

required Mahler to appropriate them in different ways. Mahler evoked military bands

primarily through timbral effects that reflect the most common clichés about the

ensembles in the popular imagination. He favored using particular percussion,

prominent trumpet lines, consistently loud dynamics, and distance effects. Mahler’s

light marches can be identified by a combination of parameters: orchestration, dynamics,

and expressive character. Distinguishing among these different kinds of popular

marches yields a historically informed representation of Mahler’s popular musical

environment and draws on conventions that were second nature to Mahler and his

audiences. Because the light march is a compositional type described for the first time in

7
this dissertation, the final section of chapter 4 assays its merits by considering examples

from a number of Mahler’s works other than the Third Symphony.

The marches in the first movement of the Third Symphony are among the most

notorious elements in Mahler’s entire oeuvre, making the movement an ideal case for

study of his vernacularisms. Whereas the two preceding chapters concentrated on the

origins and musical basis of allusions to vernacular styles, chapter 5 considers them in

the context of a broader analysis of the first movement. The analysis unfolds in three

stages. The first deals with the movement’s immanent musical logic. Within the

structural outlines of rotational form, Mahler gives an extraordinarily prominent role to

idiom and sound as formal constituents. The second phase of the analysis turns to the

referential qualities of the movement. Mahler created a network of melodic, tonal, and

stylistic relationships that project the semantic content of the symphony’s two song

texts to the other, purely instrumental movements. In addition, large swaths of the first

movement speak with the expressive dialect of operetta and programmatic military

music. The multivalent evocation of popular styles, however, is little involved in the

semantic content of the symphony. The third phase of the analysis concerns what

Mahler stood to gain by having such provocative connections to entertainment music in

his symphony. Questions of Mahler’s intent cannot be known with certainty, but it is

reasonable to surmise that he sought to elicit powerful emotional effects in his listeners.

Vernacularisms and multivalent evocation were ideally suited toward this end, for they

could engage the personal experiences, aesthetic convictions, and social and even racial

ideologies of a broad and diverse public. Although the vividness of Mahler’s allusions to

folk and popular styles may have been extraneous to the work’s meaning as articulated

in its song texts, it was no less an integral part of his aesthetic strategy.

8
 CHAPTER 1

MAHLER THE IDEALIST:

THE PROGRAM AND PROMOTION OF THE THIRD SYMPHONY

The symphony is more comprehensible than one would guess

from reading the profound, German commentary.

—Sibmacher Zijnen, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche, 19031

On 9 November 1896, days before Mahler completed the orchestral fair copy of

his Third Symphony, Arthur Nikisch conducted the première of its second movement in

Berlin. The movement carried the title “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me /

from the Symphony in F major (III) ‘A Summer-Morning’s Dream.’” The concert’s

program booklet contained a thematic introduction, penned by Mahler himself, as well

as programmatic titles for the entire symphony:

Introduction: “Pan Awakens”

No. 1. “Summer Marches In.” (Bacchic Procession.)
No. 2. “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.” (Menuett)
No. 3. “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.” (Rondeau)

1 Sibmacher Zijnen, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 18 October 1903; quoted in Rudolf Stephan,
“Die Mahler-Rezeption in Holland 1903-1911,” in Mahler-Interpretation: Aspekte zum Werk und Wirken von
Gustav Mahler, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1985), 83: “Die Symphonie ist faßlicher, als man beim
Lesen der tiefsinnigen deutschen Kommentare vermuten könnte.” All translations are my own unless
otherwise indicated.

9
 No. 4. “What Man Tells Me.” (Alto Solo)
No. 5. “What the Angels Tell Me.” (Women’s chorus with alto solo.)
No. 6 (Final movement). “What Love Tells Me.” (Adagio)2

A few months later, on 9 March 1897, Felix Weingartner led “What the Flowers

in the Meadow Tell Me” along with the first performances of movements three and six.

For this concert Mahler provided an even more extensive programmatic guide. In

addition to movement titles, the booklet reproduced the finale’s epigraph and a narrative

description of the third movement written by Mahler especially for the occasion.3

Over five years would pass before the first performance of the entire symphony

and the publication of its score. In contrast to the increasingly extensive explanatory

apparatus that framed the earlier performances, Mahler revoked all programmatic

associations in these instances and in nearly all subsequent performances. Generic

rubrics alone replaced thematic introductions, titles, epigraphs, and narratives. The

work was advertised as follows:

Symphony no. 3
in 2 parts
for large orchestra, solo alto, women’s and children’s chorus.

Part I.
No. 1. Introduction and first movement.

Part II.
No. 2. Tempo di Menuetto
No. 3. Rondo.
No. 4. Alto solo.
attacca. No. 5. Women’s and children’s chorus with alto solo.
attacca. No. 6. Adagio4

2 See appendix A.23 for a transcription of the entire program; Mahler’s handwritten draft is
transcribed in appendix A.22.
3 See appendix A.24 for a reconstruction of the program.
4 A facsimile of the poster is reproduced in Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler / Richard Strauss
Briefwechsel: 1888–1911, rev. ed. (Munich: Piper, 1988), 67:
Symphonie No. 3
in 2 Abtheilungen
für grosses Orchester, Alt-Solo, Frauen- und Knabenchor.

10
 An intractable problem in Mahler scholarship is determining the relationship of

the programmatic commentaries to his music.5 Over the past thirty-five years, scholars

have tended to treat Mahler’s Third as a program symphony.6 Indeed, the primary

means of explaining the expressive character of the movements and their

vernacularisms has been with reference to the programmatic titles and to Mahler’s

private commentaries about the symphony. Donald Mitchell has staked out the most

extreme position, claiming that the “enormous importance of the dramatic programme

I. Abtheilung.
No. 1. Einleitung und I. Satz.
II. Abtheilung.
No. 2. Tempo di Menuetto
No. 3. Rondo.
No. 4. Altsolo
attacca. No. 5. Frauen- und Knabenchor mit Alt-Solo.
attacca. No. 6. Adagio
5 The literature on Mahler’s use of programs is very extensive. Prominent contributions include:
Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler, vol. 1, Die geistige Welt Gustav Mahlers in systematischer Darstellung
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977): 15–35; Edward R. Reilly, “A Re-Examination of the Manuscripts
of Mahler’s Third Symphony,” in Colloque international Gustav Mahler: 25, 26, 27 Janvier 1985, 62–72
(Paris: Association Gustav Mahler, 1986); Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier’ and the Problem of
Program Music,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 1 (summer 1988): 27–53; Friedhelm Krummacher, Gustav
Mahlers III. Symphonie (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991), 9–22; Stephen E. Hefling, “Miners Digging from
Opposite Sides: Mahler, Strauss, and the Problem of Program Music,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives
on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam, 41–53 (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1992); and Vera Micznik, “Music and Aesthetics: The Programmatic Issue,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35–48.
6 See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, The Wunderhorn Years [1975], rev. Paul Banks and

David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 193; Susanne Vill,
Vermittlungsformen verbalisierter und musikalischer Inhalte in der Musik Gustav Mahlers, Frankfurter Beiträge
zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 6 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1979), 281–314; Constantin Floros, Gustav
Mahler, vol. 3, Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985), 75–101; Peter Franklin, Mahler:
Symphony no. 3, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Morten
Solvik Olsen, “Culture and the Creative Imagination: The Genesis of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony”
(PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992); Hefling, “Mahler: Symphonies 1–4,” in The Nineteenth-
Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 390–401; James Hepokoski,
“Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music,
ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 445–47. Notable exceptions to this trend
include Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie; Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit
(Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991), 152–203; and Vera Micznik, “‘Ways of Telling’ in Mahler’s Music: The
Third Symphony as Narrative Text,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005), 295–323. Danuser claims that the programs have been ignored in the reception of
Mahler’s music since 1960 (Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit, 134). He originally wrote this sentence in an
article in 1975, when it could reasonably be said of German-language scholarship; the sentence, reprinted
in 1991 without alteration or qualification in his monograph, is false.

11
for his early symphonies cannot be gainsaid: the symphonies are the programmes,

embodied and transcended, it is true, but unthinkable without them.”7 Constantin Floros

has even spoken of a conspiracy among early Mahler scholars to suppress the true

programmatic nature of the symphonies.8 More recently, in the Cambridge History of

Nineteenth Century Music (2002), James Hepokoski articulated the view as follows: “Had

he not suppressed their original programmes, Mahler’s First and Third Symphonies

would qualify unequivocally” as program symphonies.9

Underpinning these views is the assumption that Mahler’s symphony contains

musical features that would not have arisen but by dint of a program. But the

interaction of ideas and music in the Third Symphony is more complex than a simple

label like program music can possibly convey. The primary goal of this chapter is to

determine what can be known about the role of programmatic ideas and commentaries

in the composition of the Third Symphony. How far can facts and evidence take us, and

where does interpretation begin? To address these questions properly requires an

overview of the work’s genesis as well as of Mahler’s somewhat complicated aesthetic

views. These are presented in the first two sections. The final section lays out Mahler’s

thoughts on program music and uses biographical, documentary, and musical evidence

to determine the relationship of program to music in Mahler’s creative process and

finished symphony.

7 Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, 2:193. All emphases appearing within quotations are original.
8 Floros, Gustav Mahler, 1:15–17.
9 Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception,” 446. In Hepokoski’s taxonomy of symphonic types,
Mahler’s Third fits under “Tacit, implicit or suspected programmes throughout or of substantial sections”
(p. 444).

12
Genesis of the Third Symphony

Several scholars have reconstructed the Third Symphony’s genesis in

considerable detail.10 Only the basic chronology and sources need to be outlined here.

Mahler wrote the symphony over the course of one and a half years, from June 1895 to

November 1896, adhering to his customary pattern of composing over summer vacation

and then preparing fair copies of the scores as he shouldered directorial responsibilities

of the opera season. The first summer yielded movements two through six as well as

some sketches for the first movement. At this time, the symphony still had a projected

seventh movement, the Wunderhorn song “Das himmlische Leben,” which had been

composed in 1892.11 In the spring of 1896, Mahler prepared fair copies of movements

two, three, and five. That summer he composed the first movement and jettisoned the

song finale, leaving the six-movement symphony known today. He worked on the fair

copies of the outer movements in the fall, completing the autograph score on 22

November 1896.12

Throughout composition and the initial performances of individual movements,

Mahler elaborated on the Third Symphony’s content. These remarks fall into two

10 The most thorough and reliable treatment is Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,”

354–500. Though similar information can sometimes be found in more widely published works, I will cite
Solvik for most codecological issues on account of its accuracy and comprehensiveness. See also Susan
Filler, “Editorial Problems in the Symphonies of Gustav Mahler: A Study of the Sources of the Third and
Tenth Symphonies” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1977), 20–224; Peter Franklin, “The Gestation
of Mahler’s Third Symphony,” Music & Letters 58, no. 4 (October 1977): 439–46; John Williamson,
“Mahler’s Compositional Process: Reflections on an Early Sketch for the Third Symphony’s First
Movement,” Music & Letters 61, no. 314 (July–October 1980): 338–45; Reilly, “A Re-Examination,” 62–72;
Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie, 23–54; Franklin, Mahler, 41–51.
11 The Wunderhorn song “Ablösung im Sommer,” on which much of the third movement of the
Third is based, was written by 1890. Sketches of marches for the first movement appear in a notebook
alongside sketches for the second movement of the Second Symphony and were probably written in 1893;
there is no indication that this material was originally written with later inclusion in the Third Symphony
in mind.
12 It is not known when the fair copy to movement four was completed. It was either in the

summer or fall of 1896. See Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 386–88.

13
groups: the formal program and informal commentaries.13 The symphony’s formal

program consists of those titles, mottos, and inscriptions that Mahler made (or intended

to make) publicly available at performances and in the published score.14 Appendix A

details all versions of the formal program, set out chronologically insofar as possible.

The table includes versions of the titles and inscriptions from early stages of

composition, and it draws on a range of sources: drafts of projected movement titles,

musical manuscripts, letters, conversations, and concert program notes. With the

exception of the narrative description that Mahler penned for the première of the third

movement, the final program appears in full in the symphony’s autograph fair copy (see

appendix A.21).

Informal commentaries comprise Mahler’s private remarks. These came to light

largely after the composer’s death, in volumes of recollections and letters published by

his intimates and colleagues.15 Appendix B lists all of Mahler’s informal commentaries

for the first movement, which has more than any other movement. This is due both to

its size, which approaches that of the other five combined, and to its gestation being a

year longer and better documented than that of the others. The informal and formal

13 My distinction between formal program and informal commentaries is similar to Gérard

Genette’s distinction between the public and private epitext (see Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,
trans. Jane E. Lewin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 344–403). Micznik has usefully
applied Genette’s terminology in her essay on Mahler’s Third Symphony, “‘Ways of Telling.’”
14 The programmatic inscriptions within movements are the only formal associations that

Mahler never made public. That he originally intended to is strongly suggested by their presence in the
manuscript fair copy. By the time the score was published five years later, however, Mahler had
renounced the symphony’s programmatic guide.
15 Another possible source is the personal score of the conductor and early Mahler supporter
Willem Mengelberg. It contains annotations pertaining to the expressive character and musical meaning,
which Mengelberg claims were based directly on conversations with Mahler. See Rudolf Stephan, Gustav
Mahler. Werk und Interpretation. Autographe, Partituren, Dokumente (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1979), 85; and
Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 198–99.

14
associations overlap to the extent that Mahler discussed in private his plans for the

symphony’s public program.

Mahler’s intention to write a program can be traced back to his initial

conceptions of the symphony. Among the earliest documents are drafts of movement

titles recounted by Alma Mahler-Werfel and Paul Bekker (see appendix A.2, A.4, A.5–

6). The drafts either preceded or coincided with the first days of composition in early

June 1895. In addition, a number of the oldest extant musical manuscripts bear

programmatic titles, too (see appendix A.1, A.3, A.7). Hence the symphony’s earliest

sources all point to Mahler’s preoccupation with programmatic titles. His intention for

these to constitute a formal program accompanying the work’s performances and

publication became explicit at the end of the summer of 1895. As his working vacation

drew to a close, and with movements two through seven largely completed, Mahler sent

many friends letters soliciting feedback about the titles’ intelligibility: would they

convey his intentions to an average listener?16 Through the composition’s remaining

stages and the initial performances of isolated movements, Mahler never called the titles

into question. The Third Symphony, therefore, was created with the intention that it

would have a publicly available set of formal, programmatic associations. To assess their

significance for the work’s composition and interpretation, we must first situate them

within the context of Mahler’s aesthetic views.

16 Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 2d ed. (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 1996), 148–49; Knud
Martner, ed., Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, Bill Hopkins (New
York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), 162–63; Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Unbekannte Briefe (Vienna: Paul
Zsolnay, 1983), 23–24.

15
Mahler’s Aesthetic Views

Mahler’s aesthetic views are not easily aligned with the partisan debates that

marked Austro-German musical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Mahler’s discussions with Richard Strauss in 1894, the year before Mahler set to work

on the Third Symphony, revealed their differing outlooks and left Mahler feeling like an

outsider to rival aesthetic camps. Afterward he wrote his sister: “More and more I see

that I stand entirely alone amongst present-day musicians. Our goals diverge. From my

point of view, I can only see everywhere either old-classical or New-German

pedantry.”17

Mahler’s sense of alienation underscores the importance of creating an outline of

his aesthetic views from his own statements. Like most nineteenth-century composers,

he never codified his thoughts in a treatise or systematic summary. Comments are

instead scattered throughout his correspondence and in conversations recounted by

others. Two sources are particularly rich for the years of the Third Symphony’s

conception and early performances. Mahler’s letters from 1893–1902 reveal that he

gave considerable thought to such aesthetic issues as the nature of musical content, the

relationship of words to music, and the role of programs. Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s

recollections are another central source for this period. Sensing the historic importance

of her interlocutor, Bauer-Lechner chronicled numerous conversations in which Mahler

expounded upon music and the compositional process.18

17 Translated by Stephen McClatchie in The Mahler Family Letters (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 257.
18 The revised German edition contains many important passages not found in the English
translation. See Herbert Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner
(Hamburg: Wagner, 1984); and Peter Franklin, Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner,
trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980). Though a few scholars have questioned the reliability of
her claims, the aesthetic views that she attributes to Mahler seem trustworthy because they accord so
well with the views that Mahler expressed in his letters. For a skeptical take on her recollections, see

16
 Mahler’s was a philosophical aesthetics. Although he often spoke about music, he

only seldom described technical features like harmonic language or formal structure.

His primary interest was in music’s meaning or essence, which he most commonly

called “content” (Inhalt).19 This dichotomy between form and content was a central

aesthetic question of the nineteenth century. Thomas Grey has summarized three basic

approaches as “content and/or/as form.”20 Most Austro-German aesthetic commentary

differentiated between form and content (“and”), often privileging one concept over the

other (“or”). An alternative approach collapsed the dichotomy altogether, seeing content

as form (“as”). Mahler clearly maintained the distinction, and his overwhelming

attention to content betrays his belief in its priority.

The distinction between form and content, surface appearance and hidden

essence, points to the idealist categories of thought that inform Mahler’s worldview and

underpin his aesthetics. Idealism has many different meanings and a complex history.

The relevant sense here comes from German idealism of the late eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.21 It is based on the metaphysical thesis that the most fundamental

constituents of the universe are mental or in some sense ideal. This ideal content was

Hans Ferdinand Redlich, review of Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, by Theodor W. Adorno, Die
Musikforschung 19 (1966): 224. See also Leon Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?” in Mahler and his World,
ed. Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 50.
19 Other terms that Mahler used in relation to music’s essence are feeling (Empfindung) and inner

program (inneres Program).

20 Thomas Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18–42.
21 This is not to be conflated with subjective idealism, associated most notably with the British

philosopher George Berkeley, which denies the existence of material reality (or at least the possibility of
knowing anything about it). Though Mahler talked much about philosophers and philosophical matters
related to German idealism, he never spoke directly about idealism itself. In a letter to the Viennese critic
Max Kalbeck, however, he did describe materialism as being incompatible with the “poetic soul of the
musician” (Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 283; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 251–52). For accessible
introductions to German idealism, see Karl Ameriks, “Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 1–17. For the application of German idealist thought to musical aesthetics, see Andrew Bowie,
“Music and the Rise of Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, 29–54.

17
immanent in the world as opposed to transcendent. The flavor of German idealism to

which Mahler subscribed thus involves a metaphysically double-aspected view of reality,

which consists of an empirical world infused with intrinsic features unavailable to

normal modes of perception and cognition.22

Mahler imbibed idealist aesthetics from multiple sources in a century-long

stream of writing on music in German-speaking lands. The musical discourse of

Mahler’s day, being strongly influenced by idealist premises, was a contemporary

source. Mahler also had a strong affinity with the Early Romantic writers, who were

among the first to apply these views to music at the turn of the nineteenth century. He

avidly read both Jean Paul Richter, whose literary aesthetics was an important

forerunner of the philosophical aesthetics of music, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. But perhaps

the single most important influence on Mahler’s views was the philosophy of Arthur

Schopenhauer. Mahler revered Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819,

rev. 1844).23 A product of the first half of the century, it became widely influential only

in the second half, finding exponents in Richard Wagner and the young Friedrich

Nietzsche. Mahler once claimed that Schopenhauer’s treatise and Wagner’s “Beethoven”

(1870) were the only two texts with anything substantive to say about the nature of

music; indeed, long stretches of Wagner’s essay simply gloss passages from

22 Mark Evan Bonds, in his article “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the

Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” relies on a definition that projects non-corporeal ideals into a spiritual
world beyond the material one (Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, no. 2/3 [summer –
autumn 1997]: 387–420). For a lucid discussion of these concepts with regard to E. T. A. Hoffmann, see
Keith Chapin, “Lost in Quotation: The Nuances behind E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Programmatic Statements,”
19th-Century Music 30, no. 1 (2006): 47–52.
23 Originally published in 1819, Schopenhauer published a revised version in two volumes in

1844. All references in this chapter are taken from Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung, 2 vols., ed. Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1873).

18
Schopenhauer.24 Echoes of all these sources resonate throughout Mahler’s statements

and commentaries on music.25

For Mahler musical content was essentially metaphysical and spiritual. He

believed that music penetrated the surface reality of the world, taking as its object

deeper, hidden components of existence and rendering them in a way that could be

directly experienced through everyday senses.26 This capacity of music was unique

among human activities and justified its privileged position among the arts. Bauer-

Lechner recorded the following statement at the end of 1895:

“It is nonsense and drivel,” Mahler said, “what people always say about the
sister arts. They are not equal, but are infinitely various! By far the highest is
music, the art of inner meaning. After it comes poetry and for a long while
nothing. Only then follow painting and sculpture, which take the external world
as their object. At the very end is architecture, which deals with masses and
proportions.”27

Mahler wrote poems throughout his life and composed a number of songs and

symphonic movements to his own verse; as a young man he even fancied a career as a

24 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 455. See also Roger Hollinrake, Nietzsche, Wagner, and the

Philosophy of Pessimism (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1982).

25 The list can be easily extended to include Kant, Goethe, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Siegfried

Lipiner, and Dostoyevsky among others; their consideration, however, is not needed for an accurate
account of Mahler’s core aesthetic values. For more on Mahler’s intellectual influences, including the
importance of his membership in student organizations, see William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and
Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974); Floros, Gustav Mahler,
vol. 1; Morten Solvik, “Mahler’s Untimely Modernism,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, 153–71; and
idem, “The Literary and Philosophical Worlds of Gustav Mahler,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler,
21–34.
26 Various philosophical and aesthetic modes of thought have different ways of describing the

nature of this noumenal realm. Whereas the Romantics tended to speak of the ineffable or infinite,
Schopenhauer conceived of it as the Will. Mahler preferred to speak of Nature or feelings.
27 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 34: “‘Es ist Unsinn,’ sagte Mahler, ‘und Gefasel, was man immer von

den Schwesterkünsten spricht. Sie sind einander nicht ebenbürtig, sind im Rang unendlich verschieden!
Weitaus die erste ist die Musik, die Kunst des innern Sinnes; nach ihr kommt die Poesie, dann folgt lange
nichts; nun erst Malerei und Skulptur, die ihren Gegenstand in der äußeren Welt haben. Und ganz zuletzt
kommt die Architektur, welche es mit Maßen und Größenverhältnissen zu tun hat.’” For another clear
articulation of this sentiment, see ibid., 161.

19
poet.28 This affinity for poetry, which shines through in his division of the arts, partly

explains his proclivity to describe his music using poetic metaphors.

If metaphysical facts grasped in music are not amenable to the domain of human

reason, then how does the composer ever come to encode them in tones? Mahler

adopted his answer to this question largely from Schopenhauer, who contended that

composers of genius possess an extraordinary capacity to channel the innermost essence

of the universe. The process by which they do so, however, is largely passive and

independent of their rational faculties. For Schopenhauer, the invention of melody

is the work of the genius, whose achievement here resides even more clearly
beyond all contemplation and conscious intention; it could be called an
inspiration . . . the composer reveals the inner being of the world and articulates
the deepest wisdom in a language incomprehensible to his reason.29

Mahler similarly shrouded the creative process in mystical, a-rational terms, telling

Bauer-Lechner that

the creation and genesis of a work are mystical from beginning to end, for the
composer loses awareness of the self and creates as if through external
guidance. Afterward he hardly understands how the product came to be. I often
seem to myself like the blind hen that found a diamond. . . . But even stranger
than with an entire movement or work is the unconscious, mysterious force that
comes to light at certain passages, especially the most difficult and meaningful
ones.30

28 Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler, Moderne Essays, vol. 52 (Berlin: Gose und Tetzlaff, 1905), 17;
Floros, Gustav Mahler, 1:39–41. A number of his poems can be found in Henry-Louis de La Grange,
Mahler: Volume One (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 824–37. Mahler used his own verse in Das
klagende Lied, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and Symphony no. 2.
29 Schopenhauer, Die Welt, 1:307: “ist das Werk des Genius, dessen Wirken hier
augenscheinlicher, als irgendwo, fern von aller Reflexion und bewußter Absichtlichkeit liegt und eine
Inspiration heißen könnte . . . der Komponist offenbart das innerste Wesen der Welt und spricht die
tiefste Weisheit aus, in einer Sprache, die seine Vernunft nicht versteht.”
30 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 26; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 30–31: “Das Schaffen und die

Entstehung eines Werkes sind mystisch vom Anfang bis zum Ende, da man, sich selbst unbewußt, wie
durch fremde Eingebung etwas machen muß, von dem man nachher kaum begreift, wie es geworden ist.
Ich komme mir dabei oft vor wie die blinde Henne, die ein Diamantkorn gefunden hat . . . Aber seltsamer
als bei einem ganzen Satz oder Werk tritt diese unbewußte, geheimnisvolle Kraft bei einzelnen Stellen
zutage, und gerade bei den allerschwierigsten und bedeutsamsten.”

20
Similar sentiments resound in other well-known descriptions by Mahler of what it was

like to compose the Third Symphony: “one is himself only an instrument, as it were, on

which the universe plays.”31

Music’s ideal content, residing beyond normal ken, could not be encapsulated in

words or subjected to rational analysis. Mahler frequently emphasized this point in an

important epistolary exchange, lasting from December 1895 to January 1897, with the

critic and aspiring composer Max Marschalk. In the opening paragraph of his first

letter, Mahler wrote that “nothing can be more welcome than your not making me utter

a single word about my intentions, which I believe to have already articulated so clearly

as a musician.”32 When Marschalk sought Mahler’s opinion shortly thereafter on an

article that he was writing on the First Symphony, Mahler praised the article and then

put Marschalk’s task into perspective:

This brings us to the significant question: how, perhaps even why, music should
be interpreted with words at all. . . . My need to express myself musically—
symphonically—begins where obscure feelings reign, at the threshold that leads
to the “other world,” the world in which things are no longer differentiated by
time and space.33

Incidentally, Mahler’s quotation marks around “other world” call attention to his use of

poetic license. The metaphysical essences that he understands music to embody do not

31 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 187; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 190: “man ist, sozusagen,
selbst nur ein Instrument, auf dem das Universum spielt.”

Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 163; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 172: “so kann mir nichts
32

willkommener sein, als wenn Sie mir erlauben, über meine Intentionen, die ich als Musiker so deutlich
ausgedrückt zu haben glaube, — keine Worte zu machen.”
33 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 171; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 179: “Mein Bedürfnis,
mich musikalisch – symphonisch auszusprechen, beginnt erst da, wo die dunkeln Empfindungen walten, an
der Pforte, die in die ‘andere Welt’ hineinführt; die Welt, in der die Dinge nicht mehr durch Zeit und Ort
auseinanderfallen.” Mahler was of course not alone in this view, which predated even the Early
Romantics, who did much to propagate it. Note the similarity of Mahler’s wording to Johann Nikolaus
Forkel’s view that music “begins . . . where other languages can no longer reach” (Musikalisch-kritische
Bibliothek [Gotha, 1778], 66; quoted in Andrew Bowie, “Music and the Rise of Aesthetics,” 31) and to
Wagner’s statement: “It is an eternal truth: music begins there, where human language ceases” (“Ein
glücklicher Abend,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 1 [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911], 278:
“Es bleibt ein für allemal wahr: da wo die menschliche Sprache aufhört, fängt die Musik an”).

21
reside in another realm but suffuse our existence in this one. Although idealist thought

has often been associated with escapism and disillusionment with the human condition,

Mahler’s idealism offered a richer understanding of the world in which we live.34

The contradiction between Mahler’s speaking extensively about his works and

believing that music communicates what ordinary language cannot is only apparent. In

this respect, he was similar to the Early Romantics, who wrote voluminously about

music and promulgated the idea of ineffability of musical content. As Mark Evan Bonds

has pointed out, an idealist aesthetic actually provides greater leeway to description

because it focuses attention on the essence of music as opposed to its causal effects on

the listener: “One can, after all, be more readily forgiven for resorting to metaphorical

excess in trying to describe the infinite.”35 Mahler, like the Romantics, understood these

metaphorical renditions of music’s essence as imperfect linguistic approximations. As

such, they were often accompanied by open disclaimers. When he summarized the first

movement of the Third Symphony, for example, he wrote:

Summer marches in, ringing and singing as you cannot even imagine! It springs
up from all sides. Then in between it is again so endlessly secretive and
painful—like lifeless Nature awaiting the approach of life in utter
motionlessness. It just cannot be put into words!36

An effective rhetorical device, the final exclamation also bespeaks the philosophical

ambitions that, on one level, Mahler harbored for his symphony.

34 Chapin argues persuasively that E. T. A. Hoffmann’s description of other realms is largely

attributable to poetic license (“Lost in Quotation,” 47–52).
35 Bonds, “Idealism,” 392.
36 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 192; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 189: “Der Sommer
marschiert ein; da klingt es und singt es, wie Du Dir es nicht vorstellen kannst! Von allen Seiten sprießt
es auf. Und dazwischen wieder so unendlich geheimnisvoll und schmerzvoll – wie die leblose Natur, die in
dumpfer Regungslosigkeit dem kommenden Leben entgegenharrt. – Es läßt sich das nicht in Worten
ausdrücken!”

22
 Like Schopenhauer, Mahler attributed a secondary status to all verbal adjuncts,

including the text of vocal music and descriptions of music’s emotional content.

Schopenhauer asserted that texts and human emotions were like random instances of

the general concepts exemplified by music.37 On this view, music expresses not the

sorrow of a particular person or occasion, but the Platonic idea of sorrow. Mahler

shared these sentiments. In praise of Marschalk’s article on the First Symphony, he

wrote that

you characterized the third and fourth movements masterfully. [Your

interpretation] is especially sympathetic to me because it points toward the
realm of the categorical and general. . . . Of all possible interpretations, yours is
the most appropriate because it is the plainest and coincides the most with the
random, external cause of the inner experience.38

Mahler saw in his emotional life a universal spiritual dimension that transcended the

circumstances that apparently triggered his emotions. This inner truth is what becaume

the content of his music.

Mahler favored three families of metaphors when describing musical content:

nature, mythology, and emotion. Each of these modes of description pervades his

commentaries on the Third Symphony and will be treated in turn.39 As noted before,

37Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, ed. Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig:
F. A. Brockhaus, 1873), 310. See also Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 130–32.
38Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 171–72; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 179: “der 3. u. 4. Satz
ist von Ihnen meisterlich charakterisiert, und mir darum besonders sympathisch, weil er ins Typische,
Allgemeine deutet. . . . Unter allen Deutungen, die gegeben werden können, ist mir die Ihre die
angemessenste, weil sie die schlichteste ist und mit der zufälligen, resp. äußeren Ursache des inneren
Erlebens am meisten zusammenfällt.”
39 The metaphors pervade the final version of the titles (see appendix A.21) and nearly every

draft title that Mahler considered along the way (see appendix A.1–20). The only two possible exceptions
are “What the child tells me” (Was mir das Kind erzählt) and “What the morning bells tell me” (Was mir die
Morgenglocken erzählen), though each of these can be understood as Christian symbolism. Mahler’s
ultimate arrangement of these titles into an evolutionary progress, moreover, resonates with the interest
of German idealists like Schopenhauer in the idea of the world as a great chain of being. For example,
Schopenhauer made analogies between musical phenomena and the hierarchical objectifications of the will
in the world. The natural objects that Schopenhauer chooses for comparison are remarkably similar to
those used by Mahler in his programs and commentaries for the Third. See Stephen McClatchie,

23
Mahler’s conception of nature was metaphysically double-aspected. Nature consists not

just of the forest, plants, animals, and the like, but can also encompass the entire

universe in both its phenomenal and noumenal aspects. A conversation with Bauer-

Lechner about the first movement of the Third Symphony illustrates:

That almost ceases to be music; it is practically the sounds of nature. It is eerie

how life gradually wrests itself free from the inanimate, rigid matter—I could
have named the movement “What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me.” . . . Again,
the atmosphere of a stifling heat on a summer midday hangs over the
introduction to this movement. Not a breath stirs. All life is suspended. The
sun-soaked air shimmers and flickers. I hear it in my mental ear, but how to find
the physical tones?s40

In the first sentence, Mahler refers to music as a sounding object in the phenomenal

world, which he juxtaposes with the metaphysical import of the “sounds of nature,” a

term encountered frequently in his letters, conversations, and scores. Here he wishes to

claim that the music channels inner being so purely that it nearly becomes identical

with it. Mahler then reverts to more direct, pictorial analogies with nature—cliffs, the

glowing heat of day, shimmering air currents. The significance of these natural

phenomena, however, is not in their physical appearance, but in their symbolizing

deeper forces. This metaphysical sense motivates the subsequent rhetorical question,

which contrasts his inner “ear” with external “tones.”

Mahler, like many thinkers and artists of the nineteenth century, saw in

mythological figures embodiments of grander metaphysical and philosophical concepts.

Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 1998), 30.
40 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 56; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 59: “Das ist schon beinahe keine

Musik mehr, das sind fast nur Naturlaute. Und schaurig ist, wie sich aus der unbeseelten, starren Materie
heraus - ich hätte den Satz auch nennen können: ‘Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt’ - allmählich das Leben
losringt . . . Über der Einleitung zu diesem Satz liegt wieder jene Stimmung der brütenden
Sommermittagsglut, in der kein Hauch sich regt, alles Leben angehalten ist, die sonngetränkten Lüfte
zittern und flimmern. Ich hör’ es im geistigen Ohr tönen, aber wie die leiblichen Töne dafür finden?” For
more from this passage in Bauer-Lechner’s diary, see appendix B.5.

24
The god Pan, for instance, symbolized of the entirety of the world.41 When Mahler gave

the title “Pan awakes” (Pan erwacht) to the introduction of the Third Symphony’s first

movement, he did not wish to signal a musical depiction of the mythical god coming to,

but something much grander: “it is the world, the whole of nature, that is awakened

from unfathomable stillness to tones and sounds.”42

Mahler was all too aware that many people would fail to recognize his

invocations of nature and myth as metaphors of something more profound. In a letter to

the critic Richard Batka, written days after the première of “What the Flowers in the

Meadow Tell Me,” he complained that

This little piece (more of an intermezzo within the whole) will surely provoke
misunderstanding by being torn from the context of the large work, my most
meaningful and all-encompassing. But this cannot prevent me from letting it be
performed alone. I have no choice: if I want to be heard for a change, then I
cannot be timid. This slight, modest piece will indeed often “bleed at the
pedestal of Pompey” and introduce me to the public as the pensive, delicate
“singer of nature.” —In fact, nature contains everything that is eerie, grand, and
pleasing (and that is what I wanted to portray in a kind of evolutionary
progression through the work). But no one will catch any of this. It always
strikes me as strange that most people think only of flowers, little birds, the
forest scent, etc., when they speak of “nature.” No one knows the god Dionysus,
the great Pan. So, there you have a kind of program—that is, an illustration of
how I make music. It is nothing but the sound of nature!43

41 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 192–93; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 189–90.
42 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 203; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 198: “es [ist] die Welt,

die Natur als Ganzes, welche sozusagen aus unergründlichem Schweigen zum Tönen und Klingen
erweckt ist.”
43 Julius Caesar was murdered at the pedestal of Pompey’s statue. See Blaukopf, ed., Gustav
Mahler Briefe, 202–03; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 197–98: “Daß diese kleine Stück (mehr ein Intermezzo
des Ganzen) aus dem Zusammenhange des großen Werkes, meines bedeutendsten und umfangreichsten,
gerissen, Mißverständnisse erwecken muß, kann mich nicht daran verhindern, es einzeln frei zu geben. Es
bleibt mir eben keine Wahl, wenn ich endlich einmal zu Worte kommen will, so darf ich nicht zimperlich
sein und so wird nun wohl in dieser Saison dieses kleine bescheidene Stück noch oft ‘am Fußgestelle des
Pompeius bluten’ und mich dem Publikum als ‘sinnigen’, duftigen ‘Sänger der Natur’ vorstellen. – Daß
diese Natur alles in sich birgt, was an Schauerlichem, Großem und auch Lieblichem ist (eben das wollte
ich in dem ganzen Werk in einer Art evolutionistischer Entwicklung zum Aussprechen bringen), davon
erfährt natürlich niemand etwas. Mich berührt es ja immer seltsam, daß die meisten, wenn sie von ‘Natur’
sprechen, nur immer an Blumen, Vöglein, Waldesduft etc. denken. Den Gott Dionysos, den großen Pan
kennt niemand. So: da haben Sie schon eine Art Programm – d.h. eine Probe, wie ich Musik mache. Sie ist
immer und überall nur Naturlaut!” Mahler makes similar points in Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 95, 160;
Franklin, ed., Recollections, 96–97, 149.

25
 The third and most favored metaphor that Mahler used to describe the content

of music was feeling. These statements betray the influence of expressive aesthetics or

Gefühlsästhetik, a widely accepted view in the nineteenth century that music encodes

feelings and awakens them in turn in the listener. Expressive aesthetics distinguishes

itself from earlier doctrines of the affections in its rather unintuitive conception of

feelings, shaped by idealist categories of thought. As sensations experienced by a

subject, feelings belong to the empirical world. But because they also register in our

souls, they bear a spiritual dimension, too.44 Feelings are at once human emotions and

ideal essences.

The language of feelings is fundamentally compatible with metaphors of nature

because humans are constitutive parts of the universe. In his essay “Beethoven,” Wagner

quotes Schopenhauer to make just this point: “Because each entity capable of knowledge

is at the same time a corporeal individual, he is also a part of nature. He has open access

to nature’s inner being from within his own self-consciousness, where nature’s essence

as Will makes itself most immediately known.”45 The contemplation of one’s inner being

was thus tantamount to investigating the essence of the universe itself. Mahler

elaborated on this principle in a letter to Marschalk:

44 Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln and London: University of

Nebraska Press, 1992), 205. An alternate formulation of this idea can be found in Bowie, “Music and the
Rise of Aesthetics,” 37–39.
45 The Will was the term that Schopenhauer gave to the essence of reality not immediately

available to our senses. Mahler’s views were influenced by Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will, but these
issues are not immediately relevant to Mahler’s views of program music and need not be explicated here.
Schopenhauer, Die Welt, 2:417; quoted in Wagner, “Beethoven,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen
9:4220: “Nur sofern jedes Erkennende zugleich Individuum, und dadurch Theil der Natur ist, steht ihm
der Zugang zum Innern der Natur offen, in seinem eigenen Selbstbewußtsein, als wo dasselbe sich am
unmittelbarsten und alsdann als Wille sich kundgiebt.” Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche all believed
that certain states of consciousness like dreaming promoted the perception of inner essences. Mahler
subscribed to this view as well, and it is in this context that the text to the fourth movement of the Third
Symphony should be understood, as well as in the titles that Mahler considered for the symphony as a
whole: “Sommernachtstraum” (see appendix A.2, A.4, A.6), “Sommermorgentraum” (see appendix A.9–10,
A.12, A.22–23), and “Sommermittagstraum” (A.14, A.20).

26
 The life of a musician does not offer any interesting external events. He lives
inwardly. It is very telling that musicians hardly take an interest in the plastic
arts. His nature is to go through the external appearance to the essence of
things.46

Mahler, in keeping with expressive aesthetics, frequently equated the content of

his symphonies with his own emotional experiences. To describe how he was feeling, he

once wrote a friend: “For the moment I have arrived at the place where the beginning of

the fourth movement of [my First] Symphony can also be found.”47 The personal and

revelatory structure of the Third Symphony’s movement titles (“What . . . tells me”)

reflects Mahler’s belief that composition involved turning within and discovering

therein truths about the essence of the universe. His clearest exposition of the

underlying principle appears in an exceptional letter from 1893. A young girl named

Gisela Tolnay-Witt wrote Mahler, then the extremely overworked first Kapellmeister

of the Hamburg Opera, asking whether composers required a large orchestra to express

big ideas. Charmed by the question and its writer, Mahler uncharacteristically felt

impelled to reply. The letter is one of his longest and among the most important single

documents of his aesthetic views. In it, he articulates an expressive aesthetic as the

culmination of the historical development of music. Along with ever more detailed

performance instructions in the eighteenth century came

the appropriation of new elements of feeling as objects to be imitated in tones.

That is, the composer began to include in his creations ever deeper and more
complicated sides of his emotional life, until Beethoven initiated the new era.
From then on, the objects of musical emulation are no longer the basic moods—

46 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 206; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 201: “Das Leben eines
Musikanten bietet ja an äußeren Ereignissen nichts. – Er lebt nach innen. Es ist vielleicht ungemein
bezeichnend, daß die Musiker für die bildende Kunst nur ein geringes Interesse aufzuweisen haben; er ist
geartet, den Dingen auf den Grund zu gehen – durch die äußere Erscheinung hindurch.”
47 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 95: “Zunächst bin ich dort angelangt - wo etwa der Anfang

des vierten Satzes der in Frage stehenden Symphonie zu suchen ist.”

27
 e.g., mere joyfulness or sorrow—but also the transition from one mood to
another, conflicts, outer nature and its effect on us, humor, and poetic ideas.48

Mahler located the historical progress of music in its growing capacity to represent ever

more rarified aspects of the composer’s emotional experiences. By describing music as

“emulation,” he once again calls attention to the metaphysically double-aspected nature

of feelings. In an age quick to stigmatize stylistic imitation as evidence of a composer’s

deficient originality, the imitation of feelings, by virtue of their profound metaphysical

status, was still seen by Mahler and others as music’s highest charge.

The final view directly relevant to understanding Mahler’s programs is his

conviction that the purpose of music, like that of any language, is to communicate.

Great musical works transmit to the listener exalted feelings or glimpses of the essence

of reality accessible only to the creative genius.49 However cathartic or fulfilling

composing might have been for Mahler, these effects paled in comparison to his desire

to reach out to others and be recognized for these efforts. By 1893 Mahler had yet to

achieve his breakthrough as a composer, though he was already an established and

successful conductor. He vented his frustration in a conversation with Bauer-Lechner.

If only I could hear [the Scherzo of the Second Symphony] for once and finally
put it to the test. Then I could see whether I am on the right track, whether
that which is deep and significant to me is the same for others, too. For if I
cannot call forth in others—not even in those few listeners on whom the artist

48 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 130; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 148: “Hand in Hand

damit ging aber auch die Aneignung neuer Gefühlselemente als Gegenstände der Nachbildung in Tönen - d.
h. der Komponist fing an, immer tiefere und kompliziertere Seiten seines Gefühlslebens in das Gebiet
seines Schaffens einzubeziehen - bis mit Beethoven die neue Ära der Musik begann: Von nun an sind nicht
mehr die Grundtöne der Stimmung - also z. B. bloße Freudigkeit oder Traurigkeit etc. - sondern auch der
Übergang von einem zum anderen - Konflikte - die äußere Natur und ihre Wirkung auf uns - Humor und
poetische Ideen die Gegenstände der musikalischen Nachbildung.”

The notion of the composer revealing deep truths unavailable to mere humans gave rise in the
49

to Wagner’s idea of the poet-priest. See William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 87–162.

28
 can only ever depend—the same scene and the same content that I poured into
the work, then I have created it for nothing.50

Mahler’s faith here in the precision of musical communication points to a tension that

runs through his statements about music. He insists on the ineffability of musical

content, yet he also attributes concrete and specific content to music. These tendencies

can be reconciled, if not entirely convincingly, by claiming that Mahler made these

concrete attributions largely in informal contexts and just did not feel the need to

qualify that he was speaking metaphorically. A simpler explanation, however, is to

acknowledge that Mahler’s statements, made over the span of years and in various

contexts, do not amount to a fully consistent aesthetic system. Rather, he had multiple

ways of understanding music’s mysteries. To articulate these, he drew on prominent

aesthetic discourses inherited from his intellectual and cultural milieu—idealism,

Romanticism, and expressive aesthetics. Metaphysical aesthetics gave him a way to

acknowledge music’s cosmic significance, while expressive aesthetics allowed him to

articulate its powerful relevance to our emotional lives. The tension between these

views was by no means unique to Mahler, but was typical of his time.51

50 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 29; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 34: “Könnte ich es selbst nur einmal
hören, endlich die Probe auf die Rechnung machen, um zu sehen, ob ich mich nicht verrenne, ob das, was
für mich tief und bedeutend ist, es auch für andere ist. Denn wenn ich nicht auf die anderen - wenn auch
nur in einzelnen, auf die der Künstler immer nur zählen kann - denselben Vorgang erzeuge und denselben
Inhalt wachrufe, der aus mir heraus mein Werk schuf, so habe ich es umsonst geschaffen.”
51 Aesthetics in the second half of the nineteenth century tended toward eclectic views (Lippman,

Western Musical Aesthetics, 320–21, 347). Recent scholarship has revealed a more differentiated and
complex picture of the aesthetic views espoused by the period’s leading figures than can be gleaned from
blunt labels like romanticism, formalism, and expressive aesthetics. See Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose;
Chapin, “Lost in Quotation”; Mark Burford, “Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism,” 19th-Century Music 30, no. 2
(2006): 166–81.

29
Mahler on Program Music and Programs

The issues contained in this brief sketch constitute the backdrop for Mahler’s

complicated relationship to programs. Mahler wrote and revised programs for his own

works at the same time that he polemicized against program music more generally. The

apparent incompatibility of these attitudes has often led writers to portray Mahler as

conflicted or confused.52 This judgment is ungenerous. Mahler’s statements and actions

are coherent and lucid so long as they are considered with his idiosyncratic

understanding of programs and program music in mind.

Not all music with a program was program music to Mahler. For him, any work

dictated and defined by a program was program music. He excluded from this category

works that could be described in terms of a program but need not be. Natalie Bauer-

Lechner reported the following remarks:

[Mahler] considered the whole enterprise of writing music to a program the

biggest aberration musically and artistically: “One who does that is no artist! . . .
[It is a] superficial, erroneous undertaking in which the composer chooses a
limited, clearly defined sequence and follows it programmatically, step-for-
step.”53

Program music’s greatest transgression in Mahler’s eyes was its forfeiting music’s

metaphysical privilege. It did this by concretizing the objects or ideas that gave impetus

52 Richard Taruskin heads a section on Mahler “Is There or Isn’t There? (Not Even the

Composer Knows for Sure)” (Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 4 Music in the Early Twentieth Century
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 9); Lydia Goehr writes that Mahler, faced with the choice
between absolute and program music, was “less sure and wavered constantly between the two concepts”
and “wavered constantly and without resolution over his use of titles” (The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 215, 228). Carl Dahlhaus uses
Mahler as an example of the inevitable convolutions required of a program musician who also subscribed
to Schopenhauerian aesthetics (Idea of Absolute Music, 138).
53 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 170: “er halte das Beginnen, Musik nach dem Programm zu
schreiben, für die größte musikalische und künstlerische Verirrung: Einer, der das kann, ist kein Künstler!
. . . [Es ist ein] plattes, irriges Beginnen, sich einen begrenzten, eng umrissenen Vorgang zu wählen und
ihn programmatisch, Schritt für Schritt zu verfolgen.” For more of Mahler’s statements on program
music, see Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 163, 171; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 172, 179.

30
to its creation, and then presenting these as an intrinsic part of the whole.54 Program

music did not have to be seen as opposed to idealist aesthetics. In fact, the idealist

thought of which Mahler was a major exponent had become strongly associated with

the New Germans and proponents of program music.55 For whatever reason, the use of

programs by other composers often triggered a host of assumptions in Mahler’s mind

about how the music came to be. The program constituted the work’s starting point, the

unyielding framework of its composition, and the content of the finished work. This

caricature says little about how composers of program music actually conceived and

created their works. It does, however, reveal much about his own programs.

Mahler was adamant that stimuli to a work’s creation should be extraneous to its

ultimate meaning. Musical content, after all, derived from its reflecting the inner

essence of being. This was often a topic of letters written during the genesis of the

Third Symphony. Conceding to Marschalk that the children’s woodcut “The Hunter’s

Funeral” (Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis) had animated him to compose the First

Symphony’s third movement, Mahler insisted that the music did not portray the picture:

“all that matters is the mood that is expressed.”56 Mahler similarly acknowledged that a

love affair gave impetus to his creation of the First Symphony: “But the outer

experience was the occasion for the work—not its content.”57

54 Mahler was aware that programs could be written after the fact.
55 In the last section of his article “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music,” Bonds

traces the juncture at mid-century when idealism, which is fundamentally compatible to both absolute and
program music, came to be associated with the latter.
56 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler, 170; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 177–78: “es kommt nur auf die

Stimmung an, welche zum Ausdruck gebracht werden soll.”

57 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler, 171; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 179: “Aber das äußere Erlebnis

wurde zum Anlaß und nicht zum Inhalt des Werkes.”

31
 Mahler’s position is consistent with his aesthetic views about the generality of

musical expression. Entangled in particulars of the empirical world, external stimuli

could not be the content of the music. They could, however, unleash in the composer

powerful emotional experiences, whose universal aspect could be captured in tones.

Perhaps the clearest articulation of this process was made by Richard Wagner. Mahler

read Wagner’s prose writings as avidly as he advocated the music dramas. Around the

time of the Third Symphony’s genesis, he gave the composer’s collected prose writings

as a gift with the following instruction: “An artist must own these works, read them

over and over again, and internalize them.”58 Mahler was likely familiar with the

following passage from “A Happy Evening”:

A musician feels compelled to sketch even the slightest composition only when
he is in the grip of a feeling whose animating force overpowers his entire being.
This mood may be brought about by an external experience or arise from an
inner, mysterious source . . . [Musicians] are human and our fate is ruled by
external circumstances. But by the time that these moods compel the musician
to compose, they have already been turned to music inside him. In the moment
of creative ecstasy, the composer is guided not by those external events, but by
the musical sensations they produced.59

The difference between composing out the external events as opposed to the

metaphysically significant musical sensations was, in Mahler’s words, the difference

58The gift was to Anna von Mildenburg, his mistress and a soprano at the Hamburg Opera. See
Bahr-Mildenburg, Erinnerungen (Vienna: Wiener Literarische Anhalt, 1921), 16: “Eine Künstlerin muß
diese Werke besitzen und sie immer wieder aufs neue lesen und in sich aufnehmen.”
59Wagner, “Ein glücklicher Abend,” 289: “Wenn sich ein Musiker gedrängt fühlt, die kleinste
Komposition zu entwerfen, so geschieht dieß nur durch die anregende Gewalt einer Empfindung, die in
der Stunde der Konzeption sein ganzes Wesen überwältigt. Diese Stimmung möge nun durch ein äußeres
Erlebniß herbeigeführt werden, oder einer inneren geheimnißvollen Quelle entsprungen sein . . . wir sind
Menschen und unser Schicksal wird durch äußere Verhältnisse regiert; da aber, wo sie den Musiker zur
Produktion hindrängen, sind auch diese großen Stimmungen in ihm bereits zu Musik geworden, so daß
den Komponisten in den Momenten der schaffenden Begeisterung nicht mehr jenes äußere Ereigniß,
sondern die durch dasselbe erzeugte musikalische Empfindung bestimmt.”

32
between having a “program” and having an “inner program.” All great music since

Beethoven, he claimed, possessed the latter; program music did not.60

Mahler also believed that his symphonies combined music and word in a

fundamentally different way than program music. Yet the arguments that he gave to

support this view can actually be applied to a program just as readily. A year after

completing the Third Symphony, he wrote that “Whenever I conceive a large, musical

edifice, I always reach a point where I must turn to the ‘word’ as the carrier of my

musical idea.”61 Liszt, by comparison, invoked nearly the same reasoning: “programs or

titles are only justified when they are a poetic necessity, an indissoluble part of the

whole, and indispensible to making oneself understandable.”62 Both composers harbored

a certain sense that the expressive capacity of purely instrumental music had limits, and

that the word, by virtue of its complementing the indeterminate musical expression

with definite concepts, could create even more profound expressive effects.

To Mahler’s eyes, however, the sum of the parts was greater than the whole in

his own works only. The reason was an implicit belief that words could legitimately be

an intrinsic part of a musical work only if they were a vocal text.63

60 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 277; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 262: “es gibt, von
Beethoven angefangen keine moderne Musik, die nicht ihr inneres Programm hat. – Aber keine Musik ist
etwas wert, von der man dem Hörer zuerst berichten muß, was darin erlebt ist – respektive was er zu
erleben hat. – Und so nochmals: pereat – jedes Programm!”
61Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 222–23; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 212: “Wenn ich ein
großes musikalisches Gebilde konzipiere, so komme ich immer an den Punkt, wo ich mir das ‘Wort’ als
Träger meiner musikalischen Ideen heranziehen muss.” See also Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 202;
Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 198.
62 Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz und seine Harold-Symphonie, ed. L. Ramann (Leipzig: Breitkopf und

Härtel, 1881), 26: “Programm oder Titel [lassen] sich nur dann rechtfertigen, wenn sie eine poetische
Nothwendigkeit, ein unablösbarer Theil des Ganzen und zu seinem Verständnis unentbehrlich sind!”
63 The rare exceptions in the printed scores are occasional performing instructions like Wie ein

Naturlaut at the beginning of the First Symphony.

33
 Something altogether different [from program music] is when the content
soars to such heights and assumes such forms that the composer no longer
manages with just notes and struggles to attain that highest expression, which
can only be achieved by union with the human voice and the articulated, poetic
word, as in Beethoven’s Ninth and also my C-minor symphony. . . . . Above all,
however, it should all be taken in as music, and only as such.64

A written program’s externality condemned it to be forever a verbal and conceptual

construct. A vocal text, in contrast, was sublimated by its musical setting. As a

sounding component of the musical structure, it transcended the limitations of mere

words and left the musical integrity of the work intact.

Ultimately, Mahler’s assertions reduce to little more than rhetorical strategy.

No set of external factors can sift works that transcend their programs from those

whose content is delimited by them. Nevertheless, Mahler’s criticisms are important for

what they imply about his own written programs: they were hapless attempts to capture

in words meanings that were essentially musical.

Mahler did not create programs for his first three symphonies because he

thought them necessary for understanding the work. Rather, he was motivated by

continuing lack of recognition and performance opportunities. By the end of 1896, he

had completed three symphonies yet averaged less than one performance of a full

symphony per year since 1889. The meager opportunities not only deprived Mahler of

an artistic outlet, they obstructed the fulfillment of his ultimate charge as a composer: to

communicate through his own works. He told Bauer-Lechner in 1893: “Being denied all

Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 171: “Etwas anderes ist es . . . wenn sein Inhalt sich zu solcher Höhe
64

erhebt und solche Formen annimmt, daß der Komponist mit den Tönen allein nicht mehr auskommt und
nach jenem höchsten Ausdruck ringt, den er nur in der Vereinigung mit der menschlichen Stimme und
dem artikulierten, poetischen Worte gewinnt, wie es in der Neunten Beethovens und auch in meiner C-
Moll-Symphonie der Fall ist. . . . Vor allem aber sollen sie es als Musik, und nur als solche, nehmen!"”

34
interaction between the outer world and my inner world, between my creations and

their finally having an effect—you wouldn’t believe how that cripples me!”65

The little interaction that he did have was largely negative. Yet Mahler put the

polarized reception of the First Symphony in Weimar in 1894 in a most positive light:

“Opinions clashed on the open streets and in salons in a delightful way. Well, when the

dogs bark, then we know we are on our way!”66 Similarly, he wrote consolingly to his

sister in the wake of the largely negative reviews of three movements from the Third

Symphony in 1897: “At it turns out, [the concert in] Berlin has really not harmed me,

but has only stirred the emotions and focused attention on me.”67 Even negative

attention was better than no attention at all.

Mahler actively sought wider recognition during these years, which he dubbed

his personal “Way of the Cross” (Leidensweg).68 Some of his efforts were trained on the

critical establishment. He often wrote directly to authors of sympathetic reviews,

thanking them for their rare understanding and hoping to garner their continuing

support.69 And whenever Mahler traveled to cities with important musical institutions,

he made a point to visit critics and correspondents of the local periodicals. In Leipzig in

December 1896, he paid no fewer than twenty-four calls in just a few days, doing

Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 30; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 34: “Und daß mir so alle lebendige
65

Wechselwirkung zwischen der Außenwelt und meiner Innenwelt fehlt, zwischen Arbeit und endlich auch
einer Wirkung dieser Arbeit, – du glaubst es nicht, wie mich das lähmt!”
66 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 135; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 154: “Die Meinungen
platzten auf offenen Straßen und in Salons in ergötzlicher Weise aufeinander! – Na – wenn die Hunde
bellen, sehen wir, daß wir reiten!”
67 McClatchie, ed., Mahler Family Letters, 303.
68 Blaukopf, ed., Unbekannte Briefe, 124.
69 For examples, see Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 143–46; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,

159–60; La Grange, Mahler, 1:355.

35
likewise again in Berlin in March 1897.70 It is no exaggeration to say that Mahler

cultivated a base of supporters as assiduously as he pursued the directorship of the

Vienna Court Opera.

Another part of Mahler’s strategy to promote his works was to write

programmatic guides. Mahler appreciated the inherent difficulty of his symphonies.

Their comprehension, he often insisted, requires an intimacy with the music that could

only come from multiple hearings and score study.71 But Mahler was a pragmatist. He

understood that the fate of his symphonies did not depend on the reasoned opinions of

those with the time and initiative to engross themselves in his scores. To succeed, he

had to make a compelling impression at the very first hearing. His letter declining to

print a thematic introduction for the First Symphony’s performance in Weimar

articulates this point:

Of course I think it is vital for the motivic web to be clear to all listeners. But do
you really think that, with a modern work, reproducing a few themes will
suffice? Knowledge and appreciation of a musical work can only be procured
through exhaustive study of it; the more profound the work, the more difficult
and longer the process. At a first hearing, in contrast, the primary concern
should be to give yourself over to the mercy of the work and to let its human-
poetic expression wash over you. If you feel drawn to the work, then delve into
it!72

70 La Grange, Mahler, 1:387, 398.

71See Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 134, 164, 175, 277; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 151–
52, 173, 182, 262; La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 1897–1904 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 523, 525; Blaukopf, ed., Unbekannte Briefe, 149.
72Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 134; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 151–52: “Gewiß halte ich
es für notwendig, daß das motivische Gewebe jedem Hörer klar ist. Aber glauben Sie wirklich, daß bei
einem modernen Werke die Angabe einiger Themen dazu hinreicht? – Die Kenntnis und Erkenntnis eines
Musikwerks muß man sich durch eingehendes Studium desselben verschaffen, und je tiefer ein Werk ist,
desto schwieriger ist dies, und desto länger dauert es. – Bei einer ersten Aufführung hingegen ist es die
Hauptsache, daß man sich dem Werke auf Gnade und Ungnade ergibt, das allgemeine Menschlich-
Poetische daraus auf sich einwirken läßt; und wenn man sich dann angezogen fühlt, dann sich eingehend
damit befaßt!”

36
The only practical way to promote the positive reception of his works was to assist the

audience in grasping the human-poetic expression. For the concert in Weimar, then,

Mahler opted to contribute a narrative program, which could more effectively hint at

the “human-poetic expression” than a thematic guide.73

Mahler shirked full responsibility for this decision by attributing it to the

influence of friends.74 One suspects, however, that he did not require much persuasion.

He had an innate proclivity to describe music in allegorical terms, and he often used

parables and allusions to myth or literature to illuminate complex ideas.75 The

coincident success of Richard Strauss’s tone poems—Don Juan premièred in November

1889, the same month as Mahler’s First Symphony—could not have gone wholly

unnoticed by him, either.76 In offering a guide to his listeners, Mahler was following in

the footsteps of Richard Wagner, who justified his programs for Beethoven’s

symphonies on the grounds that some listeners needed help in order to appreciate

them.77 And Mahler was also holding true to idealist aesthetics, which maintained that a

73 Mahler did write a thematic introduction for the première of the Third Symphony’s second

movement. This is not a mark of indecisions or waffling, but of Mahler’s willingness to compromise his
views in order to gain recognition as a composer. Once he achieved that recognition, he never again used
a thematic introduction.
74 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 169; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 179.
75 To choose but a couple instances: Mahler used the Biblical parable of Jacob wrestling with an

angel to describe the difficulties of a creative artist (Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 76; Franklin, ed.,
Recollections, 79); he used a parable from the Norse Edda to characterize the unendingness of nature
(Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 160; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 149).
76 In a letter to Arthur Seidl in 1897, Mahler described Strauss as a “forerunner” who makes
possible what Mahler does (Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahlers Briefe, 224; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 212).
He later regretted the comment after Seidl published the letter in a newspaper (Hefling, “Miners,” 41–42).
77 Wagner’s attitudes toward programs changed considerably over time. In such early writings
as the Beethoven programs, he acknowledged the practical function that programs could serve in
promoting instrumental works among those in the audience who needed assistance to understand the
work. By 1852, however, his views on programs had come more into alignment with Liszt’s. Wagner thus
fashioned a program for the Tannhäuser overture in order to prevent misunderstanding and to promote
his own, authentic reading of the piece. His views in the essay on Beethoven are more similar to his pre-

37
listener must mentally reconstruct a musical work before experiencing the brunt of its

emotional expression.78 This model of aesthetic perception requires the participatory

imagination of the listener in order for music to have its effect. Hence Mahler’s

insistence that exhaustive score study was required to understand his works; the greater

the listener’s knowledge of the inner relationships of themes and movements, the more

actively their imagination could participate. In a pinch, however, a program could serve

a similar function, if less satisfactorily, by supporting the mental reconstruction with

verbal description and images.

Mahler’s efforts to gain wider recognition thus encompassed a strategy aimed at

his broader audiences, too. Mahler wrote Marschalk in early 1896: “It is a good idea for

the time being, while my manner still alienates them, that the listener receive some

signposts and mile markers for the journey. . . . A person must hold onto something

known, or else he will get lost.”79 In reaction to the unfavorable premières of the First

and Second Symphonies, both of which took place without descriptive aids, Mahler

fitted both works with movement titles or narrative interpretations.80 The changes to

the First Symphony from one performance to the next attest to Mahler’s search for the

most advantageous way to present the work. The symphony premièred in Budapest in

1889 as a “symphonic poem” without program; the concert was largely a failure.81 In

reform writings in this regard. See Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven: Wagner’s Reception of
Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121–23.
78 Bonds, “Idealism,” 394.
79 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 172; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 179–80: “Gut ist es
deshalb immerhin, wenn für die erste Zeit, als meine Art noch befremdet, der Zuhörer einige Wegtafeln
und Meilenzeiger auf die Reise miterhält . . . Der Mensch muß eben an etwas Bekanntes anknüpfen, sonst
verliert er sich.”
80 The third movement had at the première a characteristic title: “A la pompes funèbres.”
81A long discussion of the symphony with a programmatic description appeared in the
newspaper a day before the concert. Its content almost certainly derived from a conversation with

38
Hamburg in 1893, Mahler presented the symphony as a “tone poem in symphony form,”

this time with a program; the reception was largely negative, and the program attacked

with particular vehemence. He then revised the program and dubbed the work a

“symphony” for its performance at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Tonkünstlerverein in

Weimar in 1894. Its reception there was ambivalent, the program again serving as a

magnet for criticism.82 For the fourth performance, in Berlin in 1896, Mahler retained

the generic designation “symphony” but jettisoned its program. This does not mark a

complete rejection of guides, however. This same concert also included the Lieder eines

fahrenden Gesellen, which, as the source of much thematic material for the First, could

function as an implicit hermeneutic aid. In addition, the first movement of the Second

Symphony was performed on this concert under its descriptive title “Todtenfeier.” Such

continual alternation in generic designation and programmatic trappings is a sign not of

confusion but of a composer willing to acknowledge practical realities in his attempt to

secure a breakthrough for his hitherto unrecognized works.83 Mahler similarly

experimented with how to present the Second Symphony after its lackluster première in

1895.84 The increasingly detailed programmatic apparatus for the early performances of

Mahler. Whether he was intentionally leaking the program ahead of time is not clear. The article is
summarized in La Grange, Mahler, 1:203.
82 La Grange, Mahler, 1:299–301.
83 At the same time that Mahler was searching for the best way to present the symphony, he was
also continually improving the symphony’s structure and orchestration. In the terms of modern
marketing, he was optimizing his product as he honed his sales strategy.
84 The Second initially lacked a program. In 1896, Mahler performed the first movement under

the title “Todtenfeier.” That same year he gave a programmatic account of the symphony to Bauer-
Lechner and wrote another to Marschalk. In December, the first two movements were performed in
Leipzig with interpretive program notes penned by Marschalk but no doubt based on Mahler’s account. It
is not known to what extent the isolated performances of movements from the Second and Third
Symphonies in 1897 and 1898 retained their programmatic associations. Even if Mahler had not
authorized their use, they may very well have been printed in concert programs anyway.

39
movements from the Third Symphony, recounted at the beginning of this chapter,

betray a similar impulse.

Mahler’s experiments with programs were concentrated in a single period, from

late 1893 to early 1897. With the exception of the finale to the Second Symphony, the

Third Symphony was the only major work that he composed during this time. This

explains why the Third is the only symphony for which Mahler planned to publish a

program from the early stages. Mahler’s letters reveal his didactic purpose. At the end

of his first summer’s work, for example, he wrote the physicist Arnold Berliner for his

opinion: “For now I only want to know the impression that [the titles] give the listener,

i.e., whether they successfully show him the path on which I wish to accompany him.”85

Mahler nearly always used cartographic metaphors when describing the function

of his programmatic guides.86 Such metaphors captured the mediating function that

Mahler intended for them. The programs did not define the musical content or hand

down the only authorially sanctioned interpretation. Like a map or signpost, they were

verbal indications of the direction one might take to reach a goal, in this case an inner

connection with the work’s expression. In 1902, Mahler reiterated the purpose of the

Third Symphony’s titles, by then discarded: “At the time, those titles were my attempt

to give non-musicians a handle and signpost for the intellectual and, more importantly,

the emotional content of the individual movements and their relationship to one another

and to the work as a whole.”87 Mahler was primarily concerned with emotional and

85Gustav Mahler Briefe, 149: “Es kommt nur darauf an, zu erfahren, welchen Eindruck zunächst
dieser Titel auf den Hörer hinterläßt, – resp., ob es mir gelungen, den Hörer durch den Titel auf den Weg
zu bringen, den ich mit ihm dann schreiten will.”
86For example, see Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 149, 171, 196, 202, 297; Martner, ed.,
Selected Letters, 163, 179–80, 192, 198, 266.
87Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 297; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 266: “Jene Titel waren
von mir seinerzeit ein Versuch, eben für Nichtmusiker einen Anhaltspunkt und Wegweiser für den

40
spiritual contents because, to his mind, these were the most likely to secure a

sympathetic response upon first hearing; they were also the music’s most profound

aspect—its direct line to the inner being of existence.

In March 1896, Mahler began airing his doubts about programs in letters and

conversations. Marschalk had attended the performance of the First Symphony in

Berlin and inquired about the program that had been previously associated with it.

I thought up these titles and explanations [to the First Symphony] after the
fact. I omitted them this time not only because I find them far from exhaustive
(actually, not even all that fitting), but also because I have experienced how they
can lead the public down the wrong path. So it is with every program!88

That month, Mahler was working on the fair copies of the movements from the Third

that he had composed the previous summer. Despite his experiences with the programs

to the First, he retained the programmatic guide to the Third, likely because he thought

it redressed problems with the earlier program: it was not grafted on after the fact, and

it did not attempt to narrate a sequence. An additional incentive was the decision,

probably made in June 1896, to drop the seventh movement. By this time Mahler had

woven thematic anticipations of the finale into other movements. The finale was thus a

factor of unity and comprehensibility in the cycle. To drop it was no doubt an unsettling

move at such a late stage of composition, and Mahler may have come to see the

programmatic guide as bestowing a modicum of compensatory coherence. A further

motivation was the opportunity to perform the second movement in November. As

Mahler opined to Batka after the première (see pp. 25–26), the “Flower” movement,

Gedanken- oder vielmehr Stimmungsgehalt der einzelnen Sätze und für das Verhältnis derselben
zueinander und zum Ganzen zu geben.”
88 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 169; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 177: “Ich hatte also

nachträglich mir diese Titel und Erklärungen ausgesonnen. Daß ich sie diesmal wegließ, hat nicht nur
darin seinen Grund, daß ich sie dadurch für durchaus nicht erschöpfend – ja nicht einmal zutreffend
charakterisiert glaube, sondern, weil ich es erlebt habe, auf welch falsche Wege hiedurch das Publikum
geriet. So ist es aber mit jedem Programm!“

41
isolated from the rest of the symphony, could all too easily be mistaken for a congenial,

programmatic piece conveying a scene from nature. By printing the titles of the other

movements in the concert program, Mahler could forestall this misinterpretation by

suggesting something of the grander framework.

Unbeknownst to Mahler, these very concerts were laying the groundwork for

his ultimate renunciation of programmatic guides. The première of the “Flower”

movement by Nikisch in November 1896 was Mahler’s first triumph as a symphonist.

Weingartner’s performance of the movement in Hamburg just a few weeks later was no

less successful. And so, with this unassuming piece that Mahler feared would give the

wrong impression of him, his ascendency in the central-European symphonic repertory

began. The success in 1897 of three movements from the Second prompted him to write

to a friend: “With my Second Symphony in Dresden I had an undisputed success—even

in the press! Can you imagine? Better winds seem to be blowing for me now!”89 Indeed,

they just kept blowing. A performance of the Second in Liège in 1898 marked the first

public success of an entire symphony by Mahler. The First Symphony had its first

overwhelmingly positive reception in Prague that same year, and he made his Viennese

debut as a symphonist with a warmly reviewed performance of the Andante from the

Second. In 1899 he led the Second Symphony in two further successful concerts, in

Liège and Vienna.90

Success obviated Mahler’s primary motivation for providing programmatic

guides. When the scores to the First and Second Symphonies appeared in 1899 and

1897, respectively, Mahler withheld programmatic titles and narratives. In 1900, at a

89 Blaukopf, ed., Unbekannte Briefe, 128.

90 Accounts of the performances mentioned in this paragraph can be found in La Grange, Mahler,

1:365, 386–87, 391–92, 466, 476–77, 501-2, 505–8.

42
celebration following a performance of the Second Symphony in Munich, Mahler gave

an impromptu speech forswearing programs. Almost without exception, he held true to

this disavowal for the rest of his life.91 Although scholars sometimes interpret this

speech as a turning point, it had already been three years since Mahler last published a

program. If anything, the speech marked an arrival: Mahler had reached a point where

the prospect of continued performances made programmatic guides unnecessary.

Aside from the flurry of performances of “What the Flowers Tell Me,” the Third

Symphony played little role in Mahler’s ascendancy in the concert hall. The work had to

wait until 1902, when Mahler was an established composer, for its first complete

performance and printed score.92 In both cases, Mahler renounced the titles. But the

programmatic guide was not forgotten. In late 1902, a concert organizer contacted

Mahler about performing the symphony and to inquire about the programmatic titles

previously associated with it. Mahler confirmed the titles but forbade their printing.

Please, articulate them in your own words without quoting the inscriptions,
which are deficient in the extreme. Then you will have done as I wish. I am very
thankful that you asked me about this. How my work and my oeuvre are
introduced to the “public” is not unimportant for their future.93

Despite the successes he had enjoyed in recent years, Mahler was still concerned about

his place in the concert hall repertory. He continued to believe that programmatic
91 The two exceptions originated in requests made by others: once in 1902, as Mahler was asked

to write a program for the Second Symphony at the request of King Albert I of Saxony; and once with the
Third Symphony in 1907, when Paul Bekker requested permission for Mahler to include the titles in his
essay for the program booklet. One can easily imagine that Mahler, by then an established composer no
longer struggling for recognition, was willing to reconsider the titles that had been so closely intertwined
with the work’s genesis.
92 The precise date cannot be determined, but Filler has argued most persuasively that the score

appeared shortly before the concert in Krefeld. Danuser gives the date variously as 1898 and 1899, and
Franklin states that it appeared after the concert.
93 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 298; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 266–67: “Bitte, drücken

Sie dies in Ihrer Sprache aus, ohne die höchst unzureichenden Überschriften zu zitieren und Sie haben
dann in meinem Sinne gehandelt. Ich bin Ihnen sehr dankbar, daß Sie mich gefragt, es ist mir für die
Zukunft meines Werkes wie meines Schaffens nicht unwichtig, wie dasselbe nun in die ‘Öffentlichkeit’
eingeführt wird.”

43
guides could aid the reception of his work, but he had learned that if he penned the

guides, his works would be misconstrued as program music based on those texts.

Mahler preferred to steer clear of “New German pedantry” and to contrast himself with

Strauss as Arthur Seidl had once put it in a letter. Mahler replied: “You are right, that

my ‘music arrives at a program as the final, ideal clarification, whereas for Strauss the

program is an assigned task.’”94

Influence of Programmatic Ideas on Composition

Although Mahler did not intend for the program to be a necessary part of the

aesthetic experience of the Third Symphony, the ideas contained in the programs did

play a role in the compositional process. The evolution of the titles in the manuscripts

suggests that Mahler’s compositional process was not tethered to his initial

programmatic ideas and often developed in directions contrary to them. Only one title

from the initial draft of movement titles survived into the symphony’s final version

(“What love tells me”; cf. appendix A.2, A.21). In June 1896, Mahler revoked the

association of the first movement with Dionysus (cf. appendix A.13, B.5) and considered

changing its longstanding title “Summer marches in,” under which many sketches for

the movement had already been created (see appendix B.5). Even seemingly

straightforward examples are more complicated than they first appear. According to

Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler claimed that the second movement was inspired by the

94 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 222; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 212: “Sie haben recht, daß

meine ‘Musik schließlich zum Programm als letzter ideeller Verdeutlichung gelangt, währenddem bei
Strauss das Programm als gegebenes Pensum daliegt.’” Much to Mahler’s chagrin, Seidl later published
extracts of Mahler’s letter in a newspaper. Its appearance was a proximate cause for Mahler’s public
disavowal of programs in Munich. See Hefling, “Miners,” 41–42.

44
flowers near his composition hut.95 Yet the earliest draft of the movement bears the title

“What the child tells” (see appendix A.1). None of Mahler’s commentaries about the

movement mentions a connection with children. Does their innocence count among the

movement’s influential stimuli and as part of its supposed program?

Documentary evidence also makes clear that Mahler’s titles and commentaries

were not just responses to the character of the music, but were also shaped by the need

for the program itself to have an intelligible premise. Here Mahler seems to have drawn

a lesson from his failed attempts to write prose descriptions of the First Symphony;

unlike those, the programmatic guide to the Third is tightly constructed and internally

coherent. Mahler’s favored formulation of the program to the Third was an

evolutionary development from lifeless matter through the stages of life to transcendent

love (see, for example, his published programs in appendix A.23–24). But he only

developed this idea at the end of the summer of 1895, when movements two through

seven were largely complete. Until then, the projected titles were split mostly between

references to nature and to the times of day and year.96 The orchestral scores drafted at

the end of the summer reveal that the order of the movements was only established at

this stage—before the advent of an evolutionary progression (see appendix A.8). A

conversation with Bauer-Lechner, probably around 18–21 August (see appendix A.11),

is the first documentation of “Man” and “Angel” in the titles to the fourth and fifth

movements. Only with these two new titles did the program take the form of an

evolutionary progression, yet it was not until 29 August, many days after Mahler’s

95 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 49; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 52–53. Mahler further claimed that

anyone who did not know the charming area would be able to picture it simply by listening to his music.
96 Natural imagery included the forest, cuckoo, and flowers. Temporal designations include

twilight, night, morning, midday, and summer (see appendix A.1–7).

45
work had been completed and the vacation ended, that he expressly articulated the

program’s logical premise as such (see appendix A.12, B.2). Clearly, the core of Mahler’s

programmatic guide for the Third Symphony made no productive contribution to his

compositional efforts that summer. It is more likely that the jettisoned titles played a

greater role in shaping the music of their respective movements, a possibility that gains

support from Mahler’s continued use of the old titles informally for another year.

The compositional process that generated the Third Symphony was obviously

not a matter of composing out a pre-existent program. That would have transgressed

Mahler’s aesthetic beliefs, and it is not supported by the manuscript evidence. Rather,

composition, for Mahler, was a complex interaction of musical and nonmusical ideas—

including ideas not enshrined in the symphony’s final program. Some may have been

contained in jettisoned titles, others in remarks that Mahler made only in private. It

may even be that the majority of ideas—philosophical, experiential, natural, visual,

aural, musical—populating Mahler’s creative imagination as he composed the Third

Symphony will never be known. To seek in the published programmatic guide an

ideational blueprint for the symphony’s construction is to misrepresent how it came to

be.

The most detailed account of how word and idea interacted can be gleaned from

the process by which the first movement came to be associated with the Greek god Pan.

Throughout the entire summer of 1895, the movement’s projected title was “Summer

marches in.” All of the surviving sketches from this period, being of lively and energetic

march character, are in keeping with it.97 When Mahler returned to his summer home a

year later, on 11 June 1896, he discovered that he had left his musical sketches behind in

97 These sketches are Stanford 630 and 631, described and transcribed in Franklin, Mahler, 100–
04.

46
Hamburg. Loath to waste precious days reserved for composition, he set to work on an

introduction for the first movement.98 The expressive character of this new material, so

unlike the buoyant march originally planned, took him by surprise. His first recorded

attempt at description consisted of little more than expressions of disbelief and the

single word “rigidity” (see appendix B.4). By 21 or 22 June, Mahler started to develop

other interpretive metaphors, telling Bauer-Lechner that he could have named the new

introduction “What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me” (see appendix B.5). In the same

conversation, he invoked Pan for the first time in connection with the symphony.99 The

reference, however, was not to the new introduction, but a possible replacement for the

main movement’s title: “Pan’s March” (Pans Zug). Only when Mahler completed the

sketches for the entire movement on 28 June is there evidence of his projecting the idea

of Pan back onto the introduction for the first time: “Now I have also found the title for

the introduction: ‘Pan’s awakening,’ which is followed by ‘Summer marches in’” (see

appendix B.7).

The preponderance of evidence points to the following picture. Although the

title of the first movement had been relatively stable since the symphony’s inception,

Mahler did not anticipate the character of the music that he composed in June 1896. The

music came out a certain way in spite of the program, not because of it. At first, he did

not even know what allegorical description best suited its expression. In a sense, then,

these initial sketches lacked both an identifiable stimulus and a verbal description.

When he finally started to formulate concrete ideas suitable to the music, it is clear that
98 He also wrote the Wunderhorn song “Lob des hohen Verstandes” at this time. Mahler
ultimately conflated the first movement’s introduction and its main section. This happened only very late
in the composition of the movement, and Mahler never fully relinquished calling it an introduction and
main movement, as seen in the autograph fair copy (see appendix A.21).
99 This statement depends on my assertions regarding the dating of the manuscript Stanford 631.

See the commentary to appendix A.17 for summary of these issues.

47
his intention was to find a description that could be incorporated into the existing

programmatic scheme. One consideration, “What the craggy mountains tell me,”

matched the titular format of the other movements and would have logically extended

their evolutionary progression a step lower to lifeless matter. But Mahler instead chose

a metaphor that could better stand for all of nature. With “Pan’s awakening,” he had not

only an apt symbol for the symphony’s starting point (the beginning of life), but also a

stronger harbinger of the metaphysical course that the final movements would take.

Following the association of “Pan” a bit further, one can also see that stimulus

and description were not mutually exclusive. Since Mahler penned many of the

programmatic descriptions in the midst of composition, post facto descriptions could in

turn become stimuli to refining his sketches and scores. These instances are as elusive

to document as they are likely to have occurred. One possible example involves a

passage from the introduction marked “Pan sleeps” (Pan schläft) in the orchestral fair

copy (m. 132; see appendix A.21). Its original sketch does not survive. There are,

however, two other sketches, most likely from late June 1896, in which Mahler

indicated for “Pan sleeps” to be inserted at specific points (see appendix A.16, A.17).

When was “Pan sleeps” written? It seems unlikely that it originated much before 28

June. Not only does this day mark the first recorded instance of Mahler linking the idea

of Pan with the introduction, but the music to “Pan sleeps” cannot be easily squared

with any of Mahler’s descriptions of the first movement’s introduction before this date.

Its pastoral and lyrical character is more in keeping with the Greek god of shepherds

than with the stark and unbridled forces discussed by Mahler (see appendix B.4–7).

These factors suggest that the idea for “Pan sleeps” resulted from a cascade of

developments triggered by Mahler’s initial idea of “Pan’s March” from roughly a week

48
earlier. Of course this cannot be known for certain. But at the very least, the idea of Pan

influenced the orchestration of “Pan Sleeps,” which was made later in July. The delicate

woodwind scoring, led by the flutes and then oboe, evokes a pastoral atmosphere, while

the dreamy backdrop of muted trills in the high strings seem tailored to the Greek god

of the shepherds and forest, also known for his reed flute and midday slumbers.

Such concrete examples suggest that the music was influenced in part by

concrete ideas in the titles and commentaries. Morten Solvik’s study of the Third has

compiled the most instances of such affinities.100 In addition to the orchestration of “Pan

sleeps,” which is akin to local tone painting, Solvik proposes that aspects of the formal

structure are also metaphors of the programmatic content.101 The “Pan sleeps” material

appears twice in the exposition and once in the development, each time in an analogous

position at the juncture between the movement’s two theme groups. Solvik reads the

absence of this material in the recapitulation as the fulfillment of the movement’s title

“Pan awakes” (Pan erwacht). After he has “slept” during the exposition and development,

Pan’s “awakening” in the recapitulation unleashes a boisterous march that drives the

movement to its close.102 Solvik’s study contains numerous further examples, both local

100 Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination.” Solvik’s dissertation is unsurpassed in its
systematic and sensitive evaluation of Mahler’s programmatic associations. In “Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier,’”
Stephen Hefling published similar work on the nexus between the first movement of Mahler’s Second
Symphony and Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady, a dramatic epic translated as Todtenfeier by Mahler’s friend
Siegfried Lipiner.
101 Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 165. Stephen Rodgers’s recent book on

Berlioz centers on the idea of form as a metaphor for poetic content; see Form, Program, and Metaphor in
the Music of Berlioz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
102 Examples like “Pan sleeps” reveal relatively little about what Mahler believed the aesthetic

effect would be for audiences unaware of the programmatic headings and commentaries associated with
the work’s genesis. Whatever the role of extra-musical considerations, Mahler would have been fully
aware of the purely musical consequences of deleting the “Pan sleeps” material. For example, its omission
brings into direct juxtaposition the music that had preceded and followed it. “Pan sleeps” is not the only
material to figure prominently in both the exposition and development only to disappear from the
recapitulation; such is also the fate of the trumpet solo and subsequent grotesque glissandos at measures

49
and large-scale. He concludes, correctly, that “as musical inspiration evoked concrete

images in Mahler’s mind, so, too, did the ideas that he articulated through verbal means

affect the musical procedure.”103

The tone painting in “Pan sleeps” is exceptional within the symphony. Most of

the titles and commentaries trade in abstract objects or topics without any apparent

depictive or pictorial element. The semantic imprecision of instrumental music sets a

severe limit on such blatant links between music and program as “Pan sleeps.” At the

same time, the imprecision all but guarantees that general musical parallels will be

found to elements of the program, regardless of whether they played any role in the

creative process or not.

The general absence of obvious programmatic or pictorial references in the

symphony reflects Mahler’s idealist aesthetic views. As an idealist, Mahler saw the

affinity of his music and titles as the result of their both reflecting a common ideal. To

him, the titles were allegories; merely to musicalize them would be tantamount to

writing program music. Mahler makes clear the distinction in his praise of a play by

Siegfried Lipiner, among his most important friends and intellectual influences. Mahler

invokes wine and Dionysus as metaphors to describe the powerful, metaphysical content

of Lipiner’s work: “Your play does not merely write about wine and portray its effects—

it is wine, it is Dionysus! It seems to me, by the way, that the figure of Dionysus was for

the ancients just that inner drive, in this mystical, magnificent sense that you have

83–98. Excluding material from the recapitulation creates a telescoping effect at the structural level
commonly exploited in sonata forms.
103 Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 120.

50
grasped!”104 Such a metaphorical understanding of the titles, as opposed to a

programmatic one, comports with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, another

philosophical tract in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Wagner that greatly

conditioned Mahler’s thinking on music and metaphysics in the mid 1890s.

Even when the composer has spoken about a composition using images, as when
he describes a symphony as pastoral or one movement as “Scene by the Brook”
and another as “Merry Gathering of Country Folk,” these are only parabolical
ideas derived from the music—not the objects imitated by the music. These
ideas cannot enlighten us in any way about the dionysian content of the music
and have no differential value over other possible images.105

The proper way to frame the affinities between music and program in Mahler’s

Third is that taken by Solvik: “The present study . . . concentrates not so much on the

score itself but on Mahler’s interpretation of the score.”106 Above all, the metaphors

contained in the titles and commentaries delineate the topography of Mahler’s

intellectual and creative fantasy. Using them as a prism for the symphony reveals not

the intrinsic content of the symphony, but how the work resonated in Mahler’s fantasy.

This perspective explains two additional aspects of Mahler’s programmatic descriptions.

First, Mahler gravitated towards related extramusical associations to describe disparate

passages in his oeuvre. Two years before he conceived of the Third Symphony and

associated its first movement with ideas of awakening, summer, and winter, Mahler

104 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 264; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 236: “Sie erzählt nicht

vom Wein und schildert seine Wirkungen – sondern sie ist der Wein, sie ist Dionysos! Mir scheint es
übrigens, daß die Gestalt des Dionysos bei den Alten eben der Trieb war, in diesem mystisch-grandiosen
Sinn, wie Du ihn erfaßt!“
105 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in Nietzsches Werke, part I, vol. 1 (Leipzig: C. G.

Naumann, 1902), 48: “Ja selbst wenn der Tondichter in Bildern über eine Composition geredet hat, etwa
wenn er eine Symphonie als pastorale und einen Satz als "Scene am Bach," einen anderen als "lustiges
Zusammensein der Landleute" bezeichnet, so sind das ebenfalls nur gleichnissartige, aus der Musik
geborne Vorstellungen—und nicht etwa die nachgeahmten Gegenstände der Musik—Vorstellungen, die
über den dionysischen Inhalt der Musik uns nach keiner Seite hin belehren können, ja die keinen
ausschliesslichen Werth neben anderen Bildern haben.”
106 Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 16.

51
wrote in the program to the First Symphony’s performance in Hamburg: “The

introduction [to the first movement] depicts nature awakening from the long sleep of

winter.”107 The absurdity that would arise from exchanging the introductions of the two

symphonies demonstrates the inadequacy of words to encapsulate musical content.

Mahler’s compositional brush was far finer than the broad strokes of his poetic

metaphors. Another aspect is that Mahler delighted in developing new metaphorical

descriptions. In the words of his Dutch acquaintance Alphons Diepenbrock: “He says

something different about [his music] each time.”108 While preparing the fair copy of

the Third Symphony, for instance, he likened the first movement to Zeus overthrowing

Kronos.109 At no previous point had Mahler brought these figures into connection with

the movement. They simply reflect how the music excited his imagination at that point

in time.

*
* *

Stephen Hefling once wrote that, in order to understand Mahler’s reference to a

chrysalis state in discussing the finale of the Fourth Symphony, one “requires a review

of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe’s published conversations, Fechner, and Lipiner, as

well as a thorough grasp of what he had tried to achieve in Symphonies 1 through 3.”110

Indeed, as this chapter has shown, one requires a similar breadth of knowledge to

107 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 1, The Early Years [1958], rev. Paul Banks and David

Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 157. Mahler was referring in
particular to the transition from the introduction to exposition in the first movement.
108Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 76; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 76; Eveline Nikkels, “Mahler and
Holland,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford
Unviersity Press, 2002), 331.
109 Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 76; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 76.
110 Hefling, “Miners,” 47.

52
appreciate Mahler’s programmatic commentaries for the Third Symphony. The

meaning that a composer ascribes to his music is a laudable topic for scholarly inquiry,

but it need not set the conditions for all interpretations and analyses.

However much Mahler fancied himself a metaphysician who communicated his

ideas through music, he was first and foremost a composer—a master in the

arrangement of tones in artful ways. Indeed, Mahler parades his sensitivity to the

sounds of other repertoires in the Third Symphony. Many of Mahler’s contemporaries

responded to this trait. The Czech music critic Richard Batka, a staunch advocate of

Mahler who nonetheless did not shrink from articulating the challenges posed by his

music, wrote in an essay on the Seventh Symphony from 1909:

[Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is a] musical reflection of impressions from the

outside world. It hardly bears witness to the inner life of its creator. What
arouses Mahler’s fantasy the most are events from folklife: parades, dances,
marches. Daily life attracts Mahler, and he does not flinch at its triviality. He
wants to discover the poetry of the workday, and he makes music en plein air a
specialty of his symphonies. It is a matter of taste whether a melody like the one
played by the cello in the trio of the second movement is even appropriate for
the concert hall, or if it should not rather be played by a military band at an
outdoor pavilion.111

Batka’s overwhelming sense was that Mahler’s expressive intensity did not lead to inner

truths, but projected outward, the salient references to folk and popular music acting as

so many reminders of quotidian existence beyond the insulating walls of the temple of

high art.

111 B. [Richard Batka], “Gustav Mahlers ‚Siebente’” Kunstwart 23, no. 6 (zweites Dezemberheft
1909): 427: “[ist] musikalischer Reflex auf Eindrücke von außen und [kündet] nur wenig von dem
Innenleben seines Schöpfers. Was Mahlers Phantasie am meisten entzündet, sind Vorgänge des
Volkslebens, Aufzüge, Tänze, Märsche. Der Alltag zieht ihn an, seine Trivialität hat keine Schrecken für
ihn. Er will die Poesie des Wochentags entdecken, und die Pleinairmusik bildet geradezu eine Spezialität
seiner Symphonien. Es ist Geschmacksache, ob eine Melodie wie das vom Cello geführte Trio des zweiten
Satzes überhaupt noch als konzertfähig gelten soll und nicht lieber von der Banda als Gartenmusik zu
spielen wäre.” An abbreviated translation of Batka’s nearly identical review of the Seventh Symphony’s
premiére in 1908 can be found in Painter, Mahler and His World, 322–24.

53
 It is difficult to explain the vividness of these vernacularisms as consequences of

the programmatic underpinnings. Nearly every commentator on the Third Symphony

has mentioned stylistic likenesses to military marches in the first movement. Yet none

of Mahler’s programmatic symbols—Dionysus, Pan, Bacchus, summer—have martial

connotations. One can claim that the energy and power conveyed by military idioms

was a potent metaphor for the primordial forces that Mahler claimed to portray. But

such a creative genius as he could easily have given voice to these forces without

evoking genres of functional and popular music. Clearly, it is not sufficient to

understand the Third Symphony as Mahler interpreted it in his public program and

private commentaries. To do so is to miss all that he left unsaid.

54
 CHAPTER 2

THE RECEPTION AND STUDY OF

MAHLER’S ALLUSIONS TO VERNACULAR MUSIC

His melodies . . . convince those ready to believe in them.

—Guido Adler, Gustav Mahler, 19161

In 1899, not long after Mahler arrived in Vienna as conductor at the Court

Opera, a new newspaper appeared in the city: Die Fackel (The Torch). For the nearly four

decades to come, the paper pilloried Vienna’s press, officials, nobility, and cultural

figures. Karl Kraus, its founder and main author, only occasionally wrote about Mahler,

but he did pen the following anecdote about the first Viennese performance of the First

Symphony in 1900:

Mahler’s friends and enemies fought a battle with one another last Sunday at
the performance of Mahler’s “Sinfonie ironica” in D major. A friend of music
told me how it began. In the third movement of the symphony, a funeral march
is parodied in high spirits. Those who understand music comprehended the
parody and started to laugh. This greatly annoyed the friends of Mr. Mahler,
who were of the opinion that it is improper to laugh during a funeral march.
Mahler’s friends therefore tried to silence them by hissing. But Mahler’s
enemies could not tolerate that. They wanted to show that they could not
consider Mahler’s funeral march serious music. They also laughed, but in order

1Guido Adler, Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: Universal Edition, 1916), 73: “Seine Weisen zeugen
immer von Charakter und wirken überzeugend für ihn, der da kommt, um zu glauben.” All translations
are my own unless otherwise indicated.

55
 to mock Mr. Mahler. And so the mockers and the admirers of the composer
valiantly battled forth. The friends of music, who had been the first to laugh, did
not long remain the third party of laughers, for comical orchestral sounds were
no longer to be heard above the din of the sectarian fighting.2

The funeral march under question actually included one of Mahler’s most exceptional

uses of vernacular music: a literal quotation of the folksong “Bruder Martin.” Kraus’s

account of the audience’s reaction vividly captures important features of the reception of

Mahler’s allusions to folk and popular styles. This trait of Mahler’s compositions was

polarizing; it elicited strong opinions from all sides. But more importantly, Kraus’s

anecdote reflects how these opinions often had less to do with the music than with

factors external to it. According to Kraus, allegiance to factions either pro or contra

Mahler and notions of what properly belongs in art music were the primarily influences

on the reactions for the majority of the audience. For all but those few who truly

understood music, Mahler’s symphony was little more than a trigger for opinions

conditioned by outside circumstances.

This chapter, which surveys the reception of Mahler’s allusions to folk and

popular styles in the secondary literature, bears out this proposition. It shows how

ideologies—particularly those regarding aesthetic hierarchies and matters of race—

have influenced claims about the sources of Mahler’s vernacularisms. To give some

measure of how the conflation of music and ideology has left us with a very incomplete

picture of the kinds of allusions that Mahler made to his musical environment, the
2 Karl Krauss, Die Fackel, Heft 59 (November 1900): 26: “Die Mahlerfreunde und die

Mahlerfeinde haben einander letzten Sonntag bei der Aufführung von Gustav Mahlers ‚Sinfonia ironica’
(D-dur) eine heftige Schlacht geliefert. Ein Musikfreund meldet mir, wie sie begann. Im dritten Satze der
Symphonie wird ein Trauermarsch übermüthig parodiert. Musikverständige begriffen die Parodie und
begannen zu lachen. Darob heftiges Aergernis bei Herrn Mahlers Freunden, die der Ansicht waren, es sei
unanständig, bei einem Trauermarsch zu lachen. Die Mahlerfreunde versuchten also, die Lacher zur Ruhe
zu zischen. Das durften aber die Mahlerfeinde nicht dulden. Sie wollten zeigen, dass sie Herrn Mahlers
Trauermarsch nicht für ernste Musik halten könnten, und lachten auch, um Herrn Mahler zu verhöhnen.
Und so kämpften Spötter und Verehrer des Componisten wacker fort. Die Musikfreunde aber, die die
ersten Lachenden gewesen, blieben nicht lang die lachenden Dritten. Denn im Lärm des Parteikampfes
war von den komischen Orchesterklängen nichts mehr zu hören.”

56
chapter closes with a short considertation of a passage from the third movement of the

First Symphony. Despite being a locus classicus for Mahler’s vernacularisms, scholars

have hitherto overlooked important connections to operetta.

The Early Monographs: Justifying Allusions to Vernacular Styles

A number of monographs on Mahler and his music appeared in the final years of

his life and the decade thereafter, when critics continued to debate vigorously the merits

of his music. Mahler’s staunchest supporters—Richard Specht, Paul Stefan, Guido

Adler, Paul Bekker, and Bruno Walter—penned the earliest monographs on his music.3

Their texts strongly influenced later views of Mahler. Each author was personally

acquainted with the composer, and their books offer a glimpse of him unmediated by the

chronological and cultural removes that separate scholars from him now. The treatment

of Mahler’s vernacular allusions in the modern scholarly literature can often be traced

back to the ideological assumptions of his earliest defenders.

All of Mahler’s early proponents felt a strong need to justify his allusions to

vernacular styles. This impulse was mainly a response to the prevailing conditions of

Austro-German musical aesthetics and reception at the fin de siècle. The symphonic

tradition, after all, is replete with examples of composers dipping into the wellsprings of

folk and popular music. Both themes in the double-variation movement of Haydn’s

3 These monographs exist in multiple editions and printings. Unless otherwise noted, the

versions consulted in this dissertation are the following: Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler, 2d ed. (Stuttgart
and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925); Paul Stefan, Gustav Mahler: Eine Studie über Persönlichkeit und
Werk, 3d ed. (Munich: Piper, 1920); Guido Adler, Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: Universal Edition, 1916); Paul
Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1921). I will also consult Specht’s first
monograph, written eight years before his more extensive, second monograph: Specht, Gustav Mahler,
Moderne Essays, no. 52 (Berlin: Gose und Tetzlaff, 1905). Bruno Walter’s book Gustav Mahler. Ein
Porträt appeared later, in 1936 (Taschenbücher zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 72 [Wilhelmshaven:Noetzel,
2001]). He is also the only one of the figures who was not a professional writer on music. Nevertheless,
his biography warrants inclusion here because of its affinities with the other monographs, and because of
the scope of its later influence.

57
Symphony no. 103 are based on folksongs4; Beethoven inserted a character variation in

janissary style into the finale of the Ninth; Brahms interrupted the finale of his First

with an imitation of an alphorn; and Bruckner drew on ländler in a number of scherzos.

By century’s end, however, borrowing from vernacular sources became increasingly

problematic for composers and commentators on the symphony, for reasons that went

back a hundred years. The introduction of idealist categories of thought into Austro-

German musical aesthetics proved to be a kind of devil’s bargain. It secured music’s

standing as a fine art and autonomous philosophical pursuit in its own right, but at the

cost of dividing musical culture into “serious” and “popular” tiers.5 The ultimate

difference between the tiers was neither stylistic nor even material; serious art works

distinguished themselves by the spiritual and essential content that philosophers, critics,

and musicians perceived in them. This split was already apparent in the divergent

reception of Beethoven, whose works constituted the quintessential example of the

higher autonomous artwork, and Rossini, whose operas represented the lower class of

music intended merely to entertain.

4 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style [1971] (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 331.
5 This following account of the division of musical culture relies on Bernd Sponheuer, Musik als
Kunst und Nicht-Kunst Untersuchungen zur Dichotomie von ‚hoher’ und ‚niederer’ Musik im musikästhetischen
Denken zwischen Kant und Hanslick, Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 30 (Kassel: Bärenreiter,
1987). For more on idealist aesthetics, see ch. 1, pp. 16–30.

58
 Vernacular music was similarly divided.6 Most writers since the early nineteenth

century distinguished between authentic folk songs and the Gassenhauer or popular

song.7 During Mahler’s lifetime, there was not even an all-inclusive concept like

vernacular that could subsume both kinds. Folksong was putatively the aesthetic

superior of the pair. Under the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder, folk music was a

direct articulation of the spirit of the people, having its origins in the Volk at some point

in the distant past. Popular songs, in contrast, were considered new, fleeting, and

morally inferior. These were normative views impossible to sustain along stylistic

grounds, but they nonetheless had currency through most of the nineteenth century.

Whatever stability the division of musical culture enjoyed at the beginning of

the nineteenth century, it had all but eroded away by the end. The rapid expansion of

6 To maintain clarity and consistency, this dissertation follows the New Grove’s usage policy for

European music (Carole Pegg, “Folk Music, §6: New Grove Usage” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/09933 [accessed 12
February 2010]). “Folk” is used to refer to traditional music disseminated primarily through oral
transmission and generally associated with specific regions, and “popular” to convey newly composed
music emanating from urban centers and written in part with the intention of making money. In many
cases, distinguishing folk and popular is impossible or unnecessary. I have chosen “vernacular” as the
umbrella term to subsume both. It has the advantage of being relatively free of the connotative baggage
of “folk” and “popular,” not to mention other alternatives. The most viable alternative is “colloquial,”
which Eggebrecht introduced to scholarship on Mahler (Die Musik Gustav Mahlers [Munich: Piper,
1982]). This term, however, too strongly connotes the absence of a written text. The German terms
“Unterhaltungsmusik” and “Trivialmusik” do not adequately convey folk music apart from its place in
mass culture, and the words are stylistically jarring in an English text. “Functional” shifts the focus too
strongly to the sociological purpose of the music; moreover, it is unclear what music is without social
function. The aesthetic judgments and derogatory connotations entailed in “trivial,” “banal,” and “vulgar,”
suit them to polemical literature and consign their use in this dissertation to reporting the views of others
who use them.
7 The differentiation was articulated by Justus Thibaut already in 1825. Exactly one hundred

years later, Hans Naumann was among the first to articulate clearly the distortion of reality required to
maintain such distinctions. See Thibaut, Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825); quoted in Carl Dahlhaus,
Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, California Studies in 19th-Century Music, vol. 5
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 107; Naumann, “Gassenhauer,” in
Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 1, ed. Paul Merker and Wolfgang Stammler (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1925–26), 406; Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 108. Gassenhauer is difficult to
render in English. The word originally described one who idly wanders the streets, especially at night.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, it applied to the songs sung by such a person. Only in the nineteenth
century did the term become the derogatory counterpart to the authentic folksong. An approximate
English translation, though more neutral than the modern German usage, is “street song.” When used in
opposition to “authentic” folk song, I will translate the term “popular song.”

59
the commercialized music industry and other effects of the industrial revolution put the

representatives of music’s upper tier on the defensive. They ratcheted up their rhetoric

and became increasingly diligent in their patrols of aesthetic borders. Ultimately, the

popular music industry became the antipode against which philosophers, critics, and

musicians defined high art and folk traditions.

Many believed that rural folk music was being pushed to the brink of extinction

by the ubiquity of supposedly inferior popular songs. Folksong collectors rushed to

anthologize the music of folk traditions that they believed to be in danger of

disappearing.8 Essays on the state of folk music appeared in prefaces to these collections

and regularly in newspapers and music journals.9 The tone was often strident and

polemical because the distinction between rural folk and urban popular was entangled

with broader moral, social, and political dimensions.10 An excerpt from a 1903 article in

a short-lived Viennese arts magazine gives a sense of the tone of this discourse:

It is precisely among the Volk that folksongs are least often sung today. . . . The
old songs are increasingly forgotten and are hardly recognized by the new
generation, who consider them old-fashioned. To suit the musical needs of large
swaths of the population, a new species of music was created in recent years,
which usurps the name folksong without deserving it. The melodies of these
songs, not even to mention their texts, justify a famous musician’s remark on an
immensely popular march from a Viennese operetta of his time: “If music could
be obscene, then such would be the case here.” Street songs and couplets of
remarkable triviality and without a trace of a true, warm folksong are sung and

8 For example, Andreas Kretzschmar and Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio, Deutsche Volkslieder

mit ihren Original-Weisen (Berlin: Vereins-Buchhandlung, 1840); Ludwig Erk and Franz M. Böhme,
Deutscher Liederhort: Auswahl der vorzüglicheren Deutschen Volkslieder, nach Wort und Weise aus der Vorzeit
und Gegenwart (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893); Joseph Joachim, Carl Krebs, and Engelbert
Humperdinck, eds., “Im Volkston: Moderne Volkslieder,” Die Woche, Sonderhefte 3, 5, and 6 (1903–1904);
and Hans Breuer, ed., Zupfgeigenhansl: Das Liederbuch der Wandervögel (Leipzig: Hofmeister, 1909).
9Julie Hubbert examined some of these prefaces in “‘Unfettering the Tongue of Kitsch,’ Mahler
and the Trivial as Folk,” paper read at the annual meeting of the 71st American Musicological Society,
Washington, D.C. (2005).
10In the book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from 1887, the German sociologist Ferdinand
Tönnies codified a widely influential theory based on a related dichotomy between rural folk communities
and urban societies of industrial capitalism. See Community and Society, trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis
(New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

60
 hummed not only on the streets, but also out in the country, which should
normally be the folksong’s preserve. Whenever I happen to hear an old
folksong, it nearly strikes me as a musical revelation.11

Many folksong collectors then, like scholars today, understood the futility of

using musical style alone to tell rural folk music from newly composed songs. In the

essay “Was singt das Volk?” (1895), Franz Böhme distinguished between three kinds of

songs in the oral folk repertory: authentic folksongs, newly composed folksong

imitations (volksthümliche Lieder), and urban popular songs (Gassenhauer). Böhme defined

the last by non-musical criteria. “These modern, urban hit songs have something in

common with the folksong with regard to their origins [i.e., they had entered the oral

tradition], but not in their value or longevity. Fortunately, they appear but a short

while and, after a brief period of fashionability, disappear again.”12 For these reasons,

Böhme deliberately excluded from his collection anything stemming from operetta, even

if it had entered oral culture. Considering his otherwise positivist stance toward

11 J. Forgách, “Das Lied im Volke und Volksmusik,” Wochenschrift für Kunst und Musik 1, no. 9 (8

February 1903): 83: “Volkslieder werden gegenwärtig gerade im Volke am wenigsten gesungen . . . die
alten Lieder gerathen daselbst immer mehr in Vergessenheit, von der neuen Generation beinahe nicht
gekannt und als veraltet angesehen. Für das musikalische Bedürfnis der breiteren Volksschichten ist in
den letzten Jahren eine Species Musik entstanden, welche diesen Namen nur mehr usurpirt, ganz gewiß
aber nicht mehr verdient, Lieder, welche von den nicht näher zu bezeichnenden Texten abgesehen,
Melodien ausweisen, welche den Ausspruch eines berühmten Musikers rechtfertigen, den dieser bezüglich
eine seinerzeit immens populär gewordenen Marsches in einer Wiener Operette machte: ‘Wenn Musik
obscön sein könnte, wäre es in diesem Falle.’ Was hören wir nicht nur in unseren Straßen, auch auf dem
Lande, das doch die Heimat des Volksliedes sein soll, pfeifen, singen und summen: Gassenhauer,
Tingltangl-Couplets von bemerkenswerther Trivialität, von einem echten warmen Volkslied kaum mehr
eine Spur; wenn wir zufällig so ein altes Liedchen hören, klingt es uns fast wie eine musikalische
Offenbarung.” The second part of the article appears in the subsequent issue, no. 10 (15 February 1903):
92–93. All italics with quoted texts are as in original.
12 Franz Magnus Böhme, Volkstümliche Lieder der Deutschen in 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig,
1895), “Was singt das Volk?”: “Diese modernen Gassenhauer haben hinsichtlich des Ursprungs mit dem
Volksliede etwas gemeinsam, nicht aber deren Wert und Lebensdauer, glücklicherweise treten sie nur
vorübergehend auf, und nachdem sie eine kurze Zeit Mode gewesen, verschwinden sie wieder.”

61
folksong collecting, we may take this omission as compelling evidence for how serious

the distinction between folk and popular was to many of Mahler’s contemporaries.13

Prominent figures in art music shared the generally hostile attitude of folksong

collectors toward urban entertainment music. Brahms, to pick just one example,

believed strongly in the superior aesthetic and moral value of folksong, going so far as

to contemplate a treatise on the idea. He also published folksong arrangements and

assimilated the style of folksongs in many of his lieder.14 His affinity did not extend to

operetta. His friend and admirer, the composer Richard Heuberger, reportedly delayed

publishing his operetta Der Opernball (1898) until after Brahms’s death out of fear of

losing the respect of his revered master.15

Nowhere were these pressures more strongly felt than in the symphony, and at

no time more than at the fin de sècle. The symphony was the final bulwark against the

encroachments of popular music.16 It was to be philosophical music and, especially for

conservative critics, suffused with sublimity of expression and high-mindedness of style.

Robert Hirschfeld, one of Mahler’s most acute opponents in the Viennese press, put it

this way: “What about the opinion that Mahler’s symphonies are an articulation of their

times? Are not trousers and a fashionable hat also expressions of the times? Each age

has its strength, its weakness, its sublimity, its inanities, its honesty, its fabrications.
13Jon Finson, “The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder,” Journal of Musicology 5,
no. 2 (winter 1987): 91–116.
14See Gottfried Scholtz, “Das Volkslied und Johannes Brahms,” in Volksmusik: Wandel und
Deutung; Festschrift Walter Deutsch zum 75. Geburtstag (Vienna: Bohlau, 2000), 454–60. Schlotz makes the
cogent point that Brahms’s predilection for philology did not transfer to folksong, which he conceived in
ideological terms in opposition to Gassenhauer.
15Otto Keller, Die Operette in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung: Musik, Libretto, Darstellung (Leipzig:
Stein Verlag, 1926), 239. Brahms did admire Johann Strauss Jr., the one composer of operetta and
entertainment music who regularly managed to gain at least some respect in the circles of high art music.
For more on Mahler’s views on popular music, see ch. 3.
16 Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2007), 6.

62
The great symphonists sense and reveal the grandeur, strength, sublimity, and honesty

of their time, but not the negative qualities.”17 The price of an autonomous,

philosophical art was the widespread conviction that the worldly domain (not to

mention the commercial sphere) had no place in it.

Allusions to Folk and Military Styles

Since Mahler was widely seen as drawing from a diverse range of folk and

popular sources, his early proponents required diverse strategies to account for them.

These strategies varied according to the assumed origins of the allusions. In the early

monographs, Mahler’s use of folk and military styles was thought to emanate from his

musical experiences as a child. Mahler grew up in Iglau, a city of some 30,000, mostly

German-speaking inhabitants nestled on the border between Bohemia and Moravia. It

was also the home to a garrison of Austrian troops with its own military band.18 Mahler

himself declared the importance of such formative musical experiences. Specht reported

hearing Mahler say “that the only fruitful impressions decisive for artistic creation are

those that precede puberty, between the ages of four and eleven. Hardly anything

thereafter becomes a work of art.”19 In addition, Mahler told Natalie Bauer-Lechner that

17 Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Zwei Mahler-Sinfonien,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 254, 5

November 1909: “Wie steht’s aber mit der Phrase, daß in den Mahlerschen Sinfonien ihre Zeit sich
ausspricht? Ist denn nicht ein Beinkleid, ein Modehut auch Ausdruck der Zeit? Jede Zeit hat aber ihre
Stärke, ihre Schwäche, ihre Erhabenheit, ihre Nichtigkeiten, ihre Ehrlichkeit, ihre Fälschungen, und die
großen Sinfoniker empfinden und offenbaren die Größe, Stärke, Erhabenheit und Ehrlichkeit, nicht die
negative Eigenschaften ihrer Zeit.”

For more on the city’s military band and other musical institutions, see Timothy Freeze, “The
18

Public Concert Life of Mahler’s Youth: Iglau, 1866–75,” Naturlaut 7, no. 2 (2010): 2–7.
19 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 170: “Mahler hat mir gegenüber einmal die Aüßerung getan,
daß im künstlerischen Schaffen fast ausschließlich jene Eindrücke endgültig fruchtbar werden und
entscheidend sind, die in das Alter vom 4. bis zum 11. Jahr, also bis vor das Eintreten der Pubertät fallen;
alles spätere werde nur selten zum Kunstwerk.” In Mahler’s life, this corresponds to the years 1864–71,
during which he lived exclusively in Iglau. Bauer-Lechner records a similar statement by Mahler; see
Herbert Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter
Wagner, 1984), 138; and Peter Franklin, ed., Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, trans.

63
childhood experiences with Bohemian folk songs, the sounds from the nearby military

barracks, and the flugelhorn (an instrument commonly heard in Austrian military

bands) bore great relevance for his later works.20 He likely discussed these views with

many of his supporters.

It is difficult to overstate the fundamental importance ascribed to Mahler’s

childhood experiences in the early literature. As Stefan wrote, “youth prefigured

everything that Mahler’s character would have to offer.”21 And Specht believed that

one cannot begin to understand his works, if one does not know that as a four-
year old child he could sing hundreds of folksongs that he had learned from his
maid . . . and that he spent much of the day during his childhood in the barracks,
amidst the strangely medieval atmosphere of provincial military life, still
redolent of the lansquenets. The entire environment . . . imprinted itself in the
child’s mind in the form of pictures and songs, which, after many years of fading
away, then came back to him, perhaps only half consciously, and took artistic
form in countless passages in the symphonies and the Wunderhorn songs.22

The trope of childhood received an academic stamp of approval from Mahler’s lifelong

friend, the eminent musicologist Guido Adler. He began his description of Mahler’s

works by recounting the musical impressions of Mahler’s youth.

In Iglau . . . [Mahler] found rich musical sustenance in the folksongs of both

peoples [Germans and Czechs] among whom he spent his youth. His fantasy
was stimulated by the wooded landscape steeped in legend, and in the lively

Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 131. For more on Mahler’s expressive aesthetic, see ch. 1,
“Mahler the Idealist,” and Constantin Floros, “Kunst und Leben: Musik als Autobiographie,” in Gustav
Mahler, vol. 1, Die geistige Welt Gustav Mahlers in systematischer Darstellung (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1977), 136–41.
20 Killian, ed. Gustav Mahler, 58. See also Mahler, “The Influence o f the Folk-Song on German

Musical Art (An interview),” The Etude (1911): 301-302.

21 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 33: “Die Jugendzeit hat alles vorgebildet, was Mahlers Charakter
ergibt.”

Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 19–20: “Man kann seine Werke gar nicht verstehen, wenn man
22

nicht weiß, daß er als vierjähriges Kind hunderte von Volksliedern zu singen wußte, die er von der Magd
erlernt hatte, und . . . daß er einen großen Teil des Tages zu jenen Kinderzeiten in der Kaserne
verbrachte, mitten in der noch seltsam mittelalterlichen und landsknechtmäßigen Stimmung des
Soldatenlebens in der Provinz. Die ganze Umgebung . . . hat sich in Bildern und Liedern dem
Kindergemüt eingeprägt, und ist ihm, nach langen Jahren des Verblassens, dann wieder zu vielleicht nur
halbem Bewußtsein gekommen und in zahllosen Stellen der Symphonien und der ‘Wunderhorn’-Lieder zu
künstlerischer Form gelangt.”

64
 activities of the garrison . . . That is also the explanation for Mahler’s preference
for march rhythms of all kinds . . . The impressions of his youth run through his
works like a red thread. With touching affection he held fast to them.23

The emphasis on Mahler’s childhood as a source for his mature compositions constitutes

a psychological parallel to the broader idea of folk music originating in culture’s infancy.

The relevance of Mahler’s boyhood experiences could even trump overtly

programmatic explanations that stemmed from Mahler himself. Stefan was certainly

aware that Mahler described “Der große Appell” in the Second Symphony as a

representation of Judgment Day, yet he wrote: “It is almost touching, how even here

Mahler recalls the barracks of his boyhood home and its evening trumpet signal.”24

Local variation of trumpet signals in the Austrian military make it difficult to verify this

claim. The marked differences between Mahler’s trumpets and the military’s standard

evening call, however, imply strongly that Stefan did not know the specific trumpet

signals used in Iglau four decades earlier. For him, the trope of childhood was a higher

truth than purely musical features.25

Given the place of folk music in the upper tier of musical culture, Mahler’s

biographers took pains to forge links to the folk traditions of Mahler’s boyhood. Adler

maintained that “specifically Austrian elements are continually felt in the use of tunes

23 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 9–10: “In Iglau . . . er fand reiche musikalische Nahrung in den

Volksliedern der beiden Stämme, unter denen er seine Jugend verbrachte. Seine Phantasie wurde
angeregt durch die sagenumwobene Waldlandschaft und das muntere Treiben der Garnison . . . Daraus
erklärt sich auch Mahlers Vorliebe für Marschrhythmen aller Art . . . Wie ein roter Faden gehen die
Eindrücke seiner Jugend durch sein Schaffen während des ganzen Lebens. Mit rührender Anhänglichkeit
hielt er daran fest.”
24 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 122: “es ist fast rührend, wie sich Mahler noch hier an die Kaserne der

Jugendheimat, an ihr abendliches Retraite-Signal erinnert.”

25 For a list of standard trumpet signals, including “Retraite,” which announced the time for

return to barracks, see Emil Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik—von ihren Anfängen bis 1918, rev. and
enl. Eugen Brixel in Alta Musica 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 82–88.

65
from his Moravian-Bohemian homeland.”26 Bruno Walter wrote similarly that

“Mahler’s music gladly lapses into an Austrian dialect” and that he assimilated the folk

music from the German-Bohemian homeland.27 Every author claimed that the sounds of

the Austrian military were especially important to the composer.28

A difficulty with the assertions of national character is knowing which musical

traits the early biographers were responding to. In cases like the ländler and waltz,

national associations inhered in the idiom itself such that no further explanation was

required. But in the case of folksongs and many other attributions, it is not self-evident

what melodic or rhythmic traits are specifically German, Austrian, Bohemian, or

Moravian. Bekker offers a typical example. He wrote in the introductory remarks to the

Second Symphony: “What bestows Mahler’s Andante-Idyll with its special charm is the

mixing-in of Austrian and particularly Viennese sounds. They give the old-fashioned

dance tune of the minuet a whiff of touching homeliness and magic of the past.”29 Bekker

does not specify which musical elements give this minuet a Viennese cast.

Such open questions beset nearly all descriptive labels in the early monographs.

The absence of comparative musical examples and analytical evidence casts doubt on the

claims. If the labels are used as critical categories based on aesthetic intuitions, then one

cannot disentangle what part stems from actual musical likenesses, and what part from

26Adler, Gustav Mahler, 52: “Spezifisch österreichische Einschläge machen sich dauernd geltend
durch Verwendung von Weisen seiner mährisch-böhmischen Heimat.” In particular, Adler cited the third
movement of the Second Symphony, the third movement of the Third, and the second movement of the
Ninth.
27 Walter, Gustav Mahler, 79, 73: “Überhaupt verfällt Mahlers Musik gern in den

österreichischen Dialekt.”
28 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 52; Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 170; Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 89–90;

Walter, Gustav Mahler, 79.

29 Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 83: “Was Mahlers Andante-Idyll besonderen Reiz verleiht,
ist die Beimischung österreichischer, spezifisch Wienerischer Lokaltöne. Sie geben der altväterlichen
Tanzweise des Menuettes einen Zug rührender Heimischkeit und Vergangenheitzaubers.”

66
ideology. Are there musical traits in Mahler’s works indebted to German, Austrian,

Bohemian, or Moravian folk traditions, or are the passages an artistic creation of a folk

tone whose ascription to specific traditions is guided by Mahler’s biography? One can

similarly ask whether Mahler’s marches are particularly indebted to Austrian military

bands. Is their musical character a product of their supposed national characteristics, or

an inference from Mahler’s biography? If the latter, then it is worth considering that

Mahler spent most of the decade preceding composition of the Third Symphony in

Kassel, Leipzig, and Hamburg, and that his earliest experiences with military music

included Prussian military bands.30 Perhaps the symphony’s marches bear the traces of

Prussian military traditions even more than Austrian.

One reason for the aesthetic superiority of folk music was its supposed origins in

the distant past, in an idyll yet untouched by the social and economic turmoil of

modernity. Mahler’s early proponents capitalized on the ennobling effect of connections

with times past in order to justify some vernacular styles that otherwise might have

been linked with contemporary popular music. Stefan, for example, wrote of the second

movement of the First Symphony and its graceful waltz trio: “a merry, dancing scherzo,

an Austrian ländler of the sort that Schubert and Bruckner wrote, exquisitely

harmonized and orchestrated. A horn leads to a Biedermeier Trio. The wayfarer has

30 For most of the year that Mahler was five years old, Iglau lacked a garrison. Then came the
Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Prussian troops occupied Iglau for nearly two months that summer. As a
means to improve relations with the public in the final weeks of occupation, the Prussians organized
nearly daily military band concerts. The frequency of these performances, and their association with the
turbulent events of war, could very well have been engrained in lasting memories. Mahler had just turned
six years old. If one accepts Mahler’s assertion that only the musical impressions before puberty are
decisive, then potential influences of his musical experiences in Kassel, Leipzig, and Hamburg would be
beside the point. Scholars need not accept Mahler’s assertion as a premise for research. Mahler could have
been mistaken or purposely misleading, and, in any event, it does not hold up to scrutiny. Mahler never
heard Wagner’s music dramas before puberty, but their influence on his compositional style is undeniable.
He, like Freud and the culture at large, simply found it compelling to locate origins in infancy—either
psychological or cultural.

67
discovered a hidden village, in which one is still cheerful as in bygone days.”31 Specht

described the posthorn solos of the Third Symphony’s third movement as rapturous

“Biedermeier romanticism.”32

None of Mahler’s allusions to vernacular repertoires benefited more from the

interpretative patina of pastness than military music. Aside from their functional duties,

such bands were among the most important disseminators of urban popular music in

central Europe.33 The frequent association in the early literature between Mahler’s use

of military idioms and bygone ages—often under the rubric of Romanticism—conferred

upon the marches and signals an air of aesthetic respectability. Specht’s account of

Mahler’s important childhood experiences, quoted above, invoked the “strangely

medieval atmosphere” that the military styles create in Mahler’s works. Walter spoke of

the “romanticism of the military elements,”34 and Adler of Mahler’s attraction to “the

figure of the old German lansquenets.”35 Elsewhere, Specht argues that Mahler elevates

contemporary musical styles, imbuing them with ancient and mythic allusion. Mahler

“rips certain military fanfares out of triviality and injects them into the romanticism of

the lansquenet or the ghostly reveilles of marching skeletons.”36 Specht made the

connection between folksongs and this antiquating impulse when he characterized the

31 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 111: “ein lustiges, tanzfreudiges Scherzo, ein österreichischer ländler
von der Art Schuberts und Bruckners, wunderhübsch harmonisiert und instrumentiert. Ein Horn leitet
zum Biedermeier-Trio. Der fahrende Gesell hat ein recht verborgenes Dorf entdeckt, in dem man noch
fröhlich ist wie einst.”
32 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1905], 40: “schwärmerische Biederzeitromantik.”
33 For more on the role of military bands in popular music, see ch. 4, pp. 147–55.
34 Walter, Gustav Mahler, 79.
35 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 9.

Specht’s final allusion is to Mahler’s song “Revelge.” See Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 201:
36

“gewisse militärische Signalfanfaren, die er aus der Trivialität ins Landsknechtromantische oder in
gespenstige Reveillen marschierender Gerippe hinüberreißt.”

68
first movement of the Third Symphony as the “romanticism of the soldier and

folksong.”37

By continually associating allusions to military music with Mahler’s childhood

and with distant ages, critics implicitly granted the sounds of military bands an

honorary place in the upper tier of musical culture alongside folksong. In part, the

impetus for this strategy came from Mahler himself, who set a number of soldier songs

from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, an early-nineteenth century collection folksong texts. The

effect of these interpretations, nonetheless, was to justify “low” materials in Mahler’s

works. In an age when many were nostalgic for the past and cherished the spirit of the

people, Mahler’s supporters saw his use of the folk styles and military idioms as strong

credentials of his connectedness with German and Austrian culture.

Allusions to Popular Music

Mahler’s proponents needed different strategies to justify allusions to popular

music than those used for elements of supposedly folk origin. One strategy was to

justify the material in terms of personal expression rather than the cultural authenticity

of its origins, effectively sidestepping the problem of association with genres considered

aesthetically inferior. Bruno Walter’s monograph exemplifies this approach. His

description of the third movement of the First Symphony does not mention Mahler’s

extraordinary use of vernacular materials: the quotation of the folksong “Bruder

Martin,” rendered as a funeral march; a highly evocative passage that Mahler sometimes

related to Bohemian street musicians; and an extended quotation of a folk-like melody

from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen accompanied by the instruction “Simple like a folk

37 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1905], 38: “Soldaten- und Volksliedromantik.”

69
tune” (Schlicht wie eine Volksweise).38 Rather, Walter glosses the movement, together

with the finale, as “the psychological reaction to a tragic event transformed into

music.”39 He thereby retreats from the music’s vernacular allusions, taking refuge in the

more easily defensible inner content of feelings. Specht takes a similar approach to this

difficult passage, although he acknowledges its unusual musical materials.

A psychological experience certainly contributed to the portrayal of this half-

insane condition . . . The piece would be merely the witty game of a ferocious
ironist . . . if its substance consisted only of these reflexes of the everyday and
not of purer emotions. . . . Musically as well as psychologically, [the movement]
juxtaposes purely instinctive feelings, devotedness, and immediacy, with the
witty absurdities, eerie alarms, and distraught aspects of this Kapellmeister
Kreisler music. Through the calm, blossoming sound of a deeply sorrowful, soft,
and simple melody, it reveals the heart of the child who is hiding himself behind
all of this grim, agonizing self-mockery.40

In characteristically overripe prose, Specht justified the brash juxtaposition of

vernacular elements as reflections of the composer’s psychological experience. Without

the identification of the musical parody with self-mockery, and of the folk-like tone with

Mahler’s child-like soul, the same vernacular allusions, he contended, would be a mere

“game.”

38 Example 1 below contains the second of these elements, the supposed Bohemian street band
music.
39 Walter, Gustav Mahler, 83: “die seelische Reaktion auf ein tragisches Geschehen.”
40 Kapellmeister Kreisler was the alter ego of the great German Romantic writer E. T. A.
Hoffmann and a recurrent character in his works. Hoffmann signed some of his musical criticism as
Kreisler, and the character appeared in many stories (e.g., “Kreisleriana” from Fantasiestücke in Callots
Manier [1814–15]) and most notably in his novel Die Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1819–21). Friend
and foe alike have likened Mahler to Kreisler in his tendency towards emotional extremes, his sarcasm,
and even in his appearance. See Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 188–90: “Gewiß hat zur Darstellung dieses
halb irrsinnigen Zustandes . . . eine psychologische Erfahrung beigetragen . . . [D]as Stück wäre doch nur
das geistreiche Spiel eines grimmigen Ironikers . . . bestünde seine Substanz nur aus diesen Reflexen des
Alltags und nicht aus reineren Emotionen. . . . rein musikalisch ebenso wie psychologisch, den Kontrast
des rein Gefühlsmäßigen, Hingegebenen, Unmittelbaren all dem geistreich Absurden, gespenstig
Erschreckenden und Verstörten dieser Kapellmeister Kreisler-Musik gegenüberzustellen und durch den
überströmend innigen, gefaßten Laut einer tieftraurigen, ruhevollen, schlichten Weise das Kindergemüt
zu enthüllen, das sich hinter all dieser verbissenen, quälerischen Selbstverhöhnung verbirgt.”

70
 A related strategy was to view vernacular elements as a gateway to highly

negative expressive content previously unexplored in the symphony.41 This negativity

was the foil for the exaltation and transcendence that composers in the metaphysical

aesthetic tradition took as their expressive goal. Mahler’s supporters claimed that he

departed from earlier composers by rendering not just the ideal but also the material

world in his works. In the words of Guido Adler, Mahler’s melodies “are not always

refined” when “he wants to use the vulgar as an antithesis.”42

Mahler’s defenders often understood his vernacularisms as representing the

everyday (Alltag), a foil to the sublime. The everyday referred to the material world

divorced from the ineffable, eternal truths that an idealist aesthetics took as a higher

reality.43 The expressive dichotomy between transcendence and the everyday was

clearly mapped onto the musical dichotomy between high and low music. Apologists

justified sounds that would normally have been aesthetically and morally unacceptable

in a symphony (on account of their lowly origins) by virtue of the noble aesthetic project

they supported. The third movement of the First Symphony again provides a good

example. For Stefan, the “vulgar street-musician tune (Musikantenweise)” constituted the

“discordant everyday that will not let go” and that requires redemption in the long, folk-

41 Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 215.

42 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 73: “[Seine Weisen] sind nicht immer gewählt, dann will er das Vulgäre,
das er als Antithese verwendet.”
43 Adorno borrowed Hegel’s term Weltlauf to represent similar negative aspects of modern life

represented in Mahler’s music (see Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik [1960], in Theodor W. Adorno:
Die musikalischen Monographien, vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003], 154–
66; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1993], 6–17). The negativity of modern everyday life also plays an integral role in Eggebrecht’s
“Mahler Principle” (Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 11–38).

71
like melody later in the movement.44 Specht wrote in similar terms about the marches in

first movement of the Third, which (so he claimed) portray the parade of an artist

through life: “all that is vulgar, savage, hideous in the everyday mobs [the artist] and

threatens to drag him down.”45 In discussing the middle movements of the Ninth

Symphony, which contain copious vernacularisms, Specht describes the everyday in

even more intense terms: it is “Inferno on Earth,” “the hell of the everyday in all its

impure strength, its brutal commonness, its blaring emptiness, its mendacious bustle

that hideously deforms everything fair and kind.”46 Stefan summed by this view as

follows:

Whoever interprets Mahler’s being, based on his own statements, as the

continually renewed experience of the universe, will not be surprised to find the
purest expression of this life in his music and especially in his symphonies. The
experience of the universe begins on the streets and ends in the unending.
Turns from the music of the everyday (somewhat similar to the Parisian “calls”
by Charpentier, whom Mahler loved dearly), dances of farmers, marches of the
soldiers, tunes of the rural streets in the gaudy dress of the “Bohemian
musicians,” a motley mixture out of motley Austria—all of this is gathered,
raised, and moved into the eternal. Those are Mahler’s “banalities,” of which our
learned elite speak with such elegance, our “good musicians,” who are always so
“interesting” and yet cannot help therein but to expose their own true banality.
If one suppresses what the everyday passes on to Mahler, then he becomes
untrue: this purification of the earthly, this dinner with tax collectors and
sinners is his way.47

44 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 111: “gemeine Musikantenweise . . . Die [sic] mißtönige Alltag, der

nicht locker läßt.”

45 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 227: “allem Gemeinen, Tierische, Fratzenhaften des Alltags

dazu, das ihn umdrängt, ihn herabzuziehen droht.”

46 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 286: “das Inferno der Welt . . . die Hölle des Alltags in all seiner

unreinen Kraft, seiner brutalen Gewöhnlichkeit, seiner lärmenden Leere, seiner verlogenen, alles Holde
und Gütige zur Fratze verzerrenden Geschäftigkeit.”
47 The last sentence refers to Jesus’s dinner with the tax collectors, a story appearing in each of

the synoptic gospels (Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5:27-32). Act 2 of Gustave Charpentier’s
Louise opens with a scene titled “Paris awakes,” for which Charpentier includes street vendors’ calls and
even cabaret tunes by Aristide Bruant. Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 89–90: “Wer Mahlers Wesen aus jeder
seiner Äußerungen als das immer erneute Erleben des Universums gedeutet hat, wird nicht verwundert
sein, in seiner Musik, vor allem in seinen Symphonien, den reinsten Ausdruck dieses Lebens zu finden.
Das Erlebnis des Weltalls beginnt auf der Straße und endet im Unendlichen. Wendungen aus der Musik
des Alltags (ähnlich wie etwa bei Charpentier, den Mahler sehr liebte, die ‘Rufe’ von Paris), Tänze von
Bauern, Märsche der Soldaten, Weisen von der Landstraße im grellen Kleid der ‘böhmischen

72
On this view, Mahler could only realize his lofty aesthetic ambitions by drawing on

“inferior” musical types from outside of art music. Their inclusion disrupted the high-

mindedness of style that many conservative critics and writers espoused for the genre,

yet this was necessary for Mahler’s symphonic project: to represent the entire world, in

both its real and ideal aspects.

Influence of Race on the Reception of Mahler’s Vernacularisms

The foregoing summary may give the impression that Mahler’s Jewishness,

which was in his day widely considered a racial category, was extraneous to how his

supporters assessed his vernacular allusions. Yet race played a significant role in these

accounts even when unacknowledged as such. There were many reasons that Mahler’s

early proponents were reticent to address its influence on Mahler’s music and reception

during the composer’s lifetime. To acknowledge openly Mahler’s Jewish identity would

have been tantamount to admitting his lack of assimilation.48 Moreover, the majority of

Vienna’s cultural elite in Vienna found it bad taste to bring social, racial, and political

matters explicitly into discussions of such high art as symphonies.49 That Mahler’s

acolytes addressed the topic of race more directly after his death also suggests that they

previously avoided the topic out of deference to his opinion on the matter. Even after his

death, however, they discussed race only tersely in biographical sections separate from

Musikanten’, buntes Gemisch aus dem bunten Österreich, das alles wird aufgelesen, emporgehoben, ins
Ewige gerückt. Das sind die ‘Banalitäten’ Mahlers, von denen unsere Gebildeten mit so viel Vornehmheit
sprechen, unsere ‘guten Musiker’, die immer so ‘interessant’ sind und sich doch gerade dann wider Willen,
aber mit Naturnotwendigkeit in der eigenen wahren Banalität entlarven. Man denke sich unterdrückt,
was Mahler der Alltag zuträgt, und er wird unwahr: diese Läuterung des Irdischen, dieses Speisen mit
Zöllnern und Sündern ist seine Art.”
48 Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 73–78.

49 Painter, Symphonic Aspirations, 34–36.

73
those devoted to the music.50 Stefan added to the second edition of his monograph,

published not long after the composer’s passing, a new section called “Work and Race.”

He declared that the many mischaracterizations of Mahler’s music as Jewish, “naturally

in a wicked sense of the word,” could no longer go unanswered.51 The later editions of

Specht’s monographs also exhibit a similar trend toward openness. The first, in 1905,

does not mention Mahler’s Jewish identity at all. In 1913, he touched upon the topic

only to quote Nietzsche: “The source of great cultures is where the races are mixed.

Maxim: do not associate with anyone who takes part in the mendacious race swindle.”52

In 1918, he expanded this section, briefly listing Jewish characteristics of Mahler’s

personality along with Christian and German ones.53

Among the early monographs, Adler’s acknowledged most directly the role of

anti-Semitism as a subtext of the invective directed against Mahler’s works. He did not

address the phenomenon by name, but referred to “certain political parties” for whom

the music was unimportant, and who were driven to attack Mahler out of personal,

50 Specht, Adler, and Bekker each acknowledged the existence of such general racial

characteristics as the penetrating Jewish intellect and the penchant for expressive extremes. Though they
believed these traits could be perceived in Mahler’s music on a general or abstract level, they did not cite
any single passage of the songs or symphonies as manifestations of Jewish qualities.
51 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 18–23: “natürlich in einem übeln Sinn des Wortes.” Even in his polemic

“Gustav Mahlers Erbe” (Munich, 1908), written three years before Mahler’s death to defend his
achievements as a conductor in Vienna, Stefan does not directly address the anti-Semitism that
contributed to the difficulties that led Mahler to leave the city. Stefan’s review of Mahler’s Eighth
Symphony was the only time he invoked race in a discussion of Mahler’s music during the composer’s
lifetime. In this instance, he was responding to a flurry of articles that had appeared about the role of race
in the symphony (“Zur Uraufführung der VIII. Symphonie von Gustav Mahler in München,” Neue Musik-
Zeitung 31 [1910], 489–91). For a contemporary overview and critique of these articles and their
treatment of race, see Robert Holtzmann, “Mahlers Achte Symphonie und die Kritik. Zugleich ein Beitrag
zur Rassenfrage,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 8 (1911): 169–75.
52Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin und Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), 38: “Wo Rassen
gemischt sind, ist der Quell großer Kulturen. Maxime: mit keinem umgehen, der an dem verlogenen
Rassenschwindel Anteil hat.” The original quotation, which differs slightly from Specht’s rendition,
appears in §877–79 of Nietzsche’s Werke, pt. 2, vol. 8, Unveröffentlichtes aus der Umwerthungszeit:1882/83–
1888 (Leipzig: Naumann, 1903), 356.
53 Specht, Gustav Mahler [1925], 53–4.

74
blind fanaticism. Adler strongly implied that the writers he had in mind were anti-

Semites, calling them friends of Hans Richter and a driving force behind Mahler’s

conversion to Catholicism.54 He also accused them of stealthily hiding among the ranks

of pseudo-liberal newspaper reviewers, from which they tried to pass off their

judgments as musical when in fact they were ideological.55 In fact, racial ideologies

shaped the entire discourse on Mahler’s music, including the musical judgments of the

early biographers themselves. Though they did not invoke race to explain vernacular

elements in Mahler’s music, the arguments they did use were influenced by the broader

discursive context, which was shaped by ideologies of race. To appreciate fully their

accounts of Mahler’s folk and popular materials, then, requires an understanding of this

context.

The topic of race in music and of the situation confronting Jews at the fin de siècle

is fraught with difficulties requiring a delicate touch on the historian’s part. As so often

with complex and sensitive cultural phenomena, the nomenclature must be chosen with

care and with an awareness that the terms themselves can direct one’s perceptions. This

applies all the more in this case, because the myriad opinions about the role of race in

music cannot be neatly categorized. The variety of perspectives is divided here into

three core views, each treated in turn: anti-Jewish, pro-Jewish, and assimilationist.56 To

54 Upon Mahler’s arrival in Vienna as a conductor at the Court Opera in 1897, the anti-Semitic
press in Vienna latched onto Hans Richter as a “Teutonic” conductor in contrast to the “Jewish” Mahler
(Herta Blaukopf, “Mahler’s First Season at the k.k. Hofoperntheater: The Composer Waits in the Wings,”
in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham [Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005], 327–43).
55 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 19–20.
56Many different nomenclatures have been advanced by authors writing about the role of anti-
Semitism in the cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Sigurd Paul Scheichel makes a widely used distinction,
which I observe here, between anti-Semitic writings, which have blatant political objectives, and less
benign anti-Jewish sentiments (“Contexts and Nuances of Anti-Jewish Language: Were all the
‘Antisemites’ Antisemites?” in Jews, Anti-Semitism and Culture in Vienna, ed. Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak,
and Gerhard Botz [London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987], 89–110). Edward F.

75
avoid some potential pitfalls, the stage is given to the discourse about Mahler’s music,

and not to the personal views of the authors themselves. In certain circumstances, this

results in the juxtaposition of relatively extended quotations, which are brought into

dialogue with one another without hazarding crude guesses about personal beliefs and

motivations.

Anti-Jewish Discourse

Anti-Jewish tropes in music criticism have their proximate roots in the division

of Austro-German musical culture into hierarchical tiers. With his notorious article

“Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850), Richard Wagner superimposed onto the

aesthetic hierarchy of high and low a racially charged dichotomy between German and

Jewish, thereby systematizing the application of anti-Jewish stereotypes to music. By

the 1880s, these allegedly Jewish musical traits had become common themes in musical

criticism, where they overlapped with anti-modern rhetoric more generally.57 Many of

the traits were as if tailor-made for any passage alluding to the vernacular.

Kravitt has recently appealed to Mahler scholars to portray anti-Semitism less monolithically and with
greater attention to its regional and theoretical differences (“Mahler, Victim of the ‘New’ Anti-Semitism,”
Journal of the Royal Music Association 127 [2002]: 72–94). To complement the less politically charged
“anti-Jewish,” I have chosen to use “pro-Jewish,” although the two texts that I cite below, by Heinrich
Berl and Max Brod, could also be legitimately called “Zionist.”
57 First published under the pseudonym R. Freigedank in 1850 and republished under his real

name in 1869, Wagner's tract was originally a response to an article by Theodor Uhlig in the Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik, in which Uhlig discussed the “Hebrew taste for art” (Jens Malte Fischer, “Das
Judentum in der Musik: Kontinuität einer Debatte,” in Conditio Judaica. Judentum, Antisemitismus und
deutschsprachige Literatur vom ersten Weltkrieg bis 1933/28, vol. 3, ed. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler
[Tübingen, 1993], 229). On the development of anti-Semitic tropes in music criticism, see Federico
Celestini, “Der Trivialitätsvorwurf an Gustav Mahler: Eine diskursanalytische Betrachtung (1889–1911),”
Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 62, no. 3 (2005): 165–76; Kravitt, “Mahler, Victim of the ‘New’ Anti-
Semitism”; and Margaret Notley, “Brahms the Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-
Century Vienna,” 19th-Century Music 18, no. 2 (autumn 1993): 115–18. Two studies on the overlap of anti-
modern and anti-Semitic critique are K. M. Knittel, “‘Ein Hypermoderner Dirigent’: Mahler and Anti-
Semitism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” 19th -Century Nineteenth-Century Music 18, no. 3 (spring 1995): 257–67;
and Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen Abwehr der
Moderne in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002).

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 Anti-Jewish tropes were irreducible to concrete musical traits and hence

insulated from empirical refutation. A typical example is the distinction between

“authentic” and “inauthentic” imitation of folk styles. Adherents of the “race swindel”

believed that only Germans were capable of writing in a true German folk style; all

other attempts, especially those made by Jews, were branded “inauthentic.” Associations

to popular music were Jewish on account of the their supposed moral degeneracy and

implicit association with monetary gain. These indefinite accusations could be leveled at

nearly any piece of music, not to mention Mahler’s oeuvre, which harbored ample

opportunities for any writer inclined to use them. In most cases apart from the virulent,

openly anti-Semitic papers, the accusations resided below the surface at the level of

innuendo, where they could just as easily be read as anti-modern as anti-Jewish.

In recent years, scholars have amply documented the presence of anti-Jewish

tropes in Mahler reception. A single example can suffice to give a sense of the

accusations and the terms and evidence used to support them.58 Writing for the German

nationalist paper Deutsche Zeitung, Theodor Helm’s review of the Viennese première of

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is a virtual anthology of anti-Jewish tropes.59

58 See Henning Böke, “Gustav Mahler und das Judentum,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 49, no. 1
(1992): 1–21; Fischer, “Das Judentum in der Musik”; Karen Painter, “Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitic
Critique in the Austro-German Reception of Mahler, 1900–1945,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, 175–
94; and Celestini, “Der Trivialitätsvorwurf an Gustav Mahler.”
59 With the initial support of Hanslick, Helm (1843–1920) began his long career as music critic in

1867 at the Neues Fremdenblatt. He wrote at various times for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Neue
Musikalische Presse, Der Merker, and the Deutsche Zeitung among other outlets. Helm’s initial alliance with
the musical conservatives in the city (Hanslick and Brahms) grew in the 1880s to include the New
Germans (Bruckner and Wolf). His was one of Vienna’s most famous and respected voices in matters
musical.

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 [Mahler] apparently set out this time to work with the most simple, folk-like60
(or rather attempted folk-likeness), old-fashioned, even child-like—not to say
childish—melodies, which he in turn sets in such involved combinations, that a
higher unity is completely lost, and that one gets the impression of the most
utter confusion, especially in the first movement . . . Moreover, this
composition, like more or less everything that we have hitherto heard from
Mahler, is lacking higher originality: it is teeming with reminiscences, in which
the author does not shy away from occasional descent to the very lowest social
classes, as he does when he lets the well-known street song “Das ist halt
weanerisch – weanerisch” sound clearly enough in the Quasi-Scherzo.61

Many of Helm’s criticisms responded to allusions to vernacular styles: the unconvincing

folk-tone, the lack of melodic originality, and the quotation of a popular song.62 In

making these claims, Helm was responding to many of the same musical traits as

Mahler’s apologists did; he merely evaluated them from an opposing perspective. Both

heard imitations of German folksong, but Helm judged them a failed attempt collapsing

into childishness, not a channeling of the German spirit. Both heard traces of popular

music and themes lacking originality, but instead of seeing in them the means to

introduce novel expressive affects, Helm deemed Mahler’s music derivative and tainted

60 As Kravitt has pointed out, the word “volksthümlich” at the fin-de-siècle “signified mystic

qualities inherent in the German soul, most apparent in the peasantry” (“Mahler, Victim of the ‘New’
Anti-Semitism,” 76). Given the anti-Jewish tenor of the review and the audience for which it was
intended, true Volksthümlichkeit was not a trait that could be attributed to the work of a Jewish composer.
61 h—m [Theodor Helm], review of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, Deutsche Zeitung (13 Jan 1902):
“Anscheinend hat er es sich diesmal angelegen sein lassen, mit möglichst einfachen, volksthümlichen
(oder doch volksthümlich gemeinten), altväterischen, selbst kindlichen, um nicht zu sagen: kindischen
Melodien zu arbeiten, die er aber dann in so verzwickte Combinationen setzt, dass eine höhere Einheit
völlig verloren geht, ja man mitunter — besonders im ersten Satz — den Eindruck des buntesten
Durcheinander empfängt. . . . Ueberdies fehlt der Composition, wie mehr oder minder eigentlich allem,
was man bisher von Mahler hier zu hören bekam, durchaus die höhere Originalität: es wimmelt von
Reminiscenzen, wobei der Autor sich nicht scheut, zeitweise selbst zu den untersten Volksschichten
herabzusteigen, so wenn er im Quasi-Scherzo deutlich genug den altbekannten Gassenhauer ‘Das ist halt
weanerisch — weanerisch’ u. s. w. anklingen lässt.”
62 The review by Helm shows the complexities involved in projecting back onto the author

attitudes and beliefs gleaned from the subtext of a review. Though the anti-Jewish tropes in this example
seem to be too many and too close to Wagner’s own formulations to be coincidental, other factors call for
caution in reflexively projecting anti-Jewish views to Helm himself. Helm made similar arguments
against other, non-Jewish composers like Brahms. He was a supporter of Goldmark and other Jewish
composers. Writing for both liberal and anti-Semitic, nationalist newspapers, he was also sensitive to his
audiences, for whom he tailored his articles. His affiliation with the Deutsche Zeitung began when the paper
represented a liberal political view; only during the 1880s did it become an organ of nationalist, anti-
Semitic sentiment. And Helm had previously written glowing reviews of Mahler’s conducting, including
his debut in Vienna with Wagner’s Lohengrin, and even of his orchestral Retouchen of Beethoven.

78
by the association with hoi polloi. Both sides accounted for vernacular allusions without

appealing to analytical evidence in the music.

There is, however, one important exception to this generalization. Helm did

refer to the popular song “Das ist halt weanerisch” to support his claim that Mahler

makes use of musical sources associated with inappropriately low social classes.63 For

Helm or any other reviewer inclined to dismiss Mahler’s music on account of its alliance

with popular music, connections to particular songs were extra arrows in the quiver,

increasing the efficacy of disparagement. Such concrete connections to popular music

were made almost exclusively by hostile critics invoking anti-Jewish tropes.

Nevertheless, they contain valuable historical evidence about the possible origins of

Mahler’s vernacularisms in popular genres hitherto underexplored as sources for his

allusions.

Pro-Jewish Discourse

By the 1910s, persistent antagonism against Jews provoked a celebration of

Jewish identity and cultural products among Jewish intellectuals. In many ways, the

pro-Jewish view of Mahler’s music was a mirror image of its more common anti-Jewish

counterpart, since both worked from the same assumption: that Mahler’s music

contained specifically Jewish traits. The self-consciousness of this inversion is apparent

in Heinrich Berl’s book exalting Jewish art music of the Diaspora, for which he

63The song was a hit couplet from Julius Stern’s posse (farce) Die Hochzeit des Reservisten (1888).
Vienna’s Raimund-Theater put on a new production of the work in the 1900–1901 season. The Viennese
première of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony took place not long thereafter, on 12 January 1902. Mahler had
composed the work in the summers of 1899 and 1900.

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appropriated the very title that Wagner gave to his seminal anti-Semitic tract: Das

Judentum in der Musik.64

Like the anti-Jewish texts, pro-Jewish texts gleaned much of their evidence from

sections in Mahler’s works rich in allusions to vernacular repertoires. Berl’s main

example from Mahler’s oeuvre is the third movement of the First Symphony, which he

called the “purest Jewishness. It is all here: march, melancholy, irony, folksong, canon,

melodic unfolding, key, instrumentation—everything here is Jewishness; there could

hardly be a more direct testimony.”65 Though he mentions musical idioms, Berl’s

contention is not so much that Mahler drew on uniquely Jewish marches, folksongs, or

keys, but that the resulting collage of expressive characters is emphatically Jewish.66

Such claims were not without controversy. In the pages of the Berlin periodical

Der Jude, Arno Nadel took issue with the notion that Mahler’s music could be classified

as Jewish based on its expressive content, arguing that the description was meaningless

without a basis in musical style. For Nadel, only synagogue music was Jewish music

properly so called. Berl’s response, clearly indebted to idealist aesthetics, cut to the core

of the disagreement: Nadel was thinking in terms of the history of music, and he in

terms of the psychology and even metaphysics.67 In other words, Nadel was concerned

64 Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart,
1926).
65Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik, 155–56: “reinstes Judentum. Hier ist alles: Marsch, Trauer,
Ironie, Volksgesang, Kanon, melodische Entfaltung, Tonart, Instrumentation: hier ist alles Judentum, es
gibt kaum eine unmittelbarere Bezeugung.”
66 This argument seems to extend the view offered in the early monographs on Mahler. Specht,
Adler, and Bekker acknowledged that Mahler’s music conveyed a diffuse sense of Jewishness through
abstract notions of a Jewish intellect or disposition that resisted identification with specific musical traits,
but could be sensed in its expressive qualities. Berl went one step further, though, by articulating those
specific traits that he considered Jewish. Stefan was an exception among the early scholars in his
categorical denial of Jewish traits in Mahler’s music, whether at the musical level of melodies or at the
abstract level of intellect or expressive intensity.
67 Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik, 153–54.

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with matters of musical style, and Berl with its inner expression. Though this

assessment may in hindsight seem obvious, it was a remarkable diagnosis at the time;

until then, questions of expressive content and the sources of Mahler’s allusions to

vernacular styles were generally conflated and treated as one.

The pro-Jewish view was not always restricted to claims about expressive

content. Max Brod, the most prominent representative of this perspective, thought that

Mahler’s marches sprang from the same creative wellsprings as Hasidic folksong.

There have been various interpretations of Mahler’s special preference for

marches, which he prominently piles high in nearly every symphony. An
affectionate biographer (I believe it was Specht) traces this preference back to
Mahler’s growing up in Leitmeritz [sic] next to the garrison, where the horn
signals and military rhythms anchored themselves unforgettably in his spirit.
Less sympathetic judges have spoken simply of banality and lack of ideas. . . .
Still others have found in the step-like 4/4 measures of Mahler the longing to
write something like a German folksong, in other words a purposeful
assimilation. – No! Ever since I heard Hasidic folksongs, I believe that Mahler
had no choice but to make music simply out of the unconscious impetus of the
same Jewish soul from which sprang the most beautiful Hassidic songs, which
he indeed never heard. . . . [His] “marches” are nothing unholy, banal, military;
they appear happily to me to symbolize the merry, resolute, and erect gait of a
soul filled with God. . . . Perhaps one would do more justice to Gustav Mahler, if
one observed him in the context of a Jewish psychological disposition, than if
one let oneself be hypnotized by the ever-repeated fact that he set “Des Knaben
Wunderhorn” to music.68

68 Originally published in Der Jude (Berlin) 1, no. 5 (1916 or 1917); reprinted in Brod, Gustav

Mahler: Beispiel einer deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose, Von Gestern zum Morgen, vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main:
Ner-Tamid-Verlag, 1961), 25–27: “Man hat die besondere Vorliebe des Komponisten für Märsche, die er
nahezu in jeder Symphonie breitausladend auftürmt . . . verschiedenartig gedeutet. Ein liebevoller
Biograph (ich glaube: Specht) führt dies Vorliebe darauf zurück, daß der Knabe Mahler in Leitmeritz
neben einer Kaserne aufwuchs, wo sich ihm die Hornsignale und Militärrhythmen unvergeßlich ins
Gemüt eingesenkt hätten. Weniger freundliche Beurteiler sprachen einfach von Banalität und
Ideenarmut. . . . Noch andere fanden gerade im schrittweisen Viervierteltakt Mahlers das Bemühen,
volksliederartig deutsch zu schreiben, also gewollte Assimilation. - Nein! Seit ich chassidsche Volkslieder
gehört habe, glaube ich, daß Mahler ganz einfach aus demselben unbewußten Urgrund seiner jüdischen
Seele so und nicht anders musizieren musste, aus dem die schönsten chassidischen Lieder, die er wohl
niemals gekannt hat, entsprossen sind. . . . Diese ‘Märsche’ sind also nichts Unheiliges, Banales,
Militärisches, sie scheinen mir vielmehr sehr glücklich die feste entschlossene aufrechte Gangart einer
gotterfüllten Seele zu symbolisieren. . . . Vielleicht wird man Gustav Mahler gerechter, wenn man ihn im
Zusammenhang einer jüdischen Seelenstimmung betrachtet, als wenn man immer nur von der Tatsache,
daß er ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ vertont hat, sich hypnotisieren läßt.”

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Brod went on to limn a few other traits of Hasidic folksong that he believed Mahler had

absorbed into his musical style.69 Yet, these concrete musical traits do not ultimately

count as evidence of borrowing. By Brod’s own admission, Mahler never heard the kind

of Hasidic folksongs in question. To account for the similarities, Brod proposed a kind of

collective unconscious which attuned Mahler’s Jewish spirit to these sounds. Needless to

say, this is hardly a convincing historical explanation. It does, however, reveal the

capacity for ideological assumptions to steer the description of Mahler’s vernacularisms.

Brod’s comments are also the first revisionist impulse against the trope of childhood in

Mahler criticism, thereby providing an indirect measure of how dominant the view had

become by 1916.70

Assimilationist Discourse

The pro-Jewish view met stiff opposition in the early monographs on Mahler. In

1920, Stefan expanded the critique of anti-Semitism in the section on “Work and Race,”

to include a rebuttal of pro-Jewish writers, too. Max Brod was the unnamed target at

the end of his remarks:

From early youth on, [Mahler] grew up in the succession of Beethoven and
Wagner (and of the philosopher Wagner, who demands the regeneration and
the rebirth of the Jew in particular, and of mankind in general). He is a student
of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and German Romanticism, and he goes at once down
the path of the German music that leads most certainly to the heart of
Germanness. Bruckner stands at the exit. German folksong sustains [Mahler] .
. . His works repeatedly break new ground in the Christian-pantheistic and in
folk-like-German realms. . . . The last [opinion, that I need to address], is from
a worthy but thoroughly Zionist-minded literary figure, who announces
excitedly that he has succeeded in hearing from East-European Jewish refugees
prayer songs that ambled to march rhythms. But according to Mahler’s own
testimony, the marches reside much farther to the west, in his Bohemian

69 Brod, Die Musik Israels, 2d ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1976), 34–37, and idem, Gustav Mahler, 19–
23.
70 In the 1940s, Dika Newlin questioned the “trumped-up” significance accorded Mahler’s

childhood impressions. See Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, rev. ed. (London: Marion Boyers, 1978).

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 childhood, and are imbued with the military and peasant music. . . . To me and
others alike, Mahler has always been German in the deepest sense. In the sense
of our romantics and, at the pinnacle, of a Goethe: a world including all its
peoples, generous and German enough to encompass the old, faded, colorful,
glorious homeland of music, which was once called Austria.71

Stefan was not alone in his criticism of Brod. Recalling the reception of his newspaper

articles nearly half a century later, Brod remarked that

at the time, my article attracted the wrong sort of attention. The collective
music criticism of Vienna, insofar as it was carried out by German-Jewish
assimilationist reviewers, protested with annoyance. In his Mahler book, which
appeared in 1920 with Piper, and which was entirely knowledgeable and
competent with regard to other questions, Paul Stefan poured particular scorn
on the ‘worthy but entirely Zionist-minded literary figure.’ – People regarded
my statements as craziness, as a curiosity. This curiosity, however, has
persevered in the meantime, and it has come to be taken for granted to see in
Mahler the great Jewish artist.72

This exchange between Stefan and Brod, carried out over the decades, helps to make

explicit what in the early monographs was left largely implicit: that the trope of

childhood experiences and the argument for the German, Austrian, and Czech character

of Mahler’s vernacular elements represented an assimilated Jewish perspective. Though

it might seem that the early monographs were being objective or above the fray by not
71 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 20–23: “Von früher Jugend an in der Nachfolge Beethovens und

Wagners erwachsen (auch des Philosophen Wagner, der Regeneration, Wiedergeburt des Juden im
besonderen, des Menschen im allgemeinen fordert), ein Schüler Goethes, Schopenhauers und der
deutschen Romantik, geht er alsbald den Weg der deutschen Musik, der am gewissesten zum Herzen des
Deutschtums führt. Bruckner steht am Ausgang, und das deutsche Volkslied trägt ihn. . . . Immer wieder
begegnen sich seine Werke in christlich-allvergottenden – und in volkstümlich-deutschen Bahnen. . . . Die
letzte [Stimme, die ich wiedergeben muss] endlich, die eines verdienten, aber durchaus zionistisch
eingestellten Literaten, meldet erregt, es sei gelungen, Gebetsgesänge flüchtiger Ostjuden zu hören, die
in Marschrhythmen hinschritten. Und da auch Mahler Märsche liebe, ja selbst den Heiligen Geist in
Marschrhythmen rufe, seien die ‘jüdischen Melodien’ Mahlers gegeben. Aber die Märsche ruhen nach
Mahlers eigenem Zeugnis viel weiter westlich, in seinen böhmischen Kinderjahren, durch die Militär und
Bauermusik zieht. . . . Mahler ist mir und schließlich auch anderen, immer und in einem höchsten Sinn
deutsch geblieben. Im Sinne unserer Romantiker und, zu höchst, eines Goethe, eine Welt mit ihren
Völkern einschließend, weitherzig-deutsch genug, die alte, verklungene, bunte, glorreiche Heimat der
Musik mit zu umfassen, die einst Österreich hieß.”
72 Brod, Gustav Mahler, 27: “Mein Artikel erregte damals unliebsames Aufsehen. Die gesamte

Wiener Musikkritik, soweit sie von deutsch-jüdischen assimilatorischen Rezensenten ausgeübt wurde,
protestierte ärgerlich. Seinen besonderen Spott ergoß Paul Stefan in seinem 1920 bei Piper erschienenen,
in andern Fragen durchaus kenntnisreichen und kompetenten Mahler-Buch über den ‘verdienten, aber
durchaus zionistisch eingestellten Literaten’. - Man betrachtete meine Äußerung als Verrücktheit, als
Kuriosum. Dieses Kuriosum hat sich aber inzwischen durchgesetzt und es ist allmählich zur
Selbstverständlichkeit geworden, in Mahler den großen jüdischen Künstler zu sehen.”

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invoking race in their discussions of Mahler’s vernacular elements, their interpretations

arose nonetheless within a discursive context in which “German” functioned as the

antipode to “Jewish.” Just as Helm’s review represents an anti-Jewish perspective, and

Brod’s writings a pro-Jewish one, the early monographs offered an assimilationist

Jewish perspective of Mahler’s music.73 The prevailing hermeneutic style of musical

criticism did not require analytical evidence in the music but only subjective validation.

Hence, the issues driving the given polemical discourse could exert considerable

influence upon how allusions to vernacular styles in Mahler’s music were described.

Indeed, vernacularisms offered a kind of tabula rasa in which writers and critics could

inscribe their own ideological frameworks as if inhering in the music itself.74 In the

1910s, race was the dominant issue. In assimilated Jewish texts, the folksong and

military styles were traces of his childhood and of his genuinely German identity. In

texts reflecting an anti-Jewish bent, authors easily found Wagner’s tropes confirmed in

Mahler’s “inauthentic imitations” of German folksong and his use of trivial, popular

styles—all clear evidence of his Jewishness. And for celebratory, pro-Jewish texts, the

animating force of a Jewish spirit was manifest in the marches, folksong-like elements,

and irony. In every one of these cases, the vernacular elements of Mahler’s music played

73 Specht, Stefan, Adler, and Bekker were assimilated Jews, but no single mentality or worldview

encapsulates the minds and attitudes of all assimilated Jews at the turn of the century. Among them, a
significant group believed that the problems of race and becoming accepted in the dominant culture were
best treated by immersion in German culture and personal achievements made possible by Bildung and a
strong work ethic. An excellent resource for Jewish assimilation in fin-de-siècle Vienna is Steven Beller,
Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
especially 73–78, 99–105, 126–62, 178–87. The particular views of Mahler’s early biographers regarding
political and social issues that touched on race, and to what extent these views shaped their opinions of
Mahler’s music, are matters that fall outside of the bounds of this dissertation.
74 Karen Painter has claimed that counterpoint at the turn of the century was particularly

susceptible to appropriation by contradictory ideological functions and political viewpoints. This effect is
even stronger with vernacular allusions, which engage issues of nation, race, and identity even more
directly than polyphony. See Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic
Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58, no. 3 (2001): 203.

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a central role in the interpretation. As Adler put it, perhaps with unintended aptness:

Mahler’s melodies “convince those ready to believe in them.”75

Comparative Studies of Mahler’s Vernacularisms

Studies that investigate Mahler’s vernacular intonations with repertoires of

vernacular music are surprisingly few. The authors of those few accept the trope of

childhood and are devoted exclusively to identifying allusions to folk music. The earliest

of these investigations followed closely on the heels of the early monographs. Fritz

Egon Pamer was a doctoral student at the University of Vienna under the tutelage of

Guido Adler. His dissertation, “Gustav Mahlers Lieder: eine stilkritische Studie” (1922),

follows Adler’s approach to music history that viewed music in relation to the historical

procession of styles and idioms.76 The main thrust of Pamer’s research was to compare

Mahler’s lieder to German folksongs. He examined a range of musical parameters—

melodic intervals, rhythms, meter, phrasing, harmony, and form—and made direct

comparisons between Mahler’s settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the

folksongs commonly sung to them. Pamer concluded that Mahler had assimilated the

German folksongs of his youth in his own style so thoroughly that he even

unconsciously alluded to a few of them.77

Less than a decade after Pamer’s work, Ernst Klusen conducted doctoral

research on Mahler’s appropriation of folk music. The Nazis’ Machtergreifung in 1933,

however, made a dissertation on a Jewish composer untenable; the research was first

75 Adler, Gustav Mahler, 73; see fn. 1.

76 Adler excused himself from fully applying his stylistic analysis to Mahler on account of

insufficient historical distance (Adler, Gustav Mahler, 7–8).

77 Pamer, “Gustav Mahler’s Lieder,” 31.

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published in a series of articles some thirty years later.78 Unlike Pamer, Klusen held that

Mahler’s vernacular elements were a virtual melting pot of folk sources from various

regions, German and Czech. He found little evidence of Mahler actually quoting

folksongs, leading him to argue that the ostensible similarities to folk music are at times

a matter of stylistic imitation and at other times a matter of isolated elements being

used as subtle atmospheric effects.

Pamer’s and Klusen’s studies were anomalous in the Mahler literature before the

Second World War. Another forty years would pass before similar research was

undertaken. Vladimir Karbusicky’s Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt (1978) sought to

document stylistic affinities with the Bohemian and Moravian folk traditions that

Mahler assimilated from his childhood musical environment.79 According to Karbusicky,

Mahler drew on these sounds in richly associative and relatively self-contained episodes

that he called memory-complexes (Erinnerungskomplexe). Karbusicky carefully selected

sources reflecting the styles and songs likely present in Iglau during Mahler’s

childhood. Like Pamer, Karbusicky concluded that Mahler’s appropriations of Czech

folk music are a mixture of stylistic allusions and overt borrowings.

Although there have been no extensive studies of Mahler’s possible allusions to

Jewish music, such connections have been widely discussed.80 The few detailed analyses

78 Ernst Klusen, “Gustav Mahler und das böhmisch-mährische Volkslied,” in Bericht über den
Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongreß (Kassel, 1962); “Gustav Mahler und das Volkslied seiner
Heimat,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 15 (1963): 29–37; and “Über den Volkston in der
Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 17 (1972): 35–48.
79 Other studies that claim to investigate Mahler’s indebtedness to the folk music of Iglau,

Karbusicky contends, used folksong anthologies from regions with which Mahler had little or no contact.
He criticizes Klusen, for example, for using anthologies that covered south-eastern Moravia, whereas
Iglau was in the south-western corner of the province (Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 31).
80 The notion of Jewish music can be construed in many different ways. Here, it is used to refer

broadly to Jewish liturgical music and non-liturgical folk and popular traditions. There are many passing
remarks in the literature on melodic similarities to synagogue tunes or Hassidic folksongs. See, for

86
all concern a single passage from the third movement of the First Symphony at

measures 36–60.81 Berl was among the first to impute a specifically Jewish character to

this passage, which Mahler sometimes related to Bohemian street musicians. A more

analytical account did not come along until 1986, when Leonard Bernstein expounded

on the section’s Yiddish tone and similarity to klezmer music.82 He supported this claim

with references to a number of general musical parameters, spanning rhythm, mode,

melodic gestures, and expressive character. The list has since been expanded by other

scholars.83 While the sum total of these traits might seem impressive at first glance, it

suffers from two basic problems. It is not clear how Mahler would have heard klezmer

music (unlike German and Czech folksongs, which he did hear), as there is no evidence

of such ensembles in Iglau.84 Prague offered the best opportunity, but despite Mahler’s

example, Erik Werner, review of Die Musik Gustav Mahlers by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Notes, ser. 2,
vol. 40, no. 3 (March 1984): 551; Brod, Die Musik Israels, 24; Peter Gradenwitz suggests that the
similarities between Mahler’s melodies and Hassidic folksongs may be the result of a common influence
from Slavic folksongs (The Music of Israel from the Biblical Era to Modern Times, 2d ed. [New York:
Norton, 2010], 210).
81 The most detailed accounts, whose results are here combined, are Vladimir Karbusicky,

“Gustav Mahlers musikalisches Judentum” in 50 Jahre Musikwissenschaftliches Institut in Hamburg:

Bestandaufnahme - aktuelle Forschung - Ausblick, ed. Peter Peterson and Helmut Rösing, Hamburger
Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 179-207; adapted and
translated in “Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham
(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), 195-216; and Francesca Draughon and Raymond Knapp, “Gustav
Mahler and the Crisis of Jewish Identity,” Echo 3, no. 2 (fall 2001), accessed 11 February 2010
<www.echo.ucla.edu>.
82 Leonard Bernstein, “Der kleine Trommler. Essay über die Musik und das Leben Gustav

Mahlers,” a production of ZDF, BBC, and Israeli Television Tel Aviv (8 May 1986); cited in Karbusicky,
“Gustav Mahlers musikalisches Judentum,” 205.
83 Karbusicky also points to the augmented second and abrupt shift of character between

plaintiveness and dancing gaiety (“Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness,” 203–205). Draughon and Knapp
call attention to the dotted march rhythms, the focus on reed instruments, the prominent E-flat clarinet
and its “nasal” quality, and the alternation of bass and snare drum hits (“Gustav Mahler and the Crisis of
Jewish Identity”).
84La Grange and Jens Malte Fischer both conclude that there was no klezmer music in Iglau; see
La Grange 4:475; and Fischer, 330. Karbusicky’s work offers a telling indirect confirmation. His book
Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt is the most detailed reconstruction of the folk music of his childhood.
Karbusicky’s final article, “Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness,” is the most strongly articulated case for

87
living there in 1885–86, no account of his hearing klezmer music survives. The other

difficulty is that documentation of klezmer music only began in the early twentieth

century, some two decades after the First Symphony was written. It is unclear to what

extent these records offer an accurate picture of klezmer music in the 1880s—had

Mahler even heard it.

Even the meager attention given Mahler’s possible allusions to klezmer music

surpasses that given to his appropriation of urban popular styles.85 Many potential

likenesses circulate in the literature, but mostly as isolated observations. For example,

more than one commentator has identified a possible quotation of Strauss’s waltz “Freut

euch des Lebens” in the Ninth Symphony, but each has done so in passing and not as

part of a wider study of Mahler and the waltz.86 More frequently, the relationship to

popular music is a matter of assertion; one resorts to such qualifiers as “urban,”

“popular,” or “trivial” to describe a melodic construction or the disposition of a genre

reference. There is very little comparative research that actually examines Mahler’s

music in the context of the popular music of his time.

Jewish elements in Mahler’s music, going so far as to accuse Mahler scholarship of a conspiracy to
suppress this aspect of Mahler’s life. Despite summarizing all of the evidence connecting Mahler to
Judaism, he nowhere mentions Jewish folk music in Iglau.
85 To some extent, this is a peculiarity of Mahler scholarship. The literature on Stravinsky and
Shostakovich, for example, does not shy away from considering Petrushka in the context of popular music
or from writing about the references to urban songs in Shostakovich’s operetta Moscow Cheryomushki. See
Simon Karlinsky, “Stravinsky and Pre-Literate Russian Theater,” 19th-Century Music 6, no. 3 (spring 1983):
232–40; Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s Petrushka,” in Petrushka: Sources and Contexts, ed. Andrew
Wachtel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 67–114; and Gerard McBurney, “Fried
Chicken in the Bird-Cherry Trees,” in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel Fay (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 227–74.
86 See, among others, Stephen E. Hefling, “The Ninth Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed.
Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 476. Hefling treats the
quotation as common knowledge, and gives Philip Barford credit for the discovery.

88
 The most significant exception is “Johann Strauß und Gustav Mahler,” by

Alexander Ringer.87 Among Ringer’s most striking finds is that the archetypal example

of Mahler writing in the style of a folksong—the “Lindenbaum” episode of the First

Symphony—is also a pitch-specific quotation of the Lagoon waltz from Strauss’s

operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig. The prospect that a passage so frequently associated

with folksong could also bear such a resemblance to an operetta of its day should alert

us to the inadequacy of an exclusive focus on the fund of German and Czech folksongs

of Mahler’s youth.

In the end, Mahler’s only vernacularisms to receive careful study (book-length

or otherwise) involve allusions to the one echelon of vernacular music already admitted

to the upper tier of musical culture: folksong. This may be due in part to the hard-dying

habit of thinking in terms of aesthetic hierarchies. As will become evident in the

following overviews of more recent scholarship, many musicologists seem to harbor the

suspicion that any similarity with popular music reflects poorly upon Mahler’s

symphonies. Even as Mahler’s music gained acceptance in the standard orchestral

repertoire, the stigma of triviality still prompted a defensive tone among many writers.

Scholarship since the Mahler Renaissance

Scholarly interest in Mahler’s music stagnated from the interwar period until the

so-called Mahler Renaissance, a surge in popularity among both performers and

academics beginning about 1960.88 The most extensive treatment of Mahler’s

87 Alexander L. Ringer, “Johann Strauss und Gustav Mahler,” in Johann Strauss: Zwischen
Kunstanspruch und Volksvergnügen, ed. Ludwig Finscher and Albrecht Riethmüller (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 147–57.
88 In the interwar period, eroding economic conditions and mounting social and political
pressures aimed at Jews and Jewish culture reversed the fortunes that Mahler’s music had enjoyed since

89
vernacularisms in the English-language scholarship from this period came from

biographical studies that advanced many of the same interpretations as found in the

early monographs. Donald Mitchell wielded this broad explanatory brush in his

pioneering study on Mahler.

It seems clear to me that the part popular, part folk, part military musical
atmosphere in which Mahler grew up did, in fact, exert a considerable influence
on the formation of his style, that his imagination was stimulated and even
permanently coloured by local musical events in a manner which owes nothing
to the feats of reconstruction by “over-imaginative biographers,” that the
geographical context of his birth—his Bohemianism, let us call it—was more of
an active force in his music (or in certain important works) than has hitherto
been realized.89

The popularity of Freudian theory made the trope of childhood experiences all

the more attractive to British and American scholars. Having taken root in some

intellectual circles as early as the 1920s, psychoanalysis grew ever more popular into

the 1950s and 1960s.90 Freud’s view of childhood traumas as powerful determinants of

the emotional worlds of adults resonated powerfully with an anecdote about Mahler’s

brief meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1910. Mahler recounted a childhood memory in

which he escaped a fight between his parents by running out onto the street. There he

his death. A number of conductors kept the flame of Mahler’s music alive on concert stages in England,
America, and the Netherlands, but canonization remained elusive until the Mahler Renaissance. The
causes for the sudden rise in his popularity have spawned much research. An entrance into this expansive
literature can be found in the following: Carl Dahlhaus “Die rätselhafte Popularität Gustav Mahlers,”
Musik und Bildung 5, no. 11 (November 1973): 590–92; Christoph Metzger, Mahler-Rezeption: Perspektiven
der Rezeption Gustav Mahlers (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofenlath, 2000); Edward R. Reilly, “Mahler in
America,” and Donald Mitchell, “The Mahler Renaissance in England,” in The Mahler Companion, ed.
Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Leon Botstein,
“Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History,” in Mahler and his World, ed. Karen
Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
89 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 1, The Early Years, rev. and ed. Paul Banks and David
Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 19–20. Mitchell was
responding to a criticism by Dika Newlin, who had argued that Mahler’s early biographers over-
imaginatively emphasized the importance of his childhood environment for his mature compositional
style; see Newlin, Bruckner – Mahler – Schoenberg [1947], rev. ed. (London: Marion Boyers, 1978), 125.
90 For an overview of Freudian theory in American Mahler scholarship, see Paul, “Converging

Paths to the Canon,” 187–200.

90
happened upon a strongly contrasting scene: a hurdy-gurdy playing the popular song

“Ach, du lieber Augustin.” Mahler maintained that this explained “the conjunction of

high tragedy and light amusement . . . from then on inextricably fixed in [my] mind.”91

For Mitchell, this one anecdote provided the key to understanding all folk and popular

elements in Mahler’s music.

The mundane, as we know, is often a prime component of Mahler’s symphonies.

If we care to establish the ‘hurdy-gurdy’ as a symbol of the mundane, the
striking incident outlined above enables us to place the origin, and account for
the presence, of that whole area of musical experience, which formed so
substantial a part of the background to his youth, in the music of his maturity.92

The function Mitchell assigned the mundane in Mahler’s works was also much the same

as that claimed in the early literature: a negative foil to the soaring expressive heights.

Perhaps the most significant musical consequence of Mahler’s childhood trauma

was this, that his unhappy experience endowed the hurdy-gurdy—the symbol of
the commonplace—with a quite new weight. Its music became as highly
charged with emotional tension as the tragic incident to which it related. The
conjunction of high tragedy and the commonplace meant that the commonplace
itself, in the right context, could bear a new meaning. Its ironic comment could
intensify a region of tragedy, or it could be used as a new means of expression.93

Mahler’s vernacularisms were thus understood in largely the same terms in English-

language life-and-works treatments during the Mahler Renaissance as it had been in the

German-language monographs that had appeared in the wake of his death. To this day,

Mahler’s childhood continues to be linked to this aspect of his works.94

91 Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Volume Two: Years of Maturity, 1901-1919

(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 88–89.

92 Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 1, The Early Years, 19–20.
93Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, The Wunderhorn Years: Chronicles and Commentaries, rev. and ed.
Paul Banks and David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 76.
94See, for example, Ji í Rychetský, “Der Junge Gustav Mahler und Iglau: Begleiter durch die
Museumexposition,” exhibition catalogue at the Museum Vysociny, Jihlava, 1994; Stuart Feder, “Gustav
Mahler: A Composer’s Childhood. The Auditory Environment,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of
Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiß (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), 27–38.

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Eggebrecht

Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht’s Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (1982) treats Mahler’s

vernacular elements more extensively than any other work in the musicological

literature. In many ways, he simply dresses up central tenets of the early monographs in

new garb. His aim is to uncover a “Mahler principle”—a fundamental premise for the

characteristic sound and expressive power of Mahler’s music. He locates it in Mahler’s

attempt to represent the entire universe in tones. Eggebrecht argues that Mahler

divided the universe into two separate worlds: the real world, full of suffering and pain,

and beyond it an ideal world, accessible only in dreams through the beauties of nature.

The “Mahler principle” is the musical expression of these two opposed worlds and of the

human predicament of being consigned to one of them despite continual longing for the

other. Just as the early biographers understood similarities with popular music as the

basis for negative expression and the everyday, Eggebrecht claims that “The concrete

means by which Mahler strives to illustrate the world—both the ‘real’ and the other—

in symphonic terms, are to a great extent identical with the spectrum of musically

colloquial references at his disposal.”95

Where Eggebrecht departs from earlier commentators is in his attempt to wash

the vernacularisms clean of any connotations they may retain from their original

contexts. This is a substantial departure from previous accounts of folk-like traits in

Mahler’s music. Instead of using origins to legitimate their presence in a symphony and

assess their significance, Eggebrecht wants to understand Mahler’s music only by

reference to its scores and to Mahler’s worldview as articulated in his letters. For him,

95 Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 64: “Die konkreten Mittel, mit denen Mahler die Welt,
die ‘eine’ wie die ‘andere’, symphonisch abzubilden trachtet . . . sind weitgehend identisch mit dem
Spektrum der sich ihm bietenden Möglichkeiten musikalisch umgangssprachlicher Anknüpfungspunkte.”

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Mahler’s symphonies are the epitome of Weltanschauungsmusik, that is, musical creations

intended to convey the composer’s philosophical and metaphysical views of the world

and existence.96 Any apparent link to the real world would jeopardize their lofty status.

The problem that Eggebrecht faced, then, was how to divorce allusions to

vernacular styles from their musico-historical context without forfeiting their semantic

content altogether. He postulated a two-step process. The first was to recognize

vernacularisms as signifying something foreign by virtue of the contrast to their artful

musical context:

It is the artificial context that makes the vernacular tone of the themes and
motives stand out as such. This is true not just for past listeners or those today,
but once for all: The artful compositional context defines the vernacular as
something foreign to it (as Other); the artfulness is ever present but never
assimilates the points of reference and origins [of the vernacular] to itself,
never ‘artificializes’ them away. It is a quality of Mahler’s music that cannot be
lost to time, which no given situation of reception can extinguish.97

By appealing to internal contrasts, Eggebrecht could claim that these passages would be

heard as Other regardless of when and where the piece was performed. More difficult,

however, was accounting for their semantic power in a timeless perspective. His

strategy was to assert that the semantic content stemmed from musical references to

abstract types or idioms he called “vocables” (Vokabeln). Musical vocables are like items

within a linguistic vocabulary: syntactical units with purportedly unmistakable semantic

96 The term was coined by Rudolf Stephan. See “Außermusikalischer Inhalt; Musikalischer
Gehalt: Gedanken zur Musik der Jahrhundertwende,” in Vom musikalischen Denken: Gesammelte
Vorträge, ed. Rainer Damm and Andreas Traub (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1985), 309–20.
97 Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 53: “ist es der artifizielle Kontext, der den
umgangssprachlichen Ton der Themen und Motive als solchen erst eigentlich hervortreten lässt, und
dies nicht etwa nur für den damaligen oder erst für den heutigen Hörer, sondern ein für allemal: Der
kompositorisch kunstvolle Zusammenhang definiert das umgangssprachliche Moment als ein ihm
gegenüber fremdes und anderes, indem die Kunst vollauf präsent ist und doch die Anknüpfungspunkte
und Herkunftsbereiche ihrer substanziellen Gebilde nicht zu sich hin nivelliert, nicht ‘wegartifizialisiert.’
Es ist eine unverlierbare, durch keine Rezeptionssituation auszulöschende Eigenschaft der Musik
Mahlers.”

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dimension.98 Like Platonic forms, these vocables do not depend upon any single

representation in the real world, but are the idealized essences of these representations.

Any musical configuration readily recognized as familiar, regardless of its origin in the

concert hall, on the streets, or at church, could be considered a vocable: chorale, march,

falling melodic second, or birdsong. The communicative power of vocables derived not

from their origins but from their status as archetypes. The trumpet signal that closes

the posthorn solo of the Third Symphony, for example, belongs to a vocabulary of

“signals,” whose semantic content is to announce. That Mahler’s signal in fact matches

the Austrian military signal “fall out” (Abblasen) is irrelevant for Eggebrecht. In this

context, the signal announces the end of the posthorn solo, which had represented a

vision of the ideal world, and heralds the return to the real world of the animals.

Ostensible allusions to folk or popular song, Eggebrecht contended, were only

coincidental likenesses, arising from these references to general archetypes.

In the end, one wonders if the compositional premise expounded upon in this

monograph would not be more aptly designated the “Eggebrecht Principle.” The

account of aesthetic experience that it implicitly contains is far from intuitive, banning

any social or historical connotations of Mahler’s richly associative materials. Music is

instead heard in terms of pristine vocables capable of depicting the real world without

being sullied by direct connections with it. Eggebrecht ultimately developed one

possible way to account for the expressive power of Mahler’s allusions to folk and

popular materials among later generations unfamiliar with the acoustical environment

from which Mahler appropriated them. But his premises exact a steep cost from the

music, turning music into an asocial, ahistorical entity.

98 Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 67. The German word Vokabel does not denote

nonsense syllables as vocable does in English.

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Adorno

Perhaps the most influential account of Mahler’s vernacularisms is Adorno’s

Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, a slim yet seminal work from 1960 that has been

widely read ever since.99 Adorno claimed that one of Mahler’s greatest achievements as

a composer was to forge a “tone of brokenness.”100 The musical means of its articulation

turned largely on the distinctive allusions to vernacular styles in works that otherwise

aspired to high art. Adorno contended that Mahler’s use of folk and popular styles was

distinguished from the way that nationalist composers used them by virtue of the more

progressive aesthetic project to which they contribute: “what in [nationalist composers]

was involuntarily vulgar becomes in Mahler a provocative alliance with vulgar

music”101 The true merit of this alliance was, for Adorno, its reflection of social

conditions. Mahler’s banalities “are at the same time allegories of the lower, the

humbled, and the socially maimed. . . . [His music is a] critique of the culture in which it

circulates and out of whose (already) worn-out elements it is composed.”102 By appealing

99 A philosopher, sociologist, and accomplished musician, Adorno had already left a trail of
articles and books extending back into the 1920s. Within a Marxist framework he wove together a
musical aesthetics with a sociology of music. At the core of these writings is the belief that music reflects
and reciprocally influences society. Adorno thought society fractured, broken largely on the account of
the detrimental effects of capitalism and the commodity system. Bad (“regressive”) music supports the
continuation of this state of affairs by offering a utopian view of the world at the same time that it
conforms to the requirements of the reigning, unjust social conditions. Great (“progressive”) music
undermines unjust social structures by reflecting the true condition of society and by conveying a refusal
to conform. The place of hermeneutics in the respective axes of the discipline helps to explain the
chronological lag in Adorno’s popularity. In Austro-German scholarship, Adorno’s influence was
immediate and sustained, waning only at the end of the century. His work gained a foothold in Anglo-
American Mahler scholarship only in the later 1980s, coinciding roughly with the rise of the New
Musicology, which acted on similar concerns.
100Adorno, ;Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 180–81; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 31–
32. All translations from Adorno’s book are Edmund Jephcott’s from the published English edition.

Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 184; translated as in Mahler: A Musical

101

Physiognomy, 35.

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to musical types and clichés normally heard in popular music, Adorno contended,

Mahler could convey truths about the injustice of society that would have been

impossible to convey within the language of art music. Adorno is significant for viewing

a supposed weakness as an asset, as cause not for defensiveness but for admiration.

Adorno assumed that these vernacular materials had their origin in

commercialized popular culture. His writings thereby resuscitated the interpretations of

many of Mahler’s contemporary critics, bringing these ideas into the academic discourse

of the Mahler Renaissance.103 In part, Adorno was motivated to save Mahler’s music

from those who psychologized its content with appeals to the composer’s childhood

experiences. “There is the constant prattle about Mahler’s music as a mirror of his

soul.”104 Unlike the early biographers, he did not hear the trivial and vulgar as aesthetic

antipodes that throw the transcendence of other passages into relief, but, like many

hostile newspaper critics, as an interference with the works’ pretensions to a place in the

temple of high art music. Though previously a reason to dismiss Mahler’s music as

aesthetically inferior (or as Jewish), these internal dislocations became, in Adorno’s

inverted evaluation, bearers of powerful social import.

In spite of his own valorization of Mahler’s forging a “provocative alliance” with

inferior music, Adorno nonetheless felt compelled to protect Mahler’s music from

102 Adorno, “Wiener Rede,” in Gustav Mahler (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1966), 198,

200: “sind zugleich Allegorien des Unteren, Erniedrigten, gesellschaftlich Verstümmelten. . . . Mahlers
Musik ist . . . Kritik auch an der Kultur, in der sie sich bewegt und aus deren bereits vernutzten
Elementen sie sich fügt.”
103 Leon Botstein discusses how negative reactions to Mahler’s music in the critical press during
his lifetime anticipated the views that Adorno would later espouse. See Botstein, “Whose Gustav
Mahler?”
104Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 171; translated as in Mahler: A Musical
Physiognomy, 23. For Adorno’s critique of the view that Mahler’s marches represent childhood
experiences, see Adorno, “Wiener Rede,” 218–19.

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popular music. He argued that Mahler’s works were distinguished from Trivialmusik in

that they were never banal on more than one textural level at a time.105 That is,

whenever one dimension of Mahler’s musical texture—usually the melody—

incorporated a stylistic simplicity deemed unbefitting in a symphony, then the

complexity of other dimensions—usually rhythm or harmony—exceeded that of actual

examples from the folk or popular spheres.106 This explanation reconciles the seemingly

contradictory claims that the music’s effect is trivial but its technique sublime. But it

also reflects an aesthetic condescension apparent in Eggebrecht’s work, too.

Although Adorno sees the use of popular musical materials as a source of the

music’s social significance, his approach is fundamentally interpretative and ahistorical,

revealing little about how Mahler’s works related to popular music of his day. Befitting

his aphoristic and deliberately anti-systematic prose style, Adorno was hardly precise

about the scraps of popular music that he professed to hear. It is not clear to what

extent they are quotations, coincidental likenesses resulting from generic references, or

willful deformations of a popular original.107 His widely-cited observation that a passage

in the Rondo-Burleske of the Ninth Symphony bears similarities to “Ja, das Studium der

Weiber ist schwer” from Franz Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe is a case in point. The

theme “saunters to the rhythm of the ‘Women’ song in the Merry Widow, which at that

105 Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 253f.; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 107f.
106To deflect the charge of triviality in the first theme of the Andante moderato of the Sixth
Symphony, Adorno pointed to its rhythmic augmentations, which turn what “should” be a regular eight-
bar melody into one with ten bars (Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 253; Mahler: A Musical
Physiognomy, 107). Schoenberg used this same example to make a similar point in his “Prager Rede” of
1912 (in Gustav Mahler [Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1966], 55–58).
107 He even remarks on the likeness to a song not yet composed (Adorno, Mahler: Eine

musikalische Physiognomik, 184; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 35).

97
time squeaked from the brass horns of phonographs.”108 The musical similarities

prompting this observation (widely repeated in the literature) clearly extend beyond

rhythmic commonalities to include parallels in melodic shape, phrasing,

instrumentation, and other particulars of accompaniment. Without this constellation of

shared traits, and relying solely on rhythms, one would have little basis to invoke

Lehár’s operetta; dactylic rhythms alone are hardly unique to operetta or to popular

music more generally. Thus, Adorno’s remark correctly identifies a striking likeness

between Mahler’s symphony and Lehár’s operetta, but his aphoristic characterization

does not adequately summarize the underlying analytic dimensions.109

Recent Trends in Anglo-American Scholarship

Many scholars in recent decades have taken seriously the historical context for

Mahler’s vernacularisms, united by a belief in the clarity of Mahler’s borrowings. In his

article “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era” (1978), Robert

Morgan made an influential comparison of the two composers’ reactions to the

challenge posed by the demise of common practice tonality.110 Morgan contended that

rather than adopting increasingly chromatic musical languages, they used

defamiliarized, banal materials to reformulate notions of serious art music. Whereas

Ives intended his borrowings to be heard as quotations, Mahler’s apparent use of folk

and popular materials was

an artificial reconstruction of a specific compositional type—the march tunes in

the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Alpine folk song in its third

108Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 305; translated as in Mahler: A Musical

Physiognomy, 162–63.
109 For more on this potential allusion to Lehár, see ch. 4, pp. 181–84.
110 Robert P. Morgan, “Mahler and Ives: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era,” 19th-Century

Music 2, no. 1 (July 1978): 72–81.

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 movement, the Bohemian music in the third movement of the First Symphony,
or the bugle calls in the Fifth. Yet in effect—and this is the essential point—all
of these passages are as clearly representative of the real thing as are Ives's
literal borrowings.111

Vera Micznik, whose research on genre reference in Mahler’s works is among

the most important in recent decades, also believes in the fundamental reliability of

modern intuitions in accounts of Mahler’s vernacular allusions. Micznik’s goal in

“Mahler and ‘The Power of Genre’” (1994) is to tease out meanings from Mahler’s

Ninth Symphony—meanings that do not rely on biography, whether the trope of

childhood experiences or, as had been typical in the case of the Ninth, the trope of

valediction.112 Micznik’s approach is almost diametrically opposed to that taken by

Eggebrecht. She holds that the primary significance of generic references is bestowed by

the extra-musical associations of the referent in its original context, including its

“character, affect, class affiliation, social or ideological status.” She argues for a more

finely tuned and precise identification of generic references, because such broad

categories as the ländler and waltz had multiple sub-genres, each of which conveyed

different extra-musical associations. She differentiates, for example, between references

to peasant and urban ländler, and contends that Mahler juxtaposed the two for comic

effect.113 Finer differentiation of genres enables Micznik to conclude that the novelty of

the movement comes from its constant affirmation and negation of genres: it clearly

articulates genres only to distort them.

111 Morgan, “Mahler and Ives,” 75.

112 Vera Micznik, “Mahler and ‘The Power of Genre,’” Journal of Musicology 12, no. 2 (spring
1994): 117–51. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was the last work he completed before his death. Ever since its
première in 1912, it has been widely interpreted as conveying his farewell to mortal life. See Micznik,
“The Farewell Story of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music vol. 20, no. 2, Special Mahler Issue
(autumn 1996): 144–66.
113 Micznik, “Mahler and the ‘Power of Genre,’” 142.

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 In much of Micznik’s work, however, the generic labels are critical categories

forged in her modern intuition and whose validity in Mahler’s musical environment are

questionable. Her article on the Ninth differentiates between “rustic ländler,” “urbanized

ländler,” “street-band waltzes,” “circus gallops,” and “baroque ostinato bass dances,”

which she assures the reader was a recognizable type of the day. In another article, she

writes of the opening theme of Mahler’s Third: “But aside from the need for historical

accuracy [in assessing potential melodic allusions], the exact source of the reference is

not ultimately important, because even with slight variations the original tune would

contain enough characteristic clichés for it to be associated both by Mahler’s

contemporaries and in our time with an ‘urban march’ musical type or topic.”114 What

did an “urban march” sound like, and how might it have differed from folksongs and the

presumably rural marches? The distinction is not trivial; to parody folksongs, a locus of

edifying tradition and national identity, was something altogether different than to

parody urban popular songs, which many held to be a modern ill corrosive to those very

traditions and identities. Ultimately, it is not clear that Mahler and his contemporaries

heard music in terms of these genres. If they did, one would suspect to find at least some

written references to them. Micznik offers no such historical evidence.

Apparently historical claims that Mahler appropriated elements from folk,

popular, and military repertoires, are more common by far than comparative musical

examples to support the assertion. It might be tempting to believe that such historical

contextualization is unnecessary and even pedantic, given the simplicity of the musical

idioms in question and the tantalizing closeness of Mahler’s time and milieu. Even the

youngest scholars today, after all, are but a few generations removed from his lifetime.

114 Vera Micznik, “‘Ways of Telling’ in Mahler’s Music: The Third Symphony as Narrative

Text,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), 312.

100
However tempting, the notion that modern sensibilities about folk and popular genres

are roughly the same as in Mahler’s day must be demonstrated or jettisoned. Mahler’s

vernacularisms are based on conventions whose details have become blurred over time.

These elements may directly engage the imaginations of countless listeners today, but

ascertaining their relationship to the broader musical environment in which Mahler

composed requires a mode of inquiry more historical than intuitive.

The detrimental effects of assuming that modern intuitions have reliably

historical validity can be seen the inaccurate assessments of Mahler’s marches. Donald

Mitchell, in his pioneering study of 1975, called the Third “groundbreaking” in its

incorporation of “authentic” military band scoring.115 Tibbe pinpointed the particularly

military flavor of Mahler’s marches in the use of tambourine and triangle, two

“insignias” of military music.116 Bernd Sponheuer cited the triangle, tambourine, and

two sets of timpani as characteristically military traits.117 Constantin Floros wrote that

Mahler’s Allegro marziale type makes use of all the percussion instruments of a military

band: timpani, bass drum, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, and gong.118 In each of these

cases, the authors invoked specific aspects of military band practice without recourse to

comparative examples or to relevant secondary literature, as if the supposed simplicity

of popular styles made them all the more amenable to generalization. As will become

apparent in the following section and next two chapters, the musical features of popular

idioms from the past are not always self-evident today. Many instruments cited by

115 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2: The Wunderhorn Years, 326.
116 Tibbe, Lieder und Liedelemente, 107.
117 Bernd Sponheuer, Logik des Zerfalls. Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den Symphonien Gustav

Mahlers (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978), 144.

118 Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2: Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts in neuer

Deutung (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 141.

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Tibbe, Sponheuer, and Floros were anything but typical for Austrian military bands at

the turn of the century, and pace La Grange and Mitchell, Mahler’s instrumentation

rarely even comes close to an authentic depiction of these ensembles.119 Despite the

concrete references to specific aspects of Mahler’s popular musical environment,

scholarship that asserts characteristics of popular genres in this way runs the risk of

telling us first and foremost how scholars today imagine these genres to have sounded.

In the most extreme case, such a procedure distorts past musical realities.

Allusions to Operetta: A Case Study from Mahler’s First Symphony

That much remains to be discovered about Mahler’s allusions to popular music

can be made apparent by considering the veritable locus classicus of writing on Mahler’s

vernacularisms—the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony—in the context of

operetta.120 Ringer’s identification of a quotation from Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron

already suggests the potential for such affinities. This analysis will focus on the

evocative, written-out binary that comes on the heels of the infamous ironic funeral

march. As we have seen, this passage is widely seen to contain stylistic references. One

common attribution, which originated in Mahler’s program for a performance in

Hamburg in 1893, is to the sound of Bohemian street musicians.121 Many other

commentators also take these same passages as references to klezmer music, seeing in

119 See chapter 3, “Instrumentation of Military Marches.” One possible explanation for the
common error of describing the triangle as a quintessential military band instrument is that these authors
are German. Triangles were a standard instrument of the Prussian (in contrast to Austrian) military
marches. This only underscores the unreliability of our musical intuitions to conform accurately to
realities of popular repertoires in Mahler’s day.
120 For more on Mahler’s relationship to operetta, see ch. 4, pp. 140–47.
121 The program is reprinted in La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1973), plates 46, 47. Note that Mahler did not invoke Bohemian musicians to describe his music directly,
but the children’s picture “Des Jägers Leichenbegängniss [sic].”

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them an important document of Mahler’s Jewish identity. To focus only on these

potential sources, however, is to overlook palpable connections to its contemporary

popular musical context.

The binary contains two distinct expressive characters.

Example 2.1 (appendix D). Mahler, Symphony no. 1, mvt. 3

The first, led by two oboes in parallel thirds, is laden with pathos. Their melody

contains augmented melodic seconds and is inflected with modal mixture and chromatic

alterations. The regular eighth-note pizzicatos in the string accompaniment conjure a

plucked instrument. The second expressive character begins at the performance

instruction Mit Parodie with a sudden drop to the dominant major. It is boisterous and

dance-like, driven by an eighth-note alternation of the bass drum and attached Turkish

cymbals. The E-flat clarinets, also largely in thirds, assume the melody, which features

many leaps of a fourth, and the string accompaniment is mostly col legno. In both

passages, two trumpets interject prominent countermelodic motives in thirds.

Taken together, these musical traits read like a laundry list of the style hongrois,

the quintessential exotic idiom of the nineteenth century. The pizzicato string

accompaniment, chromatic inflections of the harmonic minor scale, augmented melodic

seconds, emphasis on middle-range winds, pervasive dotted rhythms, parallel thirds,

and Kuruc-fourth figure were all stock features of stylized Hungarian-Gypsy music.122

Similarly to his sparing use of the most potent signifiers of military bands, Mahler

avoids the most strongly identifiable traits of the style hongrois: virtuosic violin

122 Jonathan Bellman calls the Kuruc-fourth the “Hungarian equivalent of horn fifths”: a fanfare-

like figure alternating between the fifth and first scale degree above. The figure is a stylization of an
instrument associated with seventeenth-century Hungarian Kuruc [Crusader] warriors (Bellman, The
“Style Hongrois” in the Music of Western Europe [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993], 48). See
also Bellman, “Toward a Lexicon for the Style hongrois” Journal of Musicology 9, no. 2 (spring 1991): 220–
36.

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improvisations, cimbalom, and characteristic rhythms (spondee, choriambus, Lombard

rhythm, alla zoppa). His binary alludes to the style hongrois without being reducible to it.

The style hongrois had by the 1880s lost its appeal to many composers and

become a staple of popular entertainment music.123 Operetta is therefore an apt context

for studying how these musical traits functioned in Mahler’s contemporary musical

environment. Given its unusually broad audience base, operetta could efficiently

disseminate—or undermine—musical conventions.124 The texts of operettas enable

precise identification of the Other implied by the exotic musical elements. Finally,

Mahler had conducted numerous operettas in the years immediately preceding

composition of the First Symphony (see appendix C).

Strauss’s Cagliostro in Wien (1875) and Suppé’s Fatinitza have a similar mélange

of exoticisms as Mahler’s written-out binary, but nowhere are the resemblances more

striking than in Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron.125 Being set in Hungary and having Gypsy

characters, the operetta is shot through with the style hongrois. A passage in the overture

corresponds closely to the pathos of Mahler’s oboes.

Example 2.2 (appendix D). Johann Strauss, Jr., Der Zigeunerbaron,

overture

Overtop plodding, pizzicato strings, a solo oboe sings an increasingly plaintive melody.

Sobbing figures usher in the minor mode and prominent augmented seconds. After an

123 Bellman, The Style Hongrois, ch. 10, “Decline and Disappearance.” Set in Hungary, Suppé’s
Leichte Kavallerie (1866) was the first major Viennese operetta suffused with the style hongrois.
124 Christian Glanz, “Aspekte des Exotischen in der Wiener Operette,” in Musicologica Austriaca,

vol. 9, ed. Josef-Horst Lederer (Vienna: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft, 1998), 75.
125 See Strauss, Jr., Cagliostro, no. 5 and Suppé, Fatinitza, nos. 11 and 14 (see ex. 11 below).

Mahler never conducted Der Zigunerbaron. The anecdote recounted above, however, shows that he had a
favorable opinion of the operetta some ten years after writing the First Symphony. It is possible that
Mahler knew the operetta by the time that he composed the third movement. He could have heard it in
Prague, where the original cast from the Theater an der Wien performed the work every day of a 9-day
residence in May 1886. He may also have heard it in Leipzig in the 1886–87 season.

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intensified repetition of the solo, an abrupt shift to a cheerful dance effects a

juxtaposition not unlike that between Mahler’s two characters (ex. 2.2b).

Later in act 1, Mirabella’s Couplets display many of the distinctive features of

Mahler’s Mit Parodie passage, including its abrupt beginning.

Example 2.3 (appendix D). Johann Strauss, Jr., Der Zigeunerbaron, no. 4,
Mirabella’s couplets

Mirabella’s verse begins in the minor mode, with a melody above pizzicato strings. The

start of its second half is articulated by a sudden drop to the dominant major and the

entrance of a rigid eighth-note alternation in the percussion. The chromatically

inflected melody is accompanied by two trumpets in thirds (among other, less

penetrating instruments). And the ends of their phrases are decorated with Kuruc-fourth

figures in the clarinets, much like those played by Mahler’s E-flat clarinets. The

majority of these traits are justified by Mirabella’s being a Hungarian governess, but

some do not belong to the style hongrois. The driving “boom-chick” of the percussion and

prominent trumpets are reminiscent of the Turkish style.126 Indeed, in these couplets,

Mirabella is recounting the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Belgrade. The mixture of

style hongrois and the Turkish style is entirely appropriate to the story that she tells.

These examples from operetta suggest that the constellation of musical traits in

Mahler’s movement were used in the popular musical culture of his time as codes for

Gypsies, Hungarians, and Turks. The situation was actually more complicated. The

specificity of the style hongrois and Turkish styles was becoming ever more diluted in the

later nineteenth century, as composers used them to portray other ethnic or national

groups. As early as 1876, Suppé drew on the style hongrois for music portraying Turks in

126 Bellman, The Style Hongrois, 25–45.

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Fatinitza, an operetta that Mahler conducted. The act 2 Melodrama features an oboe

solo in the minor mode, prominent Kuruc-fourths, and a spondee (two longs) at the ends

of phrases.

Example 2.4 (appendix D). Franz von Suppé, Fatinitza, no. 14, melodrama

The setting for this music is the Pasha’s palace, yet the only musical connection to the

Turkish style is the triangle accompaniment. Christian Glanz’s study gives other

examples of how exoticisms originally developed to portray Gypsies were often used in

Viennese operetta for Slavic and Balkan musical cultures, too.127

Mahler’s First Symphony appeared at the cusp of this process of dilution.128 The

referential integrity of the style hongrois was beginning to weaken but remained

sufficiently intact that the symphony’s reviewers in the 1890s and early 1900s heard

stylistic references to Hungarian or Gypsy music more than any other repertoire.129

This was even true in Prague in 1898. Mahler had by this time jettisoned the program

from Hamburg. Tellingly, the critics of this Bohemian city, proud of the success of their

landsman, hardly remarked on the Bohemian character of his music. The critic for

Bohemia did not mention it at all, and the reviewer for the Prager Abendblatt found the

movement suffused with “the fieriest Hungarian weeping” and interpreted it as Mahler’s

reminiscence on his time in Budapest; only as an afterthought did he cite “Slavic”

127 Glanz, “Aspekte des Exotischen,” 86–88. It bears mentioning that Hungarian stereotypes
were often conflated with Jewish ones in Viennese popular culture. In the original production of Der
Zigeunerbaron, for instance, Girardi’s creation of the role for the Gypsy Zsupán included many anti-
Semitic clichés. See Camille Crittenden, Johann Strauss: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182–86.
128 Bellman, The Style Hongrois, 215–24.
129 See August Beer, Pester Lloyd, 21 November 1889; anon., Prager Abendblatt, 3. March 1898; H.
Geisler, “Gustav Mahler’s erste Symphonie,” Neue musikalische Presse 8, no. 1 (1 January 1899): 2–3; Max
Kalbeck, “Feuilleton. Gustav Mahler’s Sinfonia ironica,” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 20 November 1900; Hans
Münch, “Ein Vorwort zum 3. Abonnementskonzert: Gedenkfeier für Mahler. 1. Symphonie und
‘Kindertotenlieder,’” Badische Volkszeitung, 16 December 1911.

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influences.130 No one would contend that reviewers are infallible interpreters. But it is

reasonable to assume that their opinions were shaped by the conventions of their

musical environment, an environment that they largely shared with Mahler. The

frequency with which they heard echoes of Hungarian and Gypsy music—and the rarity

with which they mentioned either klezmer or, in the absence of Mahler’s programmatic

guide, Bohemian street musicians—betrays the alignment of his movement with musical

codes widely disseminated in the popular music of his day.131

This is not to say that Mahler intended for these passages to be clearly evocative

of Hungarian and Gypsy music. Rather, he left them referentially open-ended. He

eschewed the most readily identifiable markers of the style hongrois and Turkish style,

latching instead onto secondary traits that, on their own, were commonly but not

exclusively associated with any one style. The dilution of exotic codes in popular music

only further obscured their referential specificity. Mahler, it seems, was drawn to

materials like these: at once highly evocative yet capable of suggesting multiple

antecedents. In comparison to the vivid and precise recreation of a particular musical

type, such materials possessed a richness of associations that could seemingly speak

directly to listeners with diverse experiences and horizons of expectations.

General exoticisms are not the only features that Mahler’s movement has in

common with operetta. Irony and stylistic discontinuity, however atypical of symphonic

130 K., Bohemia, no. 64 (5 March 1898): 3; anon., Prager Abendblatt, 3 March 1898. The Prager

Abendblatt reviewer may have been in part misled by faulty assumptions of Mahler’s biography. Although
the First Symphony premièred in Budapest, Mahler had completed it before moving to the city.
131 I have not come across a review during Mahler’s lifetime that mentions a similarity to klezmer

music. Not even anti-Semitic papers like the Deutsche Zeitung, which had every incentive to identify Jewish
musical materials as a way to dismiss Mahler’s music, mentioned klezmer music in connection with the
Viennese première of Mahler’s First Symphony. Just a couple months later, though, the same reviewer did
claim to hear Jewish synagogue music in the “Spielmann” movement of Das klagende Lied. See Theodor
Helm, “Zweites philharmonisches Concert,” Deutsche Zeitung, 20 November 1900; and Helm,
“Außerordentliches Concert der Wiener Singakademie,” Deutsche Zeitung, 19 February 1901.

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style in Vienna in the 1880s, were modes of expression found elsewhere in fin-de-siècle

culture. Operettas routinely exploited pathos for ironic effect. A classic example is the

“Legend of Bluebeard” from Offenbach’s Barbe-bleue (1866). Bluebeard recounts the

deaths—attempted murders, actually—of his many wives and, in the next moment,

rejoices in the prospect of choosing yet another. Offenbach’s music emphasizes the black

comedy.

Example 2.5 (appendix D). Jacques Offenbach, Barbe-bleue, no. 8, Legend

of Bluebeard

The vehicle for Bluebeard’s disingenuous mourning is an expressive recitative with

exaggerated tragic clichés: descending melodic lines, wailing and sobbing figures, low

wind accompaniment, muffled hits on the bass drum. Then, after a brief pause, the music

suddenly flips to the parallel major and a jolly cancan. Bekker, one of Mahler’s earliest

proponents, was enamored of this number, writing: “The way that the impossibly

melancholic mood veers suddenly here into laughing frivolity, and the tragic

seriousness forfeits its dignified gravity and does merry somersaults, that is reminiscent

of examples from Heine’s poetry.”132

Another famous example occurs in Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus

as Rosalinda publicly mourns Eisenstein’s impending imprisonment.

Example 2.6 (appendix D). Johann Strauss, Jr., Die Fledermaus, no. 4, trio

The procedures by which Mahler achieves such intensely ironic effects are analogous to

those used by Strauss. The text of the Trio is comically banal—Rosalinde laments how

coffee and dinner will be ruined in the absence of her husband—and set to a collage of

132 Paul Bekker, Jacques Offenbach (Berlin: von Marquardt, 1909), 87: “Wie hier mit plötzlichem
Ruck die unwahrscheinlich schwermutsvolle Stimmung in lachende Frivolität umschlägt, wie der
tragische Ernst unvermittelt seine würdevolle Gravität aufgibt und lustige Purzelbäume schlägt, das
erinnert an Beispiele aus Heines Poesien.”

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musical clichés drawn from tragic opera. The ironic effect is heightened by the direct

juxtaposition of an amusing polka as characters giddily look forward to their amorous

pursuits once Eisenstein is out of the house. Similarly, Mahler creates a purely musical

equivalent to Strauss’s banal text: a quotation of “Bruder Martin.” Because the children’s

song would have been recognizable to nearly every European, Mahler ensured the

disconnection between the comically banal substrate and its inappropriately mournful

role as the theme of a funeral march. Furthermore, Mahler sharpens the irony with

stylistic discontinuity. After the pathos of the oboes, as in Strauss’s Trio, a contrasting

and boisterous dance suddenly emerges. Mahler even hinted at the humorous effect of

the movement in terms reminiscent of Rosalinda’s own: “Now my hero has found a hair

in his soup and his entire meal is ruined.”133 And at least one review suggests that such

correspondences were indeed heard by some of Mahler’s contemporaries. Max

Kalbeck—prominent Viennese critic, biographer of Brahms, and librettist of Johann

Strauss Jr.’s operetta Jakuba (1894)—typically used interpretative poetic ideas and

literary allusions to convey a work’s expressive content. On the effect of the shift from

ironic pathos to the section Mit Parodie, Kalbeck wrote that

As in Bruckner’s symphonies, so too here: the middle movements are the most
understandable, delightful, and pleasing. . . . The gypsy trio of the funeral march
is explicitly marked “with parody”; Turkish cymbals, bass drum, and the strings
with the wood of their bows accompany the charming melody with which the
flutes, clarinets, and bassoons sing their plaint in parallel thirds. Harlequin
mourns his Columbina – “oh dear, oh dear, how that moves me!” [“o je, o je, wie
rührt mich das!”] And yet, on account of the captivating appeal of the sound of
this original piece, one forgets that it is not meant seriously.134

133 The quotation appeared in Bauer-Lechner’s letter to Ludwig Karpath, in which she conveyed

to the critic Mahler’s views of his First Symphony (La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 1:749).
134 Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 20 November 1900: “Wie in Bruckner’s Symphonien,

sind die mittleren Sätze auch hier die verständlichsten, liebenswürdigsten und gefälligsten. . . . Bei dem
zigeunerischen Trio des Todtenmarsches ist ‘Mit Parodie’ ausdrücklich vorgeschrieben, türkische Becken
und große Trommel, dazu die Streicher mit dem Holz ihrer Geigenbogen, begleiten die reizende, in
Terzen klagende Melodie der Flöten, Clarinetten und Fagotte. Bajazzo betrauert seine Colombine – ‘o je,

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Kalbeck thus characterized the comic effect of the ironic pathos and discontinuity using

two references to popular entertainment: to commedia dell’arte and, via a direct quotation

of the refrain from the act 1 Trio of Die Fledermaus, to operetta. That Kalbeck felt no

need to cite his source underscores the topicality of operetta among those who attended

concerts and read reviews of Mahler’s symphonies. It also shows that juxtaposing ironic

pathos with amusement was an expressive device familiar from popular genres like

operetta.

*
* *

In light of the reigning assumptions in scholarship on Mahler’s vernacular

allusions, the foregoing analysis would seem to argue that Mahler clearly drew from the

stylistic clichés of operetta. A corollary would be that attributions to Bohemian street

musicians or klezmer music are either misguided or false. Nothing could be further from

the truth. Not only have scholars lost touch with how Mahler’s works fit into the

popular musical environment, but they have also missed the provocative ambiguity that

characterizes his allusions to vernacular styles. It is fallacious to seek the one true

referent. Mahler was arguably aware that the referent heard or chosen would depend on

the perspective and ideologies of the listener, and that different ways of hearing might

lead to radically different assessments of his music.135 Mahler’s attraction to vernacular

styles resided in the richness of connotative potential that lurked behind their deceptive

immediacy.

o je, wie rührt mich das!’ Und doch vergißt man über dem bestrickenden Klangreiz des originellen
Stückes vollkommen, daß es nicht ernst gemeint ist.” Kalbeck slightly misquotes the line from Die
Fledermaus, which uses the demonstrative pronoun “dies,” not the definite article “das.”
135 See, for example, his description of the march episodes in the Third (appendix B.9).

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 CHAPTER 3

MULTIVALENT EVOCATION IN THE POSTHORN SOLOS

OF THE THIRD SYMPHONY

“The nature of our epoch is ambiguity and indeterminacy.”

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 19071

It is difficult to escape the impression that the posthorn solos in the third

movement of the Third Symphony refer to music not normally heard in the concert hall.

From the standpoint of form, they are little more than the episodes in a rondo, whose

refrains are based on Mahler’s Wunderhorn song “Ablösung im Sommer.”2 Yet the

diatonicism, bewitching orchestration, and spatial remove of the soloist create such an

extreme contrast to the wry refrains that they seem to emanate from a different world,

both expressive and musical.

1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” Die neue Rundschau [Berlin] 18, no. 3

(March 1907): “Aber das Wesen unserer Epoche ist Vieldeutigkeit und Unbestimmtheit.”
2 The classic study of Mahler’s symphonic treatment of his songs is Monika Tibbe, Über die

Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementalen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers, Berliner
Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, vol. 1, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan (Munich: Emil
Katzbichler, 1977). The form is a modified five-part rondo in which the final statement of the refrain is
reduced to a short coda. The sections are as follows: refrain 1 (mm. 1–255), episode 1 (mm. 256–346),
refrain 2 (mm. 347–484), episode 2 (mm. 485–528), refrain 3/coda (mm. 529–90).

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 Scholars have long linked the posthorn episodes to folksong. Table 3.1 lists

those songs most commonly mentioned, and example 3.1 reproduces the relevant

portions of their tunes.

Table 3.1. Melodic similarities to folksongs

Example 3.1 (appendix E). Melodic similarities to folksongs

None qualifies as outright quotation.3 Two of the folksongs have both musical and

textual likenesses to Mahler’s movement. “Ich ging durch einen grasgrünen Wald”

shares with the posthorn a short turn of phrase; central to its text, like that of

“Ablösung im Sommer,” is a nightingale singing beautifully in the forest. Similarly, “Es

kann mich nichts Schöneres erfreuen” contains three melodic cells also found in

Mahler’s posthorn solo, albeit in a different order. The song’s paean to the beginning of

summer resonates with “Ablösung im Sommer” and with the erstwhile title to the

symphony’s first movement, “Summer marches in.” The folksongs most closely related

to Mahler’s posthorn episodes are “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein” and,

especially, “Freut euch des Lebens.” In short, the musical parallels in all cases are

exceedingly short, the longest extending but a single phrase. Moreover, they cluster at

cadential phrases, where the pool of melodic possibilities is significantly restricted by

the diatonic idiom. Such fragmentary and numerous likenesses would seem to indicate

that Mahler did not intend allusion to a single folksong, but rather created a new

melody within the folksong idiom. Indeed, scholars widely embrace this view.4

3 “Es ritten drei Reiter zum Thore hinaus” and “Wie lieblich schallt durch Busch und Wald”

possess only vague similarities to the posthorn solos. “Alle Vögel sind schon da” is related only to the first
orchestral interlude of the first episode. Vladimir Karbusicky claims that the Bohemian dance Hulán is a
more convincing model for this passage (Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, Impulse der
Forschung, vol. 28 [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978], 47–48).
4 Carl Dahlhaus called the posthorn’s melody “the archetypal example of Mahler’s appropriation

of the ‘folk-like tone’” (Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985], 114). Monika Tibbe has called them more songlike than a single song could ever

112
 The referential quality of the posthorn solos is magnified by the presence of two

actual melodic quotations. The most widely recognized of these, both in Mahler’s day

and in subsequent scholarship, is the trumpet fanfare that cuts off the first posthorn

episode at measure 345. It is a literal quotation of the Austrian military signal for falling

out (Abblasen).5

Example 3.2 (appendix E). Quotation of Abblasen

The other instance is the quotation of a Spanish folksong, “Jota aragonese,” in the final

orchestral interlude of the second episode. At least two composers before Mahler

borrowed the melody: Liszt, in his piano piece Rhapsodie espagnole (1863), and Glinka, in

Capriccio brillante (1845). The mostly likely source for Mahler is Busoni’s arrangement

of Rhapsodie espagnole for orchestra and piano.

Example 3.3 (appendix E). Melodic similarities to Glinka and Liszt

Not only is the melodic quotation of Busoni’s arrangement precise, but the harmony is

nearly identical, too.6 Busoni himself was the first to remark on Mahler’s use of “Jota

aragonese” in 1910.7 Since the source of the quotation is ultimately a folk song, the

passage reinforces the folk-like idiom that Mahler emulated in the episodes.

be (Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen, 86). See also Robert Morgan, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual
Responses at the End of an Era,” 19th-Century Music 2, no. 1 (July 1978): 75; Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav
Mahlers, 182–84; Friedhelm Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie: Welt im Widerbild (Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1991), 111; Morten Solvik, “Biography and Musical Meaning in the Posthorn Solo of
Mahler’s Third Symphony,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on his
Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiß (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), 355.
5 The fanfare is also the final motive of the signal for prayer (Gebet) and is closely related to the
closing motive of taps (Zapfenstreich). See Emil Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik—von ihren Anfängen
bis 1918, rev. ed., ed. Eugen Brixel in Alta Musica 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 183, 188; and Jason
Stephen Heilman, “O du mein Österreich: Patriotic Music and Multinational Identity in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2009), 198.
6 The passages also have textural similarities. See Solvik, “Biography and Musical Meaning,”

340–44, 356–59.
7 Ferruccio Busoni, Von der Einheit der Musik: von Dritteltönen und junger Klassizität, von Bühnen
und anschliessenden Bezirken (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922), 152.

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 Actual posthorns have also been invoked as models for Mahler’s solos. The

posthorn was a potent symbol in Austro-German culture, where it was (and still is) the

official emblem of the postal service. The sense of distance and longing that it conveyed

grew only stronger by the end of the century. The supplanting of postal carriages by

railroads intensified the power of the posthorn as a symbol of traditional ways of life

snuffed out by the onslaught of modernity. Mahler made clear that he was drawing on

the idea of a posthorn. He wrote “Die Postillon!” at the start of the first posthorn

episode in the autograph fair copy. In the printed score he indicated for the solo to be

“freely played (like the tune of a posthorn)” (see ex. 3.12, m. 255), and in the revised

score he even called for an actual posthorn.8 But many scholars contend that he modeled

his solos on the sound of the posthorn, too. This view is based on either of three

considerations. One is the fact that Mahler would have heard postal signals in his

youth.9 Another is the claim of an anonymous pamphlet entitled “Erinnerungen eines

Prager Musikers” (Recollections of a Prague Musician, ?1935)10 that the solos were

inspired by trips to Vlašim Park. Mahler had relatives in the area and, as a child,

traveled there by postal carriage.11 Finally, some commentators divine the likenesses to

8 At different stages of composition, Mahler called for the soloist to play a trumpet in F, a

trumpet in B-flat, and a flügelhorn. The symphony premiéred with a flügelhorn, which also appears in the
first printed score. As he revised the score, Mahler considered switching the instrument to a cornet before
finally settling on the posthorn. See Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie, 35–36; and Morten
Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination: The Genesis of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony” (PhD
diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 476–77.
9 Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 49; Jiří Rychetský, et al., Der Junge Gustav Mahler
und Iglau: Begleiter durch die Museumexposition, published in conjunction with the permanent exhibition at
the Museum Vysociny, Jihlava (Jihlava: Jiprint, 1994), 26.
10 La Grange believes that it was written by Mahler’s acquaintance Ernst Schultz. See La

Grange, Mahler: Volume 1 (Garden City, New York 1973), 141, 897.
11 La Grange, Mahler, I:897; Rychetský, Der Junge Gustav Mahler, 26. It is also possible that he
visited the park during his residence in Prague in 1885–86 and heard the stylized posthorn solos of
outdoor entertainment music.

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posthorn repertoire from the music itself, citing especially its timbre, folk-like melody,

and improvisatory character. These claims are rarely documented or supported with

musical evidence.12

In addition to these general compositional types,13 scholars often pin

interpretative labels to Mahler’s posthorn melodies that vaguely imply origins. Some of

these reinforce the sense that the Mahler alludes to folksongs or actual posthorns. The

term “old-fashioned,” for instance, was already a common description in the early

monographs on Mahler, where it connoted authentic folksong as opposed to newly

composed urban entertainment music.14 The folk-like tone, the imitation of the actual

instrument, and a sense of datedness provide mutually complementary accounts of the

posthorn episodes.

Other interpretative labels, however, convey a very different impression. The

posthorn episodes have probably attracted more accusations of banality and triviality

than any other passage that Mahler wrote. Most commentators feel no need to explain

precisely what they mean by such labels. These views often seem to be premised upon

the hierarchical division of musical culture into higher and lower tiers, and that the

posthorn solos are conduits to the lower. In other words, Mahler’s posthorn solos are

thought to resemble genres of entertainment music. Adorno used the “scandalously

12 Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 182, 186; Tibbe, Verwendung von Liedern und

Liedelementen, 86. The most substantial documentation appears in Eggebrecht (Die Musik Gustav Mahlers,
182), who cites one sentence from a book on organology.
13 One other compositional type is not discussed here: the pastoral topic, treated by Thomas

Peattie, “In Search of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler’s Broken Pastoral,” in Mahler and His World, ed.
Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 185–98.
14 Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler, Moderne Essays, vol. 52 (Berlin: Gose and Tetzlaff, 1905), 40;

Paul Stefan, Gustav Mahler: Eine Studie über Persönlichkeit und Werk, 2d ed. (Munich: R. Piper, 1920), 123–
24; Dieter Schnebel, “Über Mahlers Dritte,” in Mahler: Eine Herausforderung, ed. Peter Ruzicka
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 165; Krummacher, Mahlers III. Symphonie, 114; La Grange, “Music
about Music in Mahler: Reminiscences, Allusions, or Quotations?” in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen Hefling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142.

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audacious” episodes to illustrate his famous remark: “The unrisen lower is stirred as

yeast into high music. . . . [t]he power of naming is often better protected in kitsch and

vulgar music.”15 Dieter Schnebel has called them “poor man’s music . . . without shame

or inhibition.”16 And Peter Franklin heard in the episodes a “deliberate vulgarization . . .

[and] almost kitsch, sentimental melodies.”17 This view was not new to these authors,

but had figured in reception of Mahler’s symphony since its earliest performances. What

was new, however, was the approving tone of these scholarly accounts. In early

newspaper reception, such epithets were always pejorative.18

The scholarly reception of the posthorn exemplifies the asymmetrical treatment

of Mahler’s vernacularisms. When relationship to the upper tier of musical culture (in

this case, folksong) is suspected, it is investigated in the interest of precision. When the

music seems to point to the popular sphere, however, the relationship is simply asserted

or left implicit.19 The polarity of reception is also typical. For some scholars, the

posthorn episodes connote folksong, beauty, and the past. For others, they connote

popular music, vulgarity, and the present. One the one hand, they are idylls; on the

other, transgressions against symphonic norms.

15 Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik [1960], in Theodor W. Adorno: Die

musikalischen Monographien, vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 185;
translated as in Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1992), 36.
16 Schnebel, “Über Mahlers Dritte,” 153, 165: “Armeleutemusik . . . ohne Hemmung und Scham.”
17 Peter Franklin, “Mahler’s Third Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell

and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 174.

18 See Juliane Wandel, “Die Rezeption der Symphonien Gustav Mahlers to Lebzeiten des

Komponisten,” Europäische Hochschulschriften, Series 36, Musikwissenschaft, vol. 193 (Frankfurt am

Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 67–83.
19 In contrast to later scholarship, early reviews frequently cited specific popular melodies that

Mahler allegedly quoted. See ch. 5, p. 253.

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 To reconcile such disparate assessments requires a fuller contextualization of the

posthorn episodes and the repertoires related to them. The next section deals with the

history of the posthorn, its repertoire, and its stylization by composers before Mahler,

both in art music and entertainment genres. On that basis, the final section offers a new

framework for understanding Mahler’s vernacularisms that accounts both for his

intentions and for the polarized reception.

The Posthorn and its Imitations in Art Music before Mahler

The posthorn was initially a signaling instrument.20 It announced the arrival,

departure, and distress of postillions, whose horse-drawn carriages conveyed mail

across the European continent before the advent of railroads. Already by the end of the

seventeenth century, composers began imitating posthorn signals and writing parts for

the instrument. Johann Beer’s Concerto for posthorn, hunting horn, and two violins (late

17th century) is among the earliest extant examples. Its signals attest the simple design

of the instrument, which could play only the first two harmonics of the overtone series.

With no means for lowering pitch, posthorns could play only repeated tones and octave

leaps.

Example 3.4 (appendix E). Johann Beer, Concerto à 4, mvt. 1, posthorn

Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann, Antonio Vivaldi, and Georg Friedrich

Handel all imitated or wrote for the posthorn in a similar vein.21 This mixture of

20 The most comprehensive history of the posthorn is Albert Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn

(Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofens Verlag, 1985). Hiller relies heavily on an earlier essay: Karl Thieme,
“Abriß der Geschichte des Posthorns und Sammlung historische Posthornstücke,“ in: Friedrich Gumbert
und Thieme, Posthornschule und Posthorn-Taschenliederbuch (Leipzig: Carl Merseburger, 1903). See also
Eugen Brixel, “Das Signalwesen der Postillione in Österreich—Ungarn,” Studia Musicologica Academicae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 32 (1990): 347–82.
21 See the “Aria di Postiglione” in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo
fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992 (before 1705?); “La Poste” in the fourteenth lection of Georg Philipp

117
repeated notes and octave leaps functioned as a kind of musical calling card of the

posthorn into the nineteenth century.

Improvements in design and playing techniques in the second half of the

eighteenth century expanded the posthorn’s capabilities. How composers imitated its

signals bespeaks these advances. Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade, K. 320 (1779), for

example, calls for a posthorn that can reach the eighth harmonic.

Example 3.5 (appendix E). Mozart, Posthorn Serenade, K. 320, mvt. 6,

posthorn

Mozart preserved the traditional style of posthorn calls in the repeated notes and octave

leaps of the opening measures. He then turned to signal-like figures that, rising in this

excerpt to the sixth harmonic, took advantage of the instrument’s increased range and

reliability.

The posthorn, like all brass instruments, was transformed in the second quarter

of the nineteenth century. Whereas previous advancements in construction and

technique had made simple melodies possible, albeit with some difficulties and

inconsistencies in tone, the addition of finger holes and the invention of valves greatly

increased the instrument’s melodic potential. The enhanced melodic capacity led to a

corresponding expansion in the instrument’s uses and repertoire. Much like military

bands of the same period, the functional posthorn assumed a prominent role as purveyor

of entertainment music. In some regions, this dual function was even decreed in

handbooks for postillions. In 1832, the postal authority of Hanover stipulated that “the

main purpose of the posthorn is to announce the approach of postal carriages . . . In

addition, the posthorn makes travel by postal carriage more pleasant by virtue of its

Telemann’s Der getreue Music-meister (1728–29); the first and fifth movements of Antonio Vivaldi’s
Concerto a 5, “Il corneto da posta,” RV 363 (ca. 1730?); and the Postillion Sinfonia in Georg Friedrich
Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar (1744).

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ability to perform euphonious melodies.”22 The Swiss canton St. Gallen required its

postillions to learn six entertaining melodies in addition to the postal signals.23

Austria’s postal authority did not regulate the posthorn apart from its functional

signals. Any other music was treated as extra-curricular.

An idea of what postillions chose to play can be gleaned from anthologies. Many

were eclectic collections of waltzes, marches, ländler, polkas, mazurkas, folksongs,

gallops, lieder, and opera and operetta arias. Others were little more than collections of

folksongs transcribed for the posthorn.24 In Bavaria, the connection with folk traditions

was particularly strong, and the posthorn came to be considered a folk instrument. The

Bavarian postal service’s 50 Songs Suitable for the Posthorn (1909) cautioned: “In the

interest of good taste, sentimental pieces . . . and melodies from operas and operettas

should be avoided.”25 From about the 1830s, then, the posthorn had two independent

repertories: the body of officially sanctioned signals and a largely unregulated and

diverse repertoire of melodies played for entertainment. This polarity was captured in

22 Anweisung zum Gebrauche des Posthorns für die Königlich Hannoverschen Postillons (Hannover,
1832); cited in Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 42: “Der Hauptzweck des Posthorns besteht darin, die
Annäherung postmäßiger Transporte anzuzeigen . . . Außerdem aber dient das Posthorn dazu, die
Annehmlichkeiten des Postverkehrs zu erhöhen, indem sich dasselbe zu dem Vortrage wohlklingender
Melodien sehr wohl eignet.”
23 Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 37.
24Cf. anon., Volkslieder für das Posthorn, ed. Königlich Bayerische Oberpostdirektion (Munich,
1886); Herzog Maximilian in Bayern, Posthorn-Klänge (Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1869) [which
comprises mostly folksongs]; Anton Scherlein, Anleitung zum Blasen eines einfachen Posthornes nebst einem
Anhang von Postrufen, Fanfaren, Ländler, Walzer, Lieder etc. (Augsburg and Vienna: Böhm & Sohn, 1886);
and Fr. von Pfistermeister, Taschenliederbuch für Trompete, Cornet à Piston oder Posthorn: Eine Sammlung von
über 100 Gebirgs- und Volksliedern, Opernarien, Ländlern, Märschen etc., leicht spielbar arrangirt von F. v. P.
(München, Josef Seiling, 1892).
25 Anon., 50 für das Posthorn geeignete Lieder; cited in Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 50: “Im
Interesse des guten Geschmacks sind sentimentale Musikstücke . . . zu vermeiden. Ferner sind auch
Opern- und Operettenmelodien nicht passend.” That the admonition was necessary suggests that
postillions in Bavaria did play melodies from opera and operetta.

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the couplet: “Posthorn sounds, posthorn sounds! / Sometimes a blast, sometimes a song”

(Posthornklang, Posthornklang! / Bald Geschmetter, bald Gesang!).26

Whereas signals were strictly regulated, their prescribed playing even being

enforced with fines, it is difficult to establish how often and with what ability postillions

performed other melodies. Throughout the nineteenth century, the standard instrument

issued to postillions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire lacked valves and had only a

single finger hole.27 Such instruments were not suited to any but the simplest diatonic

tunes. Furthermore, the postillion was in control the horses.28 With one hand on the

reins and the carriage’s movements jarring the embouchure, he faced serious hurdles to

creating “euphonious melodies.” These realities come to the fore in a maxim among

postillions: “art comes after bread” (Die Kunst geht nach Brot).29 Particularly gifted

postillions were also more likely to drive carriages with passengers of higher social

standing or to concertize at health resorts, making it all the more unlikely that they

would have been heard in an average provincial town.30 It thus seems likely that typical

postillions played little more than the official signals and a limited repertoire of simple

26 Thieme, “Abriß der Geschichte des Posthorns,” 16.

27 Brixel, “Das Signalwesen,” 366–68.
28 Rudolf Alexander Moißl, Das Posthorn klingt, Niederdonau, Ahnengau des Führers,
Schriftenreihe für Heimat und Volk 13, ed. Gaupresseamt Niederdonau der NSDAP (St. Pölten: St.
Pöltner Zeitungs-Verlag, 1940), 26. This book was published under the auspices of the Nazi Party. It is
cited here because it complements Thieme’s essay in its unromanticized and detailed account of the
everyday life of a postillion in the nineteenth century. It has no overtly political or anti-Semitic content.
29 Thieme, “Abriß der Geschichte des Posthorns,” 12.
30 Thieme, “Abriß der Geschichte des Posthorns,” 12–13; Hiller, Der große Buch vom Posthorn, 45.

Moißl reports that famous posthorn virtuosos would switch to trumpet when performing more difficult
works (Das Posthorn klingt, 25).

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melodies, performed mostly during stops and at postal stations. It is no wonder that in

some accounts of travel by postal carriage, posthorn serenades play no part.31

At about the same time that the posthorn underwent rapid technical advances, it

started to take on new significance with composers. In the eighteenth century,

composers had generally been drawn to the posthorn as part of a broader interest in folk

and functional instruments, including the hunting horns, bagpipes, and Jew’s harp. The

posthorn was like a novelty item that appeared in concertos, symphonies, and dances,

especially ländler and German dances, but also minuets.32 In the nineteenth century, the

posthorn’s connotations fit well to the aesthetic concerns of Biedermeier and Romantic

writers. Already apparent in Goethe’s poem “An Schwager Kronos” (1774), the posthorn

became an efficient, symbolic carrier of romantic longing and aesthetic of nature in the

hands of such poets as Joseph von Eichendorff, Wilhelm Müller, and Nikolaus Lenau.33

Correspondingly, imitations of posthorns often took place in the genre most intimately

bound to poetry: lieder. In Schubert’s song “Die Post” from Die Winterreise (1827), the

sound of a posthorn intensifies the wanderer’s desire for his beloved.

Example 3.6 (appendix E). Schubert, Die Winterreise, “Die Post,” piano

Here one can see the increasing stylization of the posthorn topic in the right hand of the

piano. Schubert does not directly imitate posthorn signals, as was often done in the

31 Moißl recounts what it was like to ride in the postal carriage and does not even mention such

posthorn serenades as one of the ways that the passengers were entertained. Rather, they talked, read,
sang songs, enjoyed the scenery, the telegraph posts, etc.
32 See, for example, Beethoven, Deutsche Tänze, WoO 8, no. 12 (1795); Franz Lessel, 12 Ländler

samt Coda (1806); Mozart, Minuet from Serenade no. 9, K. 320 (1779); Johann Strauss, Sr., Zweite-
Kettenbrücke-Walzer, op. 19 (1828). For a longer list, see Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 292–94.
33 See, for example, Eichendorff, “Sehnsucht” and “Kurze Fahrt”; Müller, “Die Post”; and Lenau,

“Das Posthorn” and “Der Postillon.”

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eighteenth-century, but evokes the instrument through a combination of leaps and

repeated notes.

Schubert’s song is also indicative of a larger shift. Around 1830, composers

ostensibly stopped invoking the posthorn in their works. 34 The long tradition that had

included Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, Handel, Michael Haydn, Leopold and Wolfgang

Amadeus Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, found its next prominent example some

three quarters of a century later in Mahler’s Third Symphony. The hiatus, however, is

only half true. As German musicians and commentators increasingly and ever more

rigidly divided musical space into a higher tier centered on the autonomous artwork and

a lower tier of pieces that sought merely to entertain, depictions of the posthorn

clustered in the lower tier, in genres of popular, pedagogical, and salon music. A host of

popular pieces that contain or imitate the posthorn bridge the gap between Schubert

and Mahler. Representative examples include waltzes and ländler by Josef Lanner and

Johann Strauss, Sr.; marches and polkas by the two Austrian Militärkapellmeister Philipp

Fahrbach Sr. and Jr.; Charakterbilder and Possen by Adolf Müller, Sr., and Anton Max

Storch; pedagogical piano pieces by Robert Volkmann and Ludvig Schytte; and salon

34 Hiller’s list of works that call for the posthorn gives an idea of how precipitously the practice

fell away (Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 292–94). Of thirty-six entries, thirty-two were written by
composers born by 1780. Of the four romantic composers on the list, at least two are not normally
included among the ranks of art music: Josef Lanner and Johann Strauss, Sr. The third composer,
Edmund Kretschmer, whose “Wettinger Jubiläums-Marsch” (1883) contains a trio for four posthorns, is
largely forgotten today. Mahler, born nearly sixty years after the fathers of Viennese waltz and
entertainment music, is the fourth of these composers.

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songs by Benedikt Randhartinger and Thomas Koschat.35 Among these pieces, many

celebrated the postillion as the conveyer of love letters, as the Postillon d’amour.36

The posthorn topic became a fixture in the popular sphere beginning in about

the 1820s. The posthorn was still fashionable in domestic and entertainment music at

the end of the century. In 1885, the Großer Liederkatalog by Ernst Challier contained

just over one hundred songs with texts pertaining to posthorns. The number swelled to

over 150 in the edition from 1900.37 Posthorn anthologies and tutorials continued to be

published in the early years of the twentieth century, decades after the postal carriage

had been replaced by trains, and posthorn signals were still heard in operettas.38 By this

time, the posthorn loomed large in the public imagination not for its ubiquity outdoors,

but for its frequent evocation in popular music.

The posthorn topic did not depend upon the use of an actual posthorn. Other

instruments—especially the flügelhorn, but also the cornet, trumpet, or even cello—

were also able carriers of the topic.39 Anthologies of posthorn music likewise targeted

the family of treble brass instruments. Recognition of the posthorn topic, therefore,

35 For example, Lanner, Trennungs-Walzer (1828); Strauss, Sr., Rosa-Walzer (1835); Fahrbach,
Sr., Der flotte Postillon [Polka] (1854); Fahrbach, Jr., Der kleine Postillion [Marsch] (ca. 1867); Müller, Sr.,
Eine neue Welt [Characterbild] (1860); Storch, Localsängerin und Postillon [Posse mit Gesang] (1864);
Volkmann, “Der Postillon” from Musikalisches Bilderbuch (1853–54); Schytte, Aus Froher Kinderzeit, op. 69
(ca. 1891); Randhartinger, Der Postillon (ca. 1840s); Koschat, Der Villâcher Postillon (ca. 1879).
36 For example, Franz Abt, Postillon d’amour [song] (1860s); Johann Strauss, Jr., Postillon

d’amour [Polka français], op. 317 (1867).

37 Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 75.
38For example, Gumbert und Thieme, Posthornschule und Posthorn-Taschenliederbuch (1903);
Friedrich Krekeler, Anleitung zum Blasen des Signal-Posthorns (oder der sogenannte Posttrompete) (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905). Representative operettas include Leo Fall, Der fidele Bauer, no. 4 Finaletto;
Oscar Straus, Der tapfere Kassian (1909), Finale. Straus’s Didi has a flügelhorn solo; see the discussion of
the sentimental trumpet solo below.
39 Of the examples of the posthorn topic treated below, Adolf Müller’s song calls for a posthorn,

flügelhorn, or cello; Franz Joseph Wagner’s arrangement of “Die Post im Walde” calls for a flügelhorn;
Nessler’s Trompeter von Säkkingen calls for a trumpet.

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rested less on a particular tone color and more upon a collection of musical devices. In

addition, most evocations of the posthorn in the popular sphere announced the

instrument in a characteristic title.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the posthorn topic in instrumental music

consisted of signals, often the same repeated notes and octave leaps as those used for

nearly two centuries. To better fit the instrument’s Romantic connotations, however,

composers started drawing on the posthorn’s newly expanded repertoire. They

developed a new, predominantly lyrical stylization of the instrument. Such

representations emerged strictly in popular music and were especially common in the

salon, where characteristic pieces inviting associations to human emotions were

particularly beloved. Adolf Müller, Sr.’s setting of Lenau’s “Der Postillion” (1841), a

poem that Mahler said inspired him while writing the posthorn episodes, hints at the

association of the lyrical posthorn with romantic longing and nostalgia.40 The salon

song calls for voice, piano, and obbligato posthorn, flügelhorn, or cello. Throughout the

piece, staccato signals alternate with legato, lyrical phrases (ex. 3.7a). Later in the poem,

the postillion halts his carriage at a cemetery to play the favorite song of his lost

comrade. The posthorn melody here begins solidly in the lyrical mode, marked piano

and dolce (ex. 3.7b). It climaxes in the consequent phrase with a brief recall of a signal

blasted forte. But the lyricism immediately returns as the high note lingers and quickly

softens, both in dynamics and character, initiating a melodic descent and soft close.

Example 3.7 (appendix E). Adolf Müller, Sr., “Der Postillion,” posthorn

40 The source of this anecdote is Ernst Decsey, “Stunden mit Mahler,” Die Musik 10 (1910–11):
356. See also Peter Franklin, Mahler: Symphony no. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63–
64; Solvik, “Biography and Musical Meaning,” 344–47.

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Although many representations of the posthorn invoked only signals, Müller, like many

other composers, drew on both sides of the instrument’s musical personality. The free

mixture of characteristics distanced the representation from what postillions actually

played and was part of a stylization closely linked with the salon and popular milieu.

The lyrical representation of the posthorn was one manifestation of a broader

phenomenon: the sentimental trumpet solo. This genre originated with the invention of

the flügelhorn in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.41 It was shorter and

more conical than the trumpet, lending it increased facility. It soon became a favorite

solo instrument in both the salon and at military band concerts, where it was the

primary melody-carrying instrument. In fact, it was not unusual for military band

directors to conduct from the obbligato flügelhorn part.42 Each band had its own star

soloist, who was featured at least once on a typical concert. Austria’s first great

flügelhorn soloist, Josef Strebinger, drew large audiences in Vienna’s Prater as early as

the mid 1830s.43 The prominence of the genre grew as military music took on an ever

larger profile in nineteenth-century musical life. In 1871, the composer, critic, and

pedagogue Ferdinand Hiller complained about the consequences of advances in brass

instrument construction:

The in many respects highly problematical perfecting of brass instruments has

its deafening as well as its burlesque consequences. The most prominent—one
has already become entirely used to it—is the sentimental trumpeter. The
sentimental trumpeter can perhaps be found at public assemblies, shooting

41 I have labeled the category “trumpet solos” because the specific instruments—flügelhorn,

cornet, posthorn, trumpet—varied and were often substituted for one another. Moreover, many of the
most prominent examples of the genre, like Nessler’s Trompeter von Säkkingen, are based on the trumpet.
The flügelhorn flourished primarily in Austria. The corresponding instrument in Germany was the
cornet, which was a direct descendent of the posthorn (Edward Tarr, Die Trompete: Ihre Geschichte von der
Antike bis zur Gegenwart [Bern and Stuttgart: Hallwag Verlag, 1978], 123).
42 Heilman, “Patriotic Music and Multinational Identity,”172.
43 Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik, 35.

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 competitions, and in the upper and lower houses of parliament. But we are not
concerned with these cases. We are only talking about the trumpeter who
devotes himself to the cantilena with the full depth of his soul and the entire
sweetness of his brass. . . . The trumpet languishes, cries plaintively, trembles
upon his lips. He leaves nothing untried: the most melting ritardandos of the
Italian diva, her expiration, her revival . . . He knows how to adopt every accent
of feeling and passion. He trembles and rustles! He blares coloratura! He trills
yearning!44

One of the most famous examples of this genre during Mahler’s lifetime came from

Viktor Nessler’s volkstümliche opera Der Trompeter von Säkkingen (1884). It was based on

Josef Viktor von Scheffel’s eponymous epic poem of 1853, a runaway hit in German-

speaking countries. Nessler’s opera enjoyed similar success, surpassing 6,000

performances in its first six years.45 The Trumpeter’s Song, “Behüt’ Dich Gott,” was the

opera’s most famous number. Although sung in the opera, it was wildly popular in

instrumental arrangement and was often heard with a brass soloist at military band and

beer garden concerts.

Example 3.8 (appendix E). Viktor Nessler, Trompeter von Säkkingen,

“Behüt Dich Gott”

Though not identical, the posthorn topic and sentimental trumpet solo were

complementary. In a speech in 1899, a German congressman ended a lament on the

vanishing tradition of the posthorn with the following flourish: “I believe that Viktor

von Scheffel never would have written his Trompeter von Säckingen if he had not

44 Ferdinand Hiller, Aus dem Tonleben unserer Zeit: Gelegentliches von Ferdinand Hiller (Leipzig: F.

E. C. Leuckart, 1871), 12–13: “ Die in mancher Beziehung sehr problematische Vervollkommnung der
Blechinstrumente bringt betäubende, aber auch burleske Erscheinungen zu Tage. Die hervortretendste –
man ist sie aber schon ganz gewohnt worden – ist die des sentimentalen Trompeters. Der sentimentale
Trompeter ist vielleicht auch bei Volksversammlungen, Schützenfesten, in hohen und niederen
Parlamenten zu finden – hier aber haben wir es mit diesem nicht zu thun. Von jenem nur ist die Rede, der
sich mit der ganzen Tiefe seines Gemüthes und der ganzen Süßigkeit seines Bleches der Cantilene
widmet. . . . Die Trompete schmachtet, klagt, zittert unter seinen Lippen. Die schmelzendsten
Ritardandos der italienischen Sängerin, ihr Hinsterben und Aufraffen, nichts läßt er unversucht . . . Alle
Accente der Empfindung und Leidenschaft weiß er sich anzueignen. Er bebt und säuselt! – er schmettert
Coloratur! – er trillert Sehnsucht!”
45 Luis C. Engelke, Review of Suite aus der Oper “Der Trompeter von Säckingen,” by Edward Tarr,

ITG Journal (October 2000), 76.

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occasionally heard the sound of the postillion’s posthorn wafting from the Black

Forest.”46

For many decades, sentimental trumpet solos resided where they originated: in

entertainment music. In the 1870s, opera and operetta composers like Franz von Suppé

began to write lyrical trumpet solos in their theatrical works.47 Such solos appeared

only later in the concert hall. Carl Goldmark’s Second Symphony from 1887 is among

the earliest examples, as is the initial, five-movement version of Mahler’s First

Symphony from 1889. 48 In fact, there is a direct connection between the lyrical trumpet

solo in Mahler’s symphony with Scheffel’s Trompeter von Säkkingen. When Mahler was

second Kapellmeister in Kassel in 1884, the success of Nessler’s opera became quickly

apparent. Mahler was commissioned by his theater to write incidental music to a stage

adaptation of the play. Mahler later destroyed the score, but a single melody survives as

the main theme of Blumine, the First Symphony’s original second movement.49 It is a

prime example of the sentimental trumpet solo type.

Example 3.9 (appendix E). Mahler, Blumine, main theme

46 Thieme, Abriß der Geschicht des Posthorns, 22.

47 For example, Franz von Suppé, Fatinitza, act 1 Finale (1876); Richard Wagner, Parsifal,

prelude (1880); Johann Strauss, Jr., Der lustige Krieg, act 2 Finale (1881); and Emil Kaiser, Der Trompeter
von Säkkingen, overture (1882).
48 A. Peter Brown, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak,

Mahler, and Selected Contemporaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 500.
49 Max Steinitzer, a friend of Mahler’s from his time in Leipzig, recalled in 1920 a trumpet
melody from Mahler’s incidental music to Trompeter. Mahler had shown him the score decades earlier. As
Blumine was rediscovered in the 1960s, its main theme fit to Steinitzer’s recollection almost perfectly.
Donald Mitchell argues that Mahler reused not only the theme in Blumine but the entire movement. See
Steinitzer, “Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 2, no. 7–8 (1920): 297; Mitchell,
Gustav Mahler. The Early Years, ed. Paul Banks and David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1980), 225–29; and Mitchell, Gustav Mahler. The Wunderhorn Years, ed.
Paul Banks and David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 217–
24.

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This “trivial” movement was roundly criticized in early reviews. Mahler later

considered it insufficiently symphonic and too sentimental, and he removed it from the

symphony.50

When Mahler composed the third movement of his Third Symphony in 1895,

then, he was drawing on a musical topic and genre that had for decades been as firmly

entrenched in popular music as they were foreign to art music. Whereas Mahler’s

incidental music to Trompeter von Säkkingen can be seen in the tradition of the

sentimental trumpet solo, the posthorn episodes of the Third Symphony exhibit more

than just abstract affinities with this genre. As we will see in the next section, details of

the melodic construction, accompaniment, and orchestration, and the use of distance

effects, suggest how finely tuned Mahler’s solos are to two of the most famous

representatives of the posthorn topic and sentimental trumpet genre.

Popular Models for Mahler’s Posthorn Episodes

Many German-language critics of Mahler’s day, friend and foe alike, mentioned

either Nessler’s Trompeter von Säkkingen or Heinrich Schäffer’s “Die Post im Walde”

(Mail Coach in the Woods) in their reviews of the Third Symphony. To the very limited

extent that the secondary literature on Mahler has considered likenesses to Nessler’s

opera, it has used “Behüt Dich Gott” as a surrogate for the entire piece. Karl Michael

Komma has written: “It is not without charm to confront Mahler’s episode with

examples of the contemporary opera and entertainment music. . . . [But] ‘Behüt’ dich

50 Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler. Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985), 24;
Bruno Walter, “Persönliche Erinnerung an Gustav Mahler,” Der Tag [Wien], 17 November 1935;
Steinitzer, “Erinnerungen.”

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Gott’ does not compare in the slightest to Mahler’s Posthorn episode”51 This short-cut

has prevented the recognition of striking similarities in music and expression between

Mahler’s posthorn solo and the Rhine Serenade, in which the court trumpeter Werner

serenades his beloved from across the river. In a book on organology from 1911, the

authors called the Trumpeter’s Song and Rhine Serenade “masterpieces of all

trumpeters” and rued not being able to secure permission to reproduce musical

examples.52 Mahler certainly knew both passages intimately, having conducted

Nessler’s opera no fewer than thirty-one times in Leipzig and Prague.53

Heinrich Schäffer’s “Die Post im Walde,” was probably the most famous

rendering of the posthorn in the popular German-language culture in the half century

before World War I. The song was a staple in the repertory of men’s choruses and, in

instrumental form, at beer gardens and military band concerts. Like Nessler’s opera, it is

occasionally mentioned in the scholarly literature on Mahler’s Third Symphony, but

never with an assessment of its musical likenesses.54 There is no direct evidence that

Mahler knew the song, but its continuing ubiquity on popular and outdoor concerts for

51 Komma, “Vom Ursprung und Wesen des Trivialen im Werk Gustav Mahlers,” Musik und
Bildung 5, no. [64]/11 (Nov 1973): 576: “Es ist nicht ohne Reiz, Mahlers Episode mit Beispielen der
zeitgenössischen Opern- und Unterhaltungsmusik zu konfrontieren. . . . ‘Behüt’ dich Gott, es wär’ so
schön gewesen’ läßt sich aber mit Mahlers Posthorn-Episode nicht im geringsten vergleichen.” Most
scholars who mention Nessler’s opera in connection with Mahler’s posthorn episodes dismiss the
connection altogether; see La Grange, Mahler, 1:903.
52 Emil Teuchert and E. W. Haupt, Musik-Instrumentenkunde in Wort und Bild (Leipzig: Breitkopf
& Härtel, 1911), 63.
53 Knud Martner, “Mahler im Opernhaus: Eine Bilanz seiner Bühnentätigkeit 1880–1910,” in

Neue Mahleriana, 169.

54 For example, see Franklin, Mahler, 63; La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:64, 72.

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the two decades before he composed the Third Symphony all but guarantees that he was

familiar with it.55

All three solos share aspects of melodic construction distinct from actual

posthorn repertoire and from earlier imitations by classical composers.

Example 3.10 (appendix E). Heinrich Schäffer, “Die Post im Walde,”

flügelhorn

Example 3.11 (appendix E). Viktor Nessler, Trompeter von Säkkingen, no.
13, trumpet

Example 3.12 (appendix E). Mahler, Symphony no. 3, mvt. 3

The mingling of signals and lyrical phrases corresponds to the romanticized

representations of the posthorn in entertainment music. In each case, signals interrupt

whatever is happening onstage—in the case of Schäffer and Mahler, the ensemble, and

in Nessler’s opera, the dramatic action. Following the initial signals is what can be

called the lyrical turn: a single note on which the melody suddenly turns lyrical. A

prototype of the lyrical turn is already evident in Müller’s salon setting of “Der

Postillon,” when the climactic high note lingers, decrescendos, and reverts back to the

lyrical mode that had preceded the signal (ex. 3.7, mm. 219–22). Schäffer’s lyrical turn is

highlighted by a switch from minor to major (ex. 3.10, m. 13), while Nessler and Mahler

use performance instructions—dolce and portamento—to make clear the change in

character (ex. 3.11, m. 20; ex. 3.12, m. 264). The lyrical continuations that ensue could

all be called folk-like in their diatonic simplicity.

Another shared melodic trait is the suggestion of improvisation. In “Die Post im

Walde,” the improvisatory passage is couched much like the cadenza of a concerto,

55 The song seems to have entered the repertory of the men’s chorus in Iglau during Mahler’s
last summer there, in 1875. It was performed to great enthusiasm on two concerts (Mährischer Grenzbote
[Iglau], 4 July 1875 and 15 August 1875).

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complete with dominant pedal, unaccompanied solo culminating in a sustained tone

(likely trilled in performance) and a tutti reprise of the main theme (ex. 3.10, mm. 23–

30).56 Nessler and Mahler rely mostly on melodic and rhythmic traits to suggest

improvisation. The consequent phrase of Nessler’s melody has chromatic

embellishments and flexibly alternates note lengths (ex. 3.11, mm. 23–30) and, later in

the solo, an entire phrase is repeated but with pseudo-improvisational ornamentation

(ex. 3.11, mm. 47–51). Mahler creates the effect of free declamation in part with

chromatic embellishments, but mostly with tenuto articulations and such performance

instructions as “freely played” (frei vorgetragen, ex. 3.9, m. 256) and “allow time!” (Zeit

lassen!, ex. 3.12, m. 275–81). Shortly afterward, in a gesture reminiscent of “Post im

Walde” (mm. 28–33) the posthorn recedes into the background and begins to trill as the

main melody is stated by the ensemble (ex. 3.12, mm. 295–300).

The final characteristic melodic element of these pieces is the similar closing

gesture. A series of signals ascend higher and higher, until the posthorn reaches and

dwells on the highest note. In Schäffer’s piece, the solo ends on this high note, as is

fitting for the end of a popular song. (In the military band arrangement that serves as

the basis for example 10, it is followed by final tone an octave deeper.) In Nessler’s and

Mahler’s cases, however, the onstage action that had been interrupted continues after

the end of the posthorn episode. These solos do not end at their peaks, but briefly

descend to a lower resting point.57 At first, Mahler’s solo ends just below its highest

56Despite the impromptu character of the passage, it is actually a precise quotation of Prussian
posthorn signal for the arrival and departure of the express mail carriage. See Hiller, Das große Buch vom
Posthorn, 260.
57This is not the end of the first posthorn episode, but rather the beginning of an orchestral
interlude (mm. 310–20). Although the posthorn ends only slightly lower than its peak pitch, the descent
is more pronounced at the end of the episode (mm. 329–45)

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pitch. But Mahler replays the closing gesture after a brief orchestral interlude. Here, at

the end of the first episode, the posthorn solo descends to an even lower resting point,

and, at the same time, the characteristic closing gesture is taken up by stopped horns

(mm. 340–46). This dreamy echo of a brilliant posthorn close is shattered by the

entrance of the muted trumpet fanfare (mm. 345–46).

In addition to these melodic similarities, all three evocations of the posthorn

involve distance effects. The entire solo in Nessler’s Rhine Serenade is played from

behind the scenes. The entrance of the trumpet is accompanied by static chords in the

muted strings. At the sound of the signals, the dynamics pull back to pp and decrescendo

from there, as the melody reaches its lyrical turn. The hushed dynamic and covered

timbres complement the placement of the trumpeter offstage. Mahler’s posthorn episode

conveys distance using these very same traits, only exaggerated. The full orchestral

textures of the rondo refrains give way to an ethereal ensemble of muted strings. The

dynamic range spans p down to ppp, the fragile sound slipping into inaudibility at the

points marked gänzlich verschwindend (dying completely away) and morendo.58

Other means were used in popular and salon music to convey distance in

passages representing the posthorn. Echo effects were perhaps the most common. This

was sometimes achieved through direct shifts in dynamics, as when a loud signal is

immediately repeated softly. Another strategy was to use such performance instructions

as “Echo” or “Like an echo during the repeat.” Mahler mimics these effects with a

number of performance instructions that intimate spatial separation: “As if from afar”

(Wie aus weiter Ferne, ex. 3.12, m. 255), “As if from a distance” (wie aus der Ferne, ex.

3.12, m. 292) and “coming somewhat nearer” (sich etwas nähernd, ex. 3.12, m. 293).

58 See also m. 282 (R15-3) and m. 343 (R17-4).

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 Even when composers did not expressly call for distance effects, trumpet or

posthorn soloists were often placed offstage as a matter of performance practice.

Schäffer did not call for an off-stage soloist, but the song was surely performed this way

countless times. In his short story “The Trip to Tilsit (Die Reise nach Tilsit, 1917),

Hermann Sudermann describes a concert of a Prussian military band at the end of the

nineteenth century in which “Die Post im Walde” is played.

Then comes a third piece that is not very pretty and only makes you drowsy. A
certain Beethoven thought that one up. But then comes something! It is hard to
imagine, even in one’s dreams, that there could be something so beautiful on
this earth. It is called “Die Post im Walde.” A trumpeter has left [the stage]
ahead of time and plays the melody softly and wistfully from far, far away, while
the others accompany him just as quietly. You hardly remain a human being,
when you hear that!59

Robert Hirschfeld’s review of the first performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony in

Vienna likewise alludes to this performance practice.

Then [comes] the Rondo with the posthorn solo that swiftly became famous. It
intones once from the distance, once from closer. At this point, one can gladly
concede that the military band conductors do not have access to the masterful
technique of Gustav Mahler when they use the same effects in their outdoor
concerts. Finally, a brilliant artist has come across “Die Post im Walde.”60

59 Hermann Sudermann, Lithauische Geschichten (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche

Buchhandlung, 1918), 49–50: “Dann kommt ein drittes Stück, das wenig hübsch ist und bloß den Kopf
müde macht. Das hat sich ein gewisser Beethoven ausgedacht. Aber dann kommt etwas! Daß es so was
Schönes auf Erden gibt, hat man selbst im Traum nicht für möglich gehalten. Es heißt: ‘Die Post im
Walde’. Ein Trompeter ist vorher weggegangen und spielt die Melodie ganz leise und sehnsüchtig von
weit, weit her, während die andern ihn ebenso leise begleiten. Man bleibt gar nicht Mensch, wenn man
das hört!”
60 Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 296, 28 December 1904:

“Dann das Rondo mit dem rasch berühmt gewordenen Posthornsolo, das einmal ferner, einmal näher
tönt. Da will man gern zugestehen, daß den Militär-Kapellmeistern für ihre Gartenmusiken, für den
gleichen Effekt nicht die meisterliche Technik Gustav Mahlers zu Gebote steht. Es ist endlich einmal ein
genialer Künstler über die ‚Post im Walde’ gekommen. Möglich, daß diese wirklich reformbedürftig war.”

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In fact, such liberties of performance practice routinely inform concerts of Mahler’s

symphony, too. Both posthorn episodes are generally played from offstage, yet only the

second is clearly marked this way.61

Just how finely tuned Mahler’s solos are to these prominent examples from the

popular sphere can be gauged by turning once again to the Blumine movement. Its main

theme was originally written for Mahler’s incidental music to Trompeter von Säkkingen.

Moreover, it set the same scene that we have just examined from Nessler’s opera: the

Rhine Serenade. Despite this explicit connection with a sentimental trumpet solo,

Mahler’s theme has little in common with Nessler’s and Schäffer’s melodies except for a

lyrical trumpet idiom. Mahler almost certainly did not know Nessler’s opera at the time,

but was likely familiar with “Die Post im Walde” and other examples of the posthorn

topic from the popular sphere. In this context, the posthorn episodes of the Third

Symphony seem all the more calculated to awaken associations with these typical

elements of entertainment music. It is unlikely that this constellation of traits in melodic

construction, details of accompaniment, and distance effects ever commingled except in

posthorn imitations and trumpet solos as found in popular music and in Mahler’s Third

Symphony.

61 In the first episode, distance effects are only suggested through performance instructions:

“Wie aus weiter Ferne” (m. 255) and “wie aus der Ferne” (m. 292). In the second episode, in contrast, the
spatial separation is expressed more concretely: “in weiter Entfernung” (m. 482) and “in weiter Ferne” (m.
510). In a sketch of the movement (Cary Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library), the difference is made
even clearer; Mahler indicates that the second episode should be played “hinter der Szene.” See Thomas
Allan Peattie, “The Fin-de-siècle Metropolis, Memory, Modernity and the Music of Gustav Mahler” (PhD
diss., Harvard University, 2002), 25–26.

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Multivalent Evocation

At this point in a typical scholarly treatment of Mahler’s vernacularisms one

might expect a declaration that the musical connections described above are clear and

correspond to Mahler’s intentions. But this would be only partly true. The musical

similarities to Nessler’s Rhine Serenade and Schäffer’s “Die Post im Walde” are

compelling, but neither constitutes a quotation or even a univocal reference. They are

allusions. Their presence does not detract from the myriad allusions summarized at the

beginning of this chapter. The posthorn episodes are not, as Robert Morgan has

claimed, “clearly representative of the real thing,” because they are actually many

things. Mahler’s vernacularisms have the capacity to refer simultaneously to many

different sources without being reducible to any one of them.

The allusions in the posthorn episodes draw on a wide spectrum of music-

making in Mahler’s environment: functional music, folk music, entertainment music,

opera, and instrumental art music. Mahler was in a position to have intended them all.

He heard functional posthorns playing signals and simple songs as a child and young

adult living and traveling in the Austrian provinces.62 He had a deep connection with

folk music, as evidenced by numerous settings of folksong texts from Des Knaben

Wunderhorn. He almost certainly knew Schäffer’s popular song as well as other

representations of the posthorn in entertainment music. He conducted Nessler’s opera

dozens of times. And less than a year before composing the posthorn episodes, Mahler

conducted the arrangement of Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole with Busoni at the piano.63 Not

62 La Grange, Mahler, 1:897; Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 49.
63 Solvik, “Biography and Musical Meaning,” 358.

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only can each of the allusions be supported by appeals to the music, but Mahler

demonstrably knew all of the relative repertoires and pieces.

Mahler’s posthorn episodes are therefore a powerful example of what can be

called multivalent evocation: seemingly referential music that can be convincingly traced

to multiple, even contradictory sources. Arguably, Mahler did not intend reference to

any single kind of music; he wrote in a way that could evoke many different kinds. Even

the oft-repeated quotation of the Austrian military signal is not as straightforward as

commonly accepted. The exact same signal, with the addition of a single pick-up, was

also the closing formula for over half of Prussia’s official posthorn signals.64

Example 3.13 (appendix E). Selected posthorn signals of the Deutsche

Reichpost

Mahler lived in Prussia for over nine of the twelve years that preceded his writing the

Third Symphony. When he set pen to paper on the posthorn episodes, was it as a

Viennese, recollecting the sounds of Austrian military bands? Or did he make reference

to the closing formula of Prussian posthorn signals? Or did he simply want the effect of

a fanfare without intending a similarity to either? Mahler’s youth in the Austrian

countryside and his self-identification with Vienna may suggest the first option.

Mahler’s residence in the years preceding composition, and the movement’s earliest

extant manuscript, in which the posthorn solos and signal were played by the same

instrument and not divided between off-stage soloist and muted orchestral trumpeter,

lend credence to the second option. Mahler’s advice about learning his works through

intensive score study, and the presence of similarly cheeky fanfare interruptions at the

end of pastoral passages in the first movement, suggest the viability of the signals

64 The posthorn signals in Saxony were the same as those in Prussia (Hiller, Das große Buch vom

Posthorn, 83).

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without acknowledging any reference in them.65 The proper answer is that Mahler’s

music can sustain all three possibilities at the same time. There is no reason that a

single option must be chosen as the one true explanation.

The multivalence of the posthorn episodes helps explain their polarized

reception. Not only is it impossible to reconcile the collective associations and

connotations of the possible referents with one another, but their very determination

depends on each individual interpreter. The folk-like melody and lingering treatment of

the solos clearly channel the instrument’s associations with things distant and past. But

many of the musical conventions by which Mahler creates this sense of nostalgia were

also cultivated in entertainment music. For listeners attuned to these connections,

Mahler’s posthorn solos could just as easily point to the everyday and the present.

Moreover, for aesthetic conservatives with strong convictions about what styles do not

belong in a symphony, the primary import of the posthorn solos could very well be their

transgressing against aesthetic norms of art music. The difference between these

viewpoints is nowhere to be found in Mahler’s score, which can support them all, but in

differences between interpreters.

In the end, Mahler’s vernacularisms are rarely as univocal as they are portrayed

to be. Unless one is prone to agree with Paul Stefan that “Mahler the thinker, organizer,

and leader, was, as a composer, naïve,” one has to proceed from the position that he

intended the diversity of associations and their contradictory connotations.66 What

attracted Mahler to vernacular materials on this view was the ambiguity and associative

richness that hides behind their deceptive immediacy. And in this, he was a

65 See mvt. 1, mm. 148–50 (R12) and mm. 237–39 (R19-2).

66 Stefan, Gustav Mahler, 95: “Mahler, der Wissende, Ordnende und Leitende, [ist] als

Schaffender naiv.”

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representative of his time, as his contemporary Hugo von Hofmannsthal saw it: “The

nature of our epoch is ambiguity and indeterminacy.”67

67 See fn. 1.

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 CHAPTER 4

ALLUSIONS TO OPERETTA AND MILITARY BANDS

IN MAHLER’S MARCHES

Suddenly, march rhythms enter at pppp, and piercing whistles, like cries of war,
are heard from time to time. The march music appears to come closer, the drum
beat becomes louder. The fanfares from the beginning call forth cheery
marching. Trumpet signals blare out from all sides. We are marching forward;
pushed from all sides, we must go along. The toes begin to tap. When the
symphonic military band concert begins, everyone is swept along.

—Max Graf on Mahler’s Third Symphony, 19041

What should we make of the first movement’s . . . second theme, which is

borrowed from operetta and, to judge from the continuation, winds up being
more important in the movement?

—Robert Hirschfeld on Mahler’s Third Symphony, 19042

For a quick measure of the potential for modern intuitions about popular genres

to distort historical realities, one need only compare two claims in the secondary

literature: that Mahler’s symphonic universe draws on the sounds of military bands, and

that it incorporates the sounds of operetta. The one is so often repeated as to be a cliché;

1 Max Graf, “Die dritte Symphonie Gustav Mahlers,” Neues Wiener Journal (20 December 1904),

5–6: “plötzlich erschallen zuerst in vierfachem Piano Marschrhythmen, gellende Pfiffe ertönen von Zeit
zu Zeit, wie Kriegsrufe, die Marschmusik scheint näher zu kommen, der Trommelschlag wird lauter, die
Fanfare des Anfangs ruft zu fröhlichem Marschieren auf, Trompetensignale schmettern auf allen Seiten,
wir marschieren vorwärts, werden von allen Seiten geschoben und müssen mit, es zuckt in den Füßen,
und wenn die symphonische Burgmusik beginnt, schließt sich alles an.”
2 Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 296, 28 December 1904: “Was sollen
wir nun mit dem . . . mit dem zweiten, der Operette entlehnten Thema [des ersten Satzes] beginnen, das,
nach der Fortführung zu schließen, das wichtigere im Satze ist?”

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the other, so seldom as to be novel.3 Yet in Mahler’s day, military music and operetta

were so closely intertwined in musical style, repertoire, personnel, audience, and

performance venues that it is difficult to know what in his scores might resemble one

but not the other. The purpose of this chapter is to explore ways to distinguish allusions

to military marches from allusions to operetta. Because scholars have given such scant

attention to operetta as a stylistic source for Mahler’s compositions, Mahler’s

experience with and attitude toward the genre will be considered at the outset. The next

section describes the close relationship of military bands and operetta. Two sound

profiles are then developed: one for military marches, and another for light marches, a

type common in operetta. The chapter closes by considering a number of examples of

stylized military and light marches in Mahler’s oeuvre.

Mahler and Operetta

Mahler was intimately familiar with operetta from his conducting career.

Appendix C lists all operettas that he is known to have directed in performance. The

specific repertoire at his first post in Bad Hall is mostly unknown, but it certainly

consisted of a mixture of farces and operettas, including Jacques Offenbach’s Le Mariage

3 The only published article devoted to the claim that Mahler drew on operetta is Alexander L.
Ringer, “Johann Strauß und Gustav Mahler,” in Johann Strauß: Zwischen Kunstanspruch und Volksvergnügen,
ed. Ludwig Finscher and Albrecht Riethmüller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995):
152–53. With the exception of occasional assertions of melodic allusion—almost always to Franz Lehár’s
Die lustige Witwe (1905)—nearly all scholarly references to operetta in Mahler’s works take the form of
genre references assumed to be self-evident and not requiring musical examples (see “Light Marches in
Mahler’s Oeuvre” below, especially the discussions of the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies). For example,
see Peter Ruzicka, “Befragung des Materials: Gustav Mahler aus der Sicht aktueller Kompositions-
ästhetik,” in Erfundene und Gefundene Musik. Analysen, Portraits und Reflexionen, ed. Thomas Schäfer
(Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 1998), 33; and Bernd Sponheuer, “‘O Alter Duft aus Märchenzeit’: Prozeduren
der Erinnerung in der ersten Nachtmusik der Siebten Symphonie Gustav Mahler,” in Das Gustav-Mahler-
Fest Hamburg 1989: Bericht über den Internationalen Gustav-Mahler-Kongress, ed. Matthias Theodor Vogt
(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991), 477. That such comparisons to operetta are concentrated in the German-
language literature likely has little to do with historical considerations, reflecting instead the greater
presence of operetta traditions in these regions today.

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aux laternes (1857). Half of Mahler’s eighty-six performances in Laibach in 1881–82

were operettas, both Viennese and French. Though many are seldom performed today,

they were among the most popular stage works in Europe in the closing decades of the

nineteenth century. The success of Lecocq’s La fille de Madame Angot, for example, was a

major reason that the Carltheater, one of Vienna’s most important suburban theaters,

remained solvent during the financial crisis in 1873–74.4 As Mahler’s conducting career

advanced to more prestigious posts, he programmed and oversaw performances of many

operettas. He included Le Mariage aux laterne in the repertoire in Budapest, conducted

dozens of performances of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Fledermaus (1874) and Carl Millöcker’s

Bettelstudent (1882) in Hamburg, and added Fledermaus to the Vienna Court Opera’s

evening repertory.5

Mahler almost certainly heard operettas as a child, too. Iglau’s municipal theater

mounted performances roughly six days a week from late September to Easter.6 Table

4.1 lists the musical stage works performed at the theater between 1866 and 1875, the

year that Mahler entered the Vienna Conservatory.

Table 4.1 (appendix F). Repertoire of operettas and operas at Iglau’s

theater, 1866–75

The audiences had a considerable appetite for musical productions and especially

operetta, the presence of which in the repertoire steadily grew during Mahler’s youth.

Table 4.2 (appendix F). Musical productions at Iglau’s theater, 1866–75

4 Camille Crittenden, Johann Strauss: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66.

5 Die Fledermaus was performed nearly twice as many times during Mahler’s tenure in Vienna as
the second most frequently staged work, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav
Mahler, vol. 3, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 1904–1907 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 941–
44).
6 For more on the theater’s activities, see Timothy Freeze, “The Public Concert Life of Mahler’s

Youth: Iglau, 1866–75,” Naturlaut 7, no. 2 (2010): 2–7.

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To the extent that Mahler attended the theater, he heard many of the works that he

would later conduct, notably operettas by Offenbach and Franz von Suppé. How often

this occurred, however, is unknown. His parents certainly had the means to take him to

performances on occasion. Ticket prices in the upper gallery, being between 10 and 15

kreuzer in these years, were accessible to the working class, let alone to families like the

Mahlers.7 It is also possible that Mahler’s teachers, several of whom were involved with

the theater, could procure him tickets or access to rehearsals. Yet the strongest evidence

that Mahler attended the theater comes from his own compositional ambitions. It is

difficult to imagine that he would have started writing an opera at age 14 without ever

having seen a performance at the theater just a stone’s throw away.8

The secondary literature paints Mahler’s attitude toward operetta in shades of

aloofness, ambivalence, and hostility.9 His only substantive connection to the genre is

generally thought to be as a conductor, either assigned to perform them by his superiors

or, later in his career, compelled to by the sure financial returns. In surviving letters and

anecdotes, Mahler said little about operetta or popular music more generally. Judicious

interpretation of these few remarks, though, casts his opinion of the genre in a

sympathetic light. One indication comes from an incident at Vienna’s Court Opera in

7 Mährischer Grenzbote [Iglau], 25 September 1873. At 100 kreuzer to a gulden, music lessons

were markedly more expensive than tickets in the upper gallery. Wenzel M. Pressburg, with whom
Mahler studied theory and harmony, charged 1.5 to 2 gulden for three hours a week (Iglauer Sonntags-
Blatt, 31 October 1869). Johannes Brosch, a piano teacher, charged 2 to 4 gulden per month for the same
amount of weekly lessons (Iglauer Sonntags-Blatt, 28 November 1869). By comparison, a mug of beer at a
beer garden in 1872 cost just 5–7 kreuzer.
8 La Grange, Mahler: Volume One (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 27.
9 La Grange and Kurt Blaukopf cast Alma Mahler’s anecdote about attending Die lustige Witwe
with her husband so as to emphasize Mahler’s ambivalence (La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:473; Blaukopf,
Gustav Mahler oder der Zeitgenosse der Zukunft [Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1969], 233). For Mahler’s aloofness
to popular music, see La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:477. An anecdote recounted by Hans Bruckmüller in
1932 (quoted in La Grange, Mahler, 1:107) suggests a more hostile posture.

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1899. The tenor Fritz Schrödter refused to sing the part of Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus

unless he were paid a bonus. Mahler reprimanded the singer in writing:

An operetta is simply a small and lighthearted opera and many classical works
are given this title. The fact that recently compositions without musical value
have been called operettas makes no difference. Johann Strauss’s work surpasses
them in every way, notably in its excellent musical diction, and that is why the
administration has not hesitated to include it in the Opera repertoire. You
yourself, dear Herr Schrödter, have often sung works that are far below the
level of Die Fledermaus—Am Wörther See, for example.10

Mahler did not judge works by their genre; rather, he considered their merits case by

case. The word “recently” is important in this connection. At the time of the reprimand,

Viennese operetta was widely perceived to be in crisis. The genre’s demise was routinely

invoked in newspaper reviews and journal articles until Lehár’s resounding success with

Die lustige Witwe (1905) proved, albeit temporarily, how misguided such sentiments

were.11 The operettas that Mahler conducted all stemmed from earlier generations: the

so-called Golden Age of Viennese operetta and French operetta of even earlier vintage

(see appendix C). Like many of his contemporaries, Mahler probably held these earlier

works in higher esteem than the latest additions to the genre.

There are hints that Mahler personally enjoyed operetta and even got to know

some that he never conducted. In a letter to his wife in 1904, he dismissed Hans

Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten by quoting a line from an Offenbachiade: the opera

“evolves only as far as the invertebrates; vertebrates cannot follow. Like Kalchas in La

10 Quoted in La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 1897–1904 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1995), 182. Am Wörther See was a Liederspiel by the Austrian composer Thomas
Koschat, who was famous for his works imitating the folk styles of Carinthia.
11 See A. N., “‘Der Fremdenführer,’” Die Wage 5, no. 43 (19 October 1902): 693; and “Der

Niedergang der Operette. Aus einer Unterredung mit Charles Lecocq,” Neues Wiener Journal, 13 July
1904. The latter article opens with the line: “For many years it has been said that the operetta is in
decline” (“Daß die Operette im Niedergange ist, darüber wird schon seit Jahr und Tag gesagt”). As
Lehár’s operettas became more sentimental and opera-like in their pretensions, the demise of the genre
was again much discussed. See Georg Pauly, “Operettendämmerung,” Signale für die Musikalische Welt 70,
no. 49 (4 December 1912): 1635–38; no. 50 (11 December 1912): 1675–77.

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belle Hélène, one would like to call out, ‘Flowers, nothing but flowers.’”12 Mahler had not

conducted La belle Hélène (1864) in nearly a quarter century. Had he retained the line in

his memory all these years, or had he heard the operetta since? Circumstantial evidence

in support of the latter can be found in the unlikeliest of places—a review of Mahler’s

Eighth Symphony (1910). The Berlin critic Oskar Bie whimsically interwove his

impressions of Mahler’s symphony with his experiences visiting the Mahlers at their

summer home just weeks before the concert.

We are in the realm of cheerfulness, the eternal feminine; an unending yearning

that can never be fulfilled. This echoes constantly in Mahler’s head. Visions of
angels in white dresses with instruments from Fiesole. A small mouth, a sweet
voice, and everything bathed in golden light, the sounds of a mandolin, and
carefree music making, just as he arranges it in many songs and symphonies.
What is that, is it not La belle Hélène? We are approaching his farmer’s villa
there on the edge of the green meadow of Toblach and hear Offenbach from the
piano in the lonely white house. A third hand plays the melodious upper voice
with such certain strength and precision—Mahler is playing with his wife,
whose Venetian delicacy Palma Vecchio could hardly have painted.13

Another hint of Mahler’s private encounters with operetta comes from an

exchange with Alexander Girardi, one of Vienna’s greatest comic actors, during a

rehearsal of Die Fledermaus at the Court Opera. The cast included the tenor Andreas

Dippel, who recounted the following in an interview:

12 La Grange and Günther Weiss, eds., Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife, trans. and rev. Antony
Beaumont (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 146–47. In Offenbach’s operetta, Calchas, chief
auger to Jupiter, is complaining about the miserable collection of alms, which consist mostly of flowers—
not the kinds of things from which priests can become rich. See also Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler:
Erinnerungen und Briefe (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1949), 300; trans. Basil Creighton as Gustav
Mahler: Memories and Letters, rev. ed., ed. Donald Mitchell (Seattle and London: University of Washington
Press, 1971), 232.
13 Oskar Bie, “Mahlers Achte,” Die neue Rundschau [Berlin] 21, no. 4 (1910); transcribed in the

Vondenhoff Collection at the Musiksammlung of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek: “Das Heitere,

das Ewigweibliche schwebt uns vor, die beständigste Sehnsucht, denn sie muss unerfüllbar sein. Mahler
klingt sie dauernd im Kopfe. Engelsbilder, in weißen Kleidern, mit Instrumenten von Fiesole, ein kleiner
Mund, eine süße Stimme, und alles Lichtvergoldete, Mandolinenklingende, unbesorgt Musizierende, wie
er es in vielen Liedern und Symphonien gestaltet. Was ist das, ist das nicht die ‘Schöne Helena’? Wir
nahen uns seiner Bauernvilla, da oben am Rande der grünen Wiese von Toblach, und hören aus dem
einsamen weißen Hause Offenbach auf dem Klavier, und eine dritte Hand spielt die melodiöse Oberstimme
mit so bestimmter Kraft und Präzision – Mahler spielt mit seiner Frau, deren venezianische Delikatesse
Palma Vecchio kaum hätte malen können.”

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 Johann Strauss sat on the conductor’s podium. Girardi, who only had to take the
stage in the last act, sat for a while next to Mahler in the dark parquet. Mahler
was silent and Girardi was eager to “chit-chat.” Girardi looked now and then at
his neighbor’s twinkling glasses and serious mien. Finally Mahler said: “I would
rather have had Der Zigeunerbaron for the benefit.” Relieved that he could finally
speak, Girardi sputtered [in Viennese dialect]: “O c’mon! Der Zigeunerbaron!? If
you’da just let me sing Lohengrin! Then you really woulda heard somethin’!”14

Since Mahler never conducted Der Zigeunerbaron (1885), his knowledge of it likely came

from private study or attending a performance.15

In the end, however, the artistic merits of operetta would have been largely

irrelevant to Mahler the composer. In a conversation about Johann Strauss, Jr., he told

Natalie Bauer-Lechner:

I do not hold a low opinion of waltzes; I accept them for what they are in all
their uniqueness and delightful inventiveness. But you cannot call them art.
They have as little to do with art as has, say, the folksong “Ach, wie ist’s
möglich denn,” no matter how moving it is. These short-breathed melodies of
successive eight-bar phrases, from which nothing develops—in which, indeed,
there is not the slightest trace of any development—cannot be considered
“compositions” at all.16

Mahler’s insistence that waltzes do not constitute art is remarkable for what he pairs

with them: folksongs. In contrast to the prevailing discourse among musicians and

14 Martin Hürlimann, ed., Die Walzer-Dynastie Strauss in Zeugnissen ihrer selbst und ihrer

Zeitgenossen (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1976), 264–67: “Am Dirigentenpult sass Johann Strauss. Girardi,
der erst im letzten Akt zu tun hatte, sass einstweilen neben Mahler im dunkeln Parkett. Mahler war
schweigsam, und Girardi wollte gern ‘plauschen’. Er sah hin und wieder nach den funkelnden
Augengläsern und in das ernste Gesicht seines Nachbars. Endlich sagte Mahler: ‘Mir wäre “Der
Zigeunerbaron” als Festvorstellung lieber gewesen.’ Froh, endlich reden zu können, sprudelte Girardi
hervor: ‘Aber ich bitt’ Sie! “Der Zigeunerbaron”! Hätten S’ mi amal den Lohengrin singen lassen! Da
hätt’n S’ erst was derlebt!’”
15 He could have heard the operetta in Prague, where the original cast from the Theater an der

Wien performed the work every day of a nine-day residence in May 1886. He may also have heard it in
Leipzig in the 1886–87 season. Alexander Ringer has posited that Mahler developed some compositional
techniques by intensifying textural traits from this operetta (“Johann Strauß und Gustav Mahler,” 153–
54).
16 Peter Franklin, ed., Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, trans. Dika Newlin

(London: Faber Music, 1980), 128 (translation amended). In the introduction to the book’s first edition in
1923, Paul Stefan cites the less charitable continuation of the above quotation as an example of how
certain details recounted by Bauer-Lechner are unreliable: “the negative comment on Johann Strauss are
inconsistent with Mahler’s often-expressed admiration for this composer” (ibid., 19). See also Herbert
Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner,
1984), 134.

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critics, Mahler did not divide vernacular styles into an aesthetic hierarchy in which

folksong was superior to urban popular music. He located aesthetic distinction in the

organic development of musical ideas. There was nothing intrinsic to folksong or

waltzes that precluded or guaranteed the admissibility of their styles to a symphony. All

that mattered was how the composer treated such materials. Mahler asserted this view

in an interview from near the end of his life:

I have often heard composers who claim to seek individuality above all things
state that they purposely avoid hearing too much music of other composers,
fearing that their own originality will be affected. They also avoid hearing the
songs of the street or folk-songs for a similar reason. What arrant nonsense! If a
man eats a beef-steak it is no sign that he will become a cow. He takes the
nourishment from the food and that transforms itself by means of wonderful
physiological processes into flesh, strength and bodily force, but he may eat
beef-steaks for a lifetime and never be anything but a man.17

Operetta was thus fit for Mahler’s symphonic universe, as much as folksong or aspects

from the music of fellow composers.

Such anecdotes offer some counterevidence to the notion that Mahler never

condescended to operetta of his own volition. Rather, it seems that he, like many other

cultural elites of his time, found enjoyment in the genre.18 Just as Mahler’s notions of

art have not deterred scholars from studying his allusions to folk music, they should not

deter a consideration of operetta in this light, either. In fact, operetta offers distinct

methodological advantages. Whereas it is exceedingly difficult to document more than a

few specific pieces of military or folk music that Mahler knew, he certainly knew

intimately the operettas that he conducted. Furthermore, the performance figures in

Appendix C, despite being an underestimate, suggest the considerable longevity of

17 Gustav Mahler, “The Influence of the Folk-Song on German Musical Art [An Interview],”

Etude (1911): 301–302; quoted in Leon Botstein, “Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis
of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1985): 126–27.
18 See “Relevanz der Operette im Fin de siècle” in Moritz Csáky, Ideologie der Operette und Wiener

Moderne: ein kulturhistorischer Essay zur österreichischen Identität (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1996), 157–61.

146
successful operettas, which was only magnified by arrangements for military bands,

salon orchestras, and domestic consumption. As Mahler composed symphonies from the

late 1880s to the early 1900s, then, he could reasonably anticipate that his audiences

were familiar not only with operettas from those years, but also with many written

decades earlier.

Military Music and Operetta: Two Intertwined Genres

Military bands provided functional music for their units and also participated

directly in the musical lives of cities. Their prominence was directly proportional to the

distance from a metropolitan center. In larger cities like Vienna, military bands were

competitors of dance bands and salon orchestras.19 Iglau, on the other hand, was a

provincial city of around 30,000 people with a theater and, only after 1869, a

Stadtkapelle. Its musical culture was not wholly dependent on military musicians, but

was nonetheless greatly enriched by their presence. Iglau was never without a military

band for more than a few months during Mahler’s youth. When the 5th Infantry

Regiment arrived in November 1866 at the end of one of these periods, its musicians

began reinforcing the theater orchestra within days. By the end of the month, it was

hosting dances at local restaurants. The band initiated a series of free weekly concerts in

a local restaurant in December, and it performed at numerous balls during the

19 Military musicians had subsidized training, a fixed income, and free lodging. They could

therefore undercut the prices of private musicians, creating lasting friction between military and civilian
musicians. Reporting on the civilian musicians’ grievances was not limited to trade journals like the
Österreichische Musiker-Zeitung, but could be found in the popular musical press, too. See, for example,
“Civilmusiker und Militärcapellen,” Neue Musikalische Presse 8, no. 8 (19 February 1899): 3; and “Zur Lage
der Civilmusiker,” Neue Musikalische Presse 8, no. 21 (21 May 1899): 2.

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subsequent carnival season. The military bands were thus integral to the theater, balls,

dances, and instrumental concerts of the city.20

Austrian military musicians performed in a variety of ensembles befitting their

diverse venues. Each band member was required to be proficient on one string

instrument in addition to a primary wind instrument. The most common ensembles

were wind band and full orchestra.21 The wind band was the stereotypical configuration

in the popular imagination, a fact clearly reflected in etymology. The term Militärmusik

could broadly apply to any ensemble or concert consisting of military musicians, but it

was also used more narrowly to refer to wind band formations. The terms

Streichorchester and Streichmusik denoted an orchestra of strings, winds, and percussion.

The wind band was generally used in outdoor performances, while the orchestral

formation and chamber ensembles were more typical for indoor balls and dances.

Sometimes multiple formations were mixed within single concerts, as attested by the

20 The city garrisoned three regiments in succession: the first battalion of the Infantry Regiment
no. 5, King of Bavaria (1866–67), two battalions of the Infantry Regiment no. 69, Lieutenant-Field
Marshall Count Jellacic (1867–74), and two battalions of the Infantry Regiment no. 49, Field Marshall
Baron von Heß (1874–78).
21 Hanslick dates the incorporation of strings to the early 1830s (Aus dem Concert-Saal: Kritiken

und Schilderungen aus 20 Jahren des Wiener Musiklebens, 1848–68, 2d ed. [Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller,
1897], 56). Emil Rameis claims that the incorporation of strings occurred much earlier in Austrian
military music than in other countries because of the prominent position of concert pieces in their
repertoire and because of their close relationship to the theaters and civilian music life of provincial
garrison towns (Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik—von ihren Anfängen bis 1918, rev. Eugen Brixel,
Alt Musica 2 [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976], 9). However, strings were likewise incorporated in
Bavarian military ensembles in the 1830s, and their concerts included a similar array of marches, dances,
and concert pieces (Andreas Masel, “Wechselwirkungen zwischen Militärmusik und ‘ziviler Musik’: Ein
Überblick am Beispiel Bayerns im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Militärmusik und “zivile” Musik:
Beziehungen und Einflüsse; Bericht über ein Symposion beim Tag der Musik am 14. Mai 1993 in Uffenheim, ed.
Armin Griebel and Horst Steinmetz [Uffenheim: Stadt Uffenheim, 1993], 35–36). The official
incorporation of strings into the Prussian military music only occurred in the last decade of the
nineteenth century (“Militärmusik,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 17 vols., ed. Friedrich Blume
[Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1986], 9:325). See also Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Mit vereinter Schwäche:
Musikalische Militäreinsätze in der Wiener Moderne,” in Zeichen der Kraft: Wissensformationen 1800–1900,
ed. Thomas Brandstetter and Christof Windgätter (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2008), 259–60.

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following announcement from Iglau (parenthetical remarks as in original; square

brackets indicate editorial additions):

A concert of the regimental band in the theater on December 25th [1874] (55-
man orchestra). . . . The Militär-Musik (wind instruments) will begin the concert
with the overtures to the operas Dinorah by Meyerbeer and the Marriage of
Figaro by Mozart. – The Streichorchester follows with the brilliant overture to
Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner, a scherzo by Mendelssohn, and the wonderful
Andante movement from the “Surprise” Symphony by Haydn. Bringing the
concert to a close will be Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the most magnificent
symphonic creation of this master next to his Ninth.22

A further indication of the primacy of the wind band formation is the official collection

of historic Austrian marches Historische Märsche und sonstige Kompositionen für das

kaiserliche und königliche Heer (1895), which contains no parts for strings.23

Military bands, like civilian dance bands, had a financial incentive to tailor their

programs to popular tastes. Concerts were vital to the financial well-being of the

ensembles, which received only a symbolic sum from the regiment.24 Their concerts

generally included a mix of marches, polkas, waltzes, dances, character pieces,

potpourris, and song transcriptions.25 Opera potpourris, a staple of the repertoire from

22 Mährischer Grenzbote [Iglau], 20 December 1874. Such a concentration on the classical

repertoire was not typical of military band concerts and was surely a response to the date of the
performance: Christmas Day. For the years 1866–75, the city’s newspapers contain evidence of only three
performances of complete symphonies (Freeze, “Public Concert Life,” 6).
23 Emil Kaiser, ed., Historische Märsche und sonstige Kompositionen für das kaiserliche und königliche

Heer (1895; repr., Vienna: Musikverlag Johann Kliment, 2002). The collection comprised official
regimental marches and other marches commemorating Austria’s past military commanders and victories.
Its heavy political symbolism contrasts strongly with the corresponding Prussian Sammlung von Märschen
für türkische Musik zu bestimmten Gebrauch in der Königlich Preussischen Armee, which first appeared decades
earlier in 1817 and was more pragmatically organized by tempo and military unit. See Raymond Monelle,
The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2006), 123; and Mazza, “Mit vereinter Schwäche,” 257–58.
24 Eva Slavíčková, “Militärkapelle und ihre Stellung in dem Musikleben des 19. Jahrhunderts:

Einfluss der Militärkapelle auf die Olomoucer Musikkultur bis zum Jahre 1918,” Musicologica Olomucensia
5 (2000): 144.
25 Bernhard Habla’s analysis of the repertoire of a single military band confirms the important
role that these ensembles had in the popularization and dissemination of entertainment music and
operettas (“Das Repertoire von Militär-Blasorchestern vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Gezeigt am
Notenbestand des ‘bosnisch-herzegowinischen’ Infanterie-Regiments Nr. 4,” in Festschrift zum 60.
Geburtstag von Wolfgang Suppan [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1993], 349–76).

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at least the 1840s, were by century’s end largely supplanted by potpourris from

operetta, which began appearing soon after the genre came to Vienna in 1858.26 At

Vienna’s Hoch- und Deutschmeister, one fourth of the repertory comprised potpourris

from stage works. Between 1897 and 1914, pieces from the most recent operettas by

Leo Held, Carl Michael Ziehrer, Alfred Grünfeld, Joseph Hellmesberger, and Johann

Strauss, Jr., were arranged within two to eighteen months of their Viennese premières, a

distinction bestowed to only one opera.27 Older operettas remained an important part of

the repertory even decades later. Lecocq’s Giroflé-Girofla (1874), which Mahler

conducted early in his career, was especially popular. Operetta popourris were also an

important part of the military band repertoire in Iglau. On 17 April 1870, for example,

the band held a concert titled “Offenbach Evening” that consisted of selections from

many of the French composer’s operettas. The public response was so enthusiastic and

the hall so full that some concert-goers were turned away.28

In addition to popular fare, an important part of military band repertories was

art music, played either in transcription or original versions. The Strausskapelle was the

first to introduce some of Richard Wagner’s works to Vienna, and Hanslick praised

military bands as “musical missionaries preaching the Good News of art.”29 In many

provincial towns, military bands provided the only access to art music requiring more

26 Slavíčková, “Militärkapelle und ihre Stellung,” 144; Bernhard Habla, “Opern-Bearbeitungen für
Harmoniemusiken und größere Bläserbesetzungen: Gedrucktes Notenmaterial aus dem zweiten Viertel
des 19. Jh.,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 38 (1997): 64.
27 The opera was Wilhelm Kienzl’s Kuhreigen (1911) and included arrangements and imitations of
folksongs and dances. Set during the French Revolution, the opera deals with the fate of a Swiss soldier;
its most famous number was an arrangement of the folksong “Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz’,” whose text
appeared in Des Knaben Wunderhorn and was also set to music by Mahler.
28 Der Vermittler [Iglau], no. 30, 14 April 1870.
29Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 2:53: “Missionäre, [welche] das fröhliche
Evangelium der Kunst predigen.” Masel suggests that the popularity of Wagner’s works in Bavaria owed
more to military bands—who included pieces by Wagner in their repertoire already in the 1850s—than
to performances in the Hoftheater (“Wechselwirkungen,” 37).

150
than a chamber ensemble. The unconcerned mixture of art and vernacular music on

these concerts stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of most critics, composers, and

philosophers of high art. This is particularly noticeable in the openness to popular

music. By the end of the nineteenth century, military bands were one of the most

important disseminators of both popular and art music in central Europe.30

The typical program of a military band concert struck a balance of serious and

light music. A program from a concert held in Olmütz on 24 February 1883, during

Mahler’s brief stint in the city as a conductor, exemplifies the range of works:

1. “Für’s Vaterland,” march from the operetta Der Bettelstudent by Carl Millöcker
2. Overture to the opera Zampa by Ferdinand Hérold
3. Laura’s Waltz from the operetta Der Bettelstudent by Carl Millöcker
4. “Erlkönig,” ballade by Franz Schubert
5. “Burschenwanderung,” polka française by Johann Strauss, Jr.
6. Reminiscences from the opera Il Trovatore [arr.] by M. Zimmermann
7. Entr’act from the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner
8. “O schöner Mai,” waltz from Prinz Methusalem by Johann Strauss, Jr.
9. Potpourri from “German Songs” by Eduard Horny
10. “Nord und Süd,” polka mazurka by Johann Strauss, Jr.
11. Legenden no. 4, by Antonin Dvorák
12. “Wanderer” Potpourri by [?Willy] Schwenda31

The inclusion of two numbers from Der Bettelstudent reflects the sensitivity of military

bands to the fashions and tastes of the public. By far the biggest musical event in

Olmütz during Mahler’s stay was Der Bettelstudent, which thereby received its debut on

a provincial stage.32 Extra performances were added to capitalize on the consistently

sold-out house, and the military band was no doubt trying to cash in on the operetta’s

success, too.

30 Hofer, Blasmusikforschung, 185.

31 Mährisches Tagblatt [Olmütz], no. 45, 24 February 1883. The concert took place in the Hotel

Pietsch and was performed by the 54th Infantry Regiment Band. All works were arranged for military
band.
32 Mahler did not conduct the work. He was responsible only for the operas; Hugo Schenk

conducted the operettas.

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 For all the eclecticism of military band concerts, not all genres were equally

represented. Folksongs made up only a small part of the repertoire, appearing mostly

within the context of potpourris.33 Folk-like songs were also sometimes used for the

lyrical flügelhorn or tenor horn solos so common to band concerts. The intimate

connection between military bands and popular music thus contrasts with its

relationship to folk traditions. By tailoring their repertoire to the tastes and needs of the

public, military bands became a primary disseminator of urban popular music

throughout the provinces, directly undermining the efforts of those who sought to

protect and preserve local traditions.

Much as operettas featured prominently in the repertoire of Austria’s military

bands, the sounds of the military were a frequent topic in operetta. This symbiotic

relationship is as old as the genre itself. Jacques Offenbach wrote both satirical (La

Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, 1867; Madame l'Archiduc, 1874) and patriotic

representations of the military (La Fille du Tambour-Major, 1879). The most explicit

examples are the many onstage imitations of military bands, most typically at high

points of act finales.34 In Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, the greatest

theatrical success in Iglau during Mahler’s youth, a regimental band assembles onstage

33 Habla, “Das Repertoire von Militär-Blasorchestern,” 375; Hofer, Blasmusikforschung, 33–34;

Wolfgang Suppan, “Die Entwicklung der Literatur für Amateur-Blasorchester in Mitteleuropa seit 1950,”
in Festschrift Ernst Klusen, ed. Günther Noll and Marianne Bröker (Bonn: Wegener, 1984), 28. The
Viennese military band director Franz Josef Wagner wrote many Großpotpourri, in which dozens and
sometimes as many as 80 melodies were stitched together, mostly without transitional material. A
characteristic title bestowed a unifying idea upon the work. For audiences, such pieces amounted to a
game of “guess that tune” with all manner of melodies taken from operettas, operas, salon music, marches,
symphonies, and folk repertoires.
34 Onstage representations of military bands were not limited to operetta but appeared in many

operas beginning in the early nineteenth century. The first use of the banda sul palco—in Italian opera, an
onstage wind band often performed by Austrian military band musicians stationed in northern Italy—is
Simon Mayr’s Zamorr, ossia l'eroe dell'Indie (1804). Better-known examples include in Spontini’s La Vestale
(1807), Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819), Weber’s Oberon (1826), Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), and Meyerbeer’s
Le Prophète (1849). See Frank Heidlberger, “Betrachtungen zur Rolle der Militärmusik in der
abendländischen Kunstmusik,” in Militärmusik und "zivile" Musik, 17–19.

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to send off the troops at the end of act 1. Instead of just a few onstage musicians, Iglau’s

actual military band appeared to spectacular effect. The newspaper reported that “The

excellent performance of the onstage regimental music enhanced the impressive effect of

the parade of uniformed troops even further.”35

It was in Viennese operetta, however, that military bands and their marches and

signals became a fundamental musical element on par with popular dances like the waltz

and polka. The frequency of onstage bands in Viennese operetta reflects local theater

traditions as much as it does Offenbach’s precedent. The Viennese Volksstück mit Musik

often had relatively undramatic, static finales featuring social rituals like devotions,

ceremonies, or parades.36 As extensions of this tradition, onstage military bands in

Viennese operettas seldom provide functional music for troops. They are more

characteristically represented in their capacity as purveyors of entertainment music for

large folk celebrations and choral scenes. Among Strauss’s early operettas, Karneval in

Rom (1875) has no fewer than five onstage marches accompanying the many outdoor

scenes at the carnival.37 More typical is his operetta Der lustige Krieg (1881). In the act 1

finale, a military band provides music for an impromptu marriage ceremony conducted

in the absence of proper church instruments. The band reappears in the act 2 finale, just

after an army storms the enemy’s military camp. But instead of battle music, the band’s

35 Iglauer Sonntags-Blatt, 7 March 1869. The operetta came to Iglau in 1869, just two years after

its première in Paris and first performance in Vienna. Together with La belle Hélène, also by Offenbach, it
was the most frequently staged musical work at the theater in 1869–75. Among the traits that made it
such a success was the particular appeal of its plot to a city that had for a century been home to a
garrison. (A foot soldier is suddenly elevated to the rank of general and leads his troops to a bloodless
victory.) Another ingredient was the lavish production, whose considerable cost was surpassed only by
the theater’s even more considerable profits. The staging in 1874, for example, cost between 600 and 800
gulden.
36 Mathias Spohr, “Inwieweit haben Offenbachs Operetten die Wiener Operette aus der Taufe

gehoben?” in Offenbach und die Schauplätze seines Musiktheaters, ed. Rainer Franke Thurnauer (Laaber:
Laaber Verlag, 1999), 58.
37 See nos. 1, 4, 12a, 15a, and 16.

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main purpose is to provide the accompaniment for an extended victory dance pairing the

troops with their vanquished, female enemy. The act comes to a rousing, merry close.38

Marches, signals, and other influences from military music also pervaded

Viennese operetta more generally. Suppé’s Boccaccio (1879), which stands alongside Die

Fledermaus and Der Bettelstudent at the pinnacle of Golden Era operettas, includes more

measures in march idiom than any other dance, and this despite a setting in

seventeenth-century Venice and a plot turning on the amorous intrigues of the famous

writer of the Italian Renaissance. One of the operetta’s most famous numbers was its

eponymous march. This was also the case with Suppé’s previous evening-long success,

Fatinitza (1876). Its march sold over 350,000 copies of sheet music in just one and a half

years and was broadly disseminated by military bands and as a Gassenhauer with various

regional texts. Not surprisingly, Eduard Strauss ended each Quadrille of a Suppé

operetta with a march.39

Operetta acted as a kind of filter of popular musical culture, drawing on those

fashions and trends most readily adaptable to the situations of the comic stage. The

frequency of marches and military band elements in Viennese operetta can be seen as a

measure of the idiom’s currency in local traditions of popular music. Suppé himself had

little direct contact with the military band culture of Vienna, a fact that sets him apart

from a great many other operetta composers. Nonetheless, he achieved a reputation as

the “Regiments-Kapellmeister der Wiener Operette” (Regimental Band Leader of

38 What specific instruments were used for onstage ensembles varied according to the means and

availability of instruments for each production. In other instances, like the onstage band scene in the act 1
finale of Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent, the ideal instrumentation is given in the score.
39 Hans-Dieter Roser, Franz von Suppé: Werk und Leben, Neue Musikportraits vol. 3 (Vienna:

Edition Steinbauer, 2007), 152–53, 174.

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Viennese Operetta), a distinction that underscores how fully military idioms had been

assimilated into entertainment music more generally.40

Examples such as these suggest ways that the operettas and operas at the

theater may have influenced Mahler’s emerging compositional instincts. Not only did he

hear actual military bands in the outdoors as a child, but he could also have experienced

how marches and the sounds of military were marshaled in other musical contexts.

Indeed, composers of operetta and opéra-comique were much more receptive to the

animated style of popular military marches than were symphonists, and they were also

prone to treat the military in a burlesquing manner. It may be that exposure to such

works—if not in Iglau, then as Mahler conducted them in Laibach and Kassel—helped

to shape his interest in high-spirited and occasionally parodic marches.

Marches in Military Music and Operetta

By mid-century, military marches were a repertoire cultivated mostly by

specialists comprising military band directors and composers of entertainment music.41

Typical for these marches are tempo, texture, and expressive character. The tempo is

that of the quick march (Geschwindmarsch), centering around 108–120 beats per

minute.42 The texture has three primary strata: (1) an accessible, diatonic melody, (2) a

clear bass line that alternates tonic and dominant or repeats the same tone, and (3) inner

40Anonymous, Wiener Zeitung, 27 January 1898; quoted in Roser, Franz von Suppé, 132. Many
operetta and entertainment music composers were either military band directors or the sons of directors:
Franz Lehár, Carl Michael Ziehrer, Karl Komzák, Béla Kéler, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, and Julius
Fucik. See Csáky, Ideologie der Operette, 267–68.
41 Monelle, Musical Topic, 130; Hofer, “Marsch,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, rev.
ed., 26 vols., ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1986), Sachteil 6:1669–70. Examples include
Wagner’s Huldigungs-Marsch (1868).
42 Erich Schwandt and Andrew Lamb, “March,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40080 (accessed February 17,

2010); and Hofer, “Marsch,” 6:1671.

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accompanying voices that could include off-beats, long tones, or a simplified version of

the melody. The expressive character is typically animated, lively, and spirited. The

tandem development of military marches with other popular marches did not appeal to

all. Already in 1853, Eduard Hanslick, criticized the reciprocal influence of the two

spheres:

The transition from the former solemn dignity to dance-like, jaunty agility in
our marches seems to have taken place almost without exception. . . . Indeed,
the bouncing dance character, which both Strausses and their numerous
imitators introduced into the marches, poses the danger that military music will
be crowded entirely out of the sphere of forceful seriousness. One should never
forget that it is warriors who are playing even the sprightliest march. When the
soldier goes to dance, he takes off his sword: at all times, however, the march
should remain armed music. The more ceremonial and dignified character of the
Prussian marches, and especially those of its cavalry, occur to me in this
connection.43

Animated, popular marches of this type were relatively uncommon in art music.

The marches cultivated in operas, symphonies, and other instrumental works tended

toward ceremonial, processional, or triumphant types.44 Notable exceptions, in which

marches directly imitate the popular military style, were far more numerous in the first

half of the nineteenth century. The relationship of these marches to military marches is

in virtually all cases made explicit in the work’s title, as in Schubert’s Marches militaires

(D. 733). Likewise, the imitation of military marches in stage works almost always

43 Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 2:54: “Der Uebergang von der ehemaligen

gravitätischen Würde zu tanzartiger kecker Beweglichkeit erscheint in unsern Märschen fast

ausnahmslos vollzogen. . . . In der Tat liegt in dem hüpfenden Tanzcharakter, welchen die beiden Strauß
und ihre zahlreichen Nachahmer in die Märsche gebracht haben, die Gefahr, daß diese militärische Musik
ganz aus der Sphäre kräftigen Ernstes herausgedrängt werde. Bei dem frischesten Marsch sollte man nie
vergessen, daß es Krieger sind, die sich ihn aufspielen. Wenn der Soldat zum Tanz geht, schnallt er den
Säbel ab: der Marsch soll unter allen Umständen bewaffnete Musik bleiben. In dieser einen Beziehung ist
mir der mehr feierliche und würdevolle Charakter der preußischen Märsche, namentlich in der Cavallerie,
aufgefallen.” More recently, Otto Schneidereit has remarked on the pronounced dance-like character of
Austrian military marches in Franz Lehár: Eine Biographie in Zitaten (Berlin: Pinguin-Verlag, 1984), 10.
See also Mazza, “Mit vereinter Schwäche,” 259–60.
44 Monelle,Musical Topic, 130; Schwandt and Lamb, “March.” See, for example, the numerous
funeral marches and other independent marches by Spontini, Meyerbeer, Saint-Saëns, Gounod,
Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Elgar, most of whom were writing for official state celebrations or
coronations.

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correlated with military topics or direct imitations of military bands, as in Auber’s Fra

Diavolo (1830) and Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (1840).45 In operettas like Boccaccio,

however, marches and military idioms were used not just for illustrating explicitly

military characters and plots, but also for non-military settings, too.

The Instruments of Military Bands and Operetta Orchestras

Because of the common ancestry of military and entertainment music, any claim

that Mahler stylistically alludes to military marches using melody, harmony, or rhythm

can be taken as evidence of a popular march type equally attributable to operetta. It is

possible, however, to make some distinction based on timbre.46 Austrian military bands

cultivated a sound distinct from that of a theater orchestra both in the instruments they

used and in characteristic ways of scoring. Table 4.3 summarizes the instruments

typical of military bands and operetta orchestras.

Table 4.3 (appendix F). Typical Instruments of Military Bands and

Operetta Orchestras

The core of the Austrian military band at the end of the nineteenth century comprised

the family of conical brass instruments, most of which were absent from the orchestra:

cornet, flügelhorn, bass flügelhorn, French horn, euphonium, and tuba. These

45 For Hugo von Hofmannsthal, these works exemplified the essence of operetta as a genre more

than the operettas of his own day; see Hofmannsthal’s letter to Richard Strauss, 26 July 1928; quoted in
Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort, “Operette,” in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich
Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), 10. Suppé’s reverence for these
composers suggests one pathway by which the music of opéras comiques from the 1830s and 1840s
influenced the Golden Age of Viennese operetta.
46A few qualifying remarks are necessary at the outset. Operettas were serially produced artistic
works in whose creation many participated. It is still possible to make reliable generalizations about the
orchestration of operetta by accepting two assumptions: that widely shared practical realities, like vocal
roles being filled by actors instead of trained operatic singers, imposed some limits on orchestration, and
that surviving scores reflect an attempt by the orchestrator to conform to these realities. Generalizations
about military marches likewise require some caveats. The instrumentation and style of military bands
varied nationally and, to a lesser extent, by region. The following discussion is restricted to the Austrian
military wind band, with which Mahler had the most contact.

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instruments bestowed on military ensembles a singular mellowness of brass timbre

extending from the treble to bass. Cylindrical brass instruments—trumpets, bass

trumpet, tenor and bass trombones—filled out the array of brass timbres. Many of those

instruments that the military band held in common with a theater orchestra were

pitched in different keys. In their most typical formation, military bands used five to six

trumpets in E-flat. Flutes and piccolos were pitched in D-flat, and the clarinet choir

contained instruments in three keys: E-flat, A, and B-flat. Some instruments, like the

oboes, were almost never heard in an Austrian military band.47

Just as characteristic as the palette of wind colors was the percussion of the

Austrian military band. In the late eighteenth century, many military bands used a trio

of percussion instruments: bass drum, cymbals, and triangle. The combination was a

stable signifier of janissary music for classical composers invoking the Turkish style.

Austrian military bands adhered to the practice well into the nineteenth century. By the

time that Andreas Leonhardt’s Zirkular-Verordung standardized the instruments for the

monarchy’s military bands in 1850, however, a different trio of percussion had been

established: snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals.48 Many indices suggest that the new

combination was a similarly stable convention of the Austrian military bands

throughout Mahler’s lifetime. There was little or no regional variation in percussion

among military bands throughout the monarchy.49 The augmented ensemble that the

Austrian military sent to the 1867 Parisian World Exposition was nearly double the

47 Hofer, Blasmusikforschung, 176.

48 Bernhard Habla, Besetzung und Instrumentation des Blasorchesters seit der Erfindung der Ventile für
Blechblasinstrumente bis zum zweiten Weltkrieg in Österreich und Deutschland, 2 vols. (Tutzing: Hans
Schneider, 1990), 1:27.
49 The variations in regional military band instrumentation dealt with in Habla’s Besetzung und
Instrumentation des Blasorchesters (see 1:37–45) include only one change to percussion: the additional use of
bell trees to accompany marching in the Italian provinces.

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size of a standard band (seventy-six instead of forty-six players) and included atypical

winds like six hunting horns and two clarifons.50 Despite the performance of orchestral

arrangements like the overture to Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, whose original version

includes timpani, the Austrian military took only two each of the standard percussion.51

Furthermore, Historische Märsche, Austria’s official collection of historical marches, has

only two that do not use the standard snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals.52

Other percussion instruments—the triangle, timpani, and tambourine among

them—were indeed used by military bands. As a rule, they did not appear in support of

functional music, which had more distinctive instrumentation and texture, but in

concert performances, where they typically provided special effects in works with exotic

or programmatic titles. Even in these cases, though, the priority of the signature trio as

the core of a military band is evident in the scores, which gave independent staves to

snare and bass drums only. As a matter of performance practice, cymbals were attached

to the bass drum and struck in unison by a single player. A written indication was

required if only one or the other was to be played. Similar indications were used to

notate the non-standard percussion, which did not appear on the front page of the score,

but were written ad hoc into the snare and bass drum parts.

The independent marches of Johann Strauss, Jr., provide one indication that

composers of entertainment music—and presumably their audiences, too—were

50 A clarifon was a metallic bass clarinet shaped as a bassoon and constructed by the Viennese
instrument maker Anton Nechwalsky (Gunther Joppig, “Eigenständige Wege im österreichischen
Blasinstrumentenbau im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Symposiumsbericht of the Internationales wissenschaftliches
Symposium “Der Marschkönig Josef Franz Wagner,” ed. Elisabeth Anzenberger-Ramminger and
Friedrich Anzenberger [Zeillern: Niederösterreichischer Blasmusikverband, 2007], 172).
51 Habla, Besetzung und Instrumentation des Blasorchesters, 1:35.
52J. N. Fuchs’s “Alt-Starhemberg-Marsch” uses triangle along with Turkish crescent,
glockenspiel, and the normal percussion; Wilhelm Asboth’s “Wallonen-Marsch” calls for triangle and
tambourine.

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sensitive to what may seem today like subtle conventions of instrumentation for

military marches.53 In contrast to his waltz scorings, Strauss tailored his marches to the

sound of the military wind band, limiting the percussion to snare drum, bass drum, and

cymbals except in marches with exotic titles.54 His waltzes, on the other hand, have the

same basic percussion section as his operettas: snare drum, bass drum with cymbals,

timpani, and triangle, often augmented by harp and exotic percussion instruments. In

contrast to the marches, this expanded percussion section was typical even in waltzes

that lacked a programmatic or exotic title. Moreover, Strauss used the E-flat clarinet in

virtually every march, yet in only a small minority of waltzes.55 Because marches and

waltzes were played alongside one another on the same concerts, these differences

cannot be attributed to practical considerations based on availability of instruments.

Rather, it was a deliberate attempt to approximate the sound of military bands. As a

result, each concert that included marches and waltzes was an opportunity to reinforce

these conventions of instrumentation among the public.

The percussion section of a typical operetta contained not just snare drum, bass

drum, and cymbals, but also timpani and triangle. Other instruments were also used,

often for diegetic sounds like the chiming of church bells. Unlike military bands,

however, operetta had no trademark configuration of percussion. In practice, virtually

all combinations of instruments were exploited. Operetta composers were sensitive to

53 Most of Strauss Jr.’s manuscripts were destroyed by his brother Eduard in 1907. The
following comments on orchestration are based on the Johann Strauß Gesamtausgabe, which relies on first
editions of parts where autograph scores do not exist. Even if these parts do not conform precisely to the
composer’s wishes, they are nonetheless reliable documents of orchestrational practices in entertainment
music during Mahler’s lifetime.
54 Examples include the Egyptian March op. 335 (glockenspiel, triangle, tambourine), Spanish

March op. 433 (timpani, castanets), and the Russian march op. 353 (timpani, tambourine).
55 When Strauss calls for E-flat trumpets in a waltz, this generally indicates that the piece

premièred on a concert in which a military band also took part.

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the percussion used in military marches, adopting snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals

in most direct representations of military bands. But much writing for percussion, like

the extensive use of triangle and timpani, would have been atypical for a military march.

Characteristics of Instrumentation in Military Marches and in Operetta

Military marches were also distinct from operetta marches in their

characteristically heavy scoring. Military wind bands had a greater potential for timbral

subtleties on account of the greater number of unique instruments at their disposal.

Discounting percussion, a typical Austrian military band of the 1890s had twenty-eight

wind parts divided among fourteen unique instruments; a typical Viennese operetta

orchestra had twenty-two parts distributed among just eleven instruments (see table

4.3). In practice, however, the repertoire of military band marches did not exploit the

ensemble’s inherent potential for timbral differentiation.56 Tutti ensembles were more a

rule than an exception, and the instrumentation within formal sections tended toward

homogeneity. In a march, the first shift in timbre would typically occur only at the

beginning of the second strain or, in a shorter work, at the trio. Although the trios of

military march were often lighter, the contrast to the “heavy” main section was achieved

more through dynamics than a thinning of the instrumentation. Military bands strove

for a sound that could project in the outdoors and be immediately recognizable through

its uniformity.57

56 This generalization cannot be extended to all pieces that military bands played. The full range
of timbral possibilities, from thinly scored passages to full ensemble, were exploited in the concert
repertoire of military bands, including potpourris, arrangements, and military character pieces
(militärische Tonbilde or Tongemälde).
57 Achim Hofer has suggested that this homogeneity of sound might reflect the fact that military

bands originally played many arrangements of orchestral music, and that their part-writing was modeled
on that for strings (Hofer, Blasmusikforschung, 177). Whatever the reason, deficiency on the part of the
composers themselves is certainly not the case. In fact, the stereotype of military band conductors at the

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 In contrast, operetta exploited the full range of possible combinations of

instruments and instrument groups. On balance, though, operetta tended toward lighter

textures, reserving tutti ensembles for climaxes in choral scenes. The transparency of

the thinner textures was only magnified by the modest size of a pit orchestra. Whereas

a full-sized military band in the 1890s consisted of forty-six winds and percussion, only

an extravagantly large operetta orchestra would have had so many players, most of

whom were playing string instruments.58 This tendency had practical justifications that

were not just financial. Vocal roles in operetta were sung by actors whose voices were

not trained to project over a massive orchestral apparatus in large opera halls. Thinner

textures and softer dynamics ensured that the actors and their nuanced declamation

could be readily heard.

The difference in sound between marches played by military bands and operetta

orchestras can be best assessed in operettas that call for onstage imitations of military

bands. Here the two profiles are as closely aligned as possible; what differences remain,

measure the unbridgeable gap between the two ensembles. Example 4.1 reproduces a

section from the end of the first act of Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent, as a Stadtkapelle

marches onstage for a short command performance.59

Example 4.1 (appendix F). Carl Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent, act 1 finale

time was that they possessed great facility in orchestration. Strauss received help from military band
conductors with orchestrations, some of which were praised by no less a critic than Hanslick.
58Habla, Besetzung und Instrumentation des Blasorchesters, 1:43; Roser, Franz von Suppé, 29, 93. In
1913, the pit orchestra at the Theater an der Wien, which mounted the most lavish operetta productions
in Vienna, comprised around forty-three players (Stefan Frey, “Was sagt ihr zu diesem Erfolg”: Franz Lehár
und die Unterhaltungsmusik im 20. Jahrhundert [ Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1999], 114).
59 The polka coloring of the march stems from the operetta’s setting in Krakow. The fact that

Millöcker’s band is not a military band does not vitiate the comparison. Stadtkapellen and other civilian
wind bands were directly modeled on military bands. Andreas Masel summarizes the interpenetration of
Bavarian military and civilian wind bands in instrumentation, repertoire, personnel, audience, venue, and
instructional institutions (Masel, “Wechselwirkungen,” 23–39). The primary difference consisted in the
institutional affiliation and greater resources available to military bands. The situation was comparable in
neighboring Austria.

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Many features of the march betray Millöcker’s attempt to imitate both the sight and

sound of a military band. Table 4.4 summarizes the orchestration, which apes the

texture, heavy doublings, and dynamics of a military march.

Table 4.4. Orchestration of Military Wind Band and its Direct Imitation in
Operetta

In addition, Millöcker opted for standard military percussion in their most stereotypical

configuration: bass drum and cymbals reinforcing the beats, the snare drum the off-

beats. The triangle and timpani, available in the pit, remain silent. No other passage of

the operetta approximates military bands so closely.

The essential characteristics of a military band’s sound are also thematized in the

text that accompanies the band’s onstage performance. In this case, as so often in

operetta, the libretto provides a running commentary on what makes the scene so

effective:

Chorus Chorus
Bei solchem Feste At such a festival,
thun sie das Beste you can’t do any better
mit Trommel und Trompetenschall, than trumpets and drums—
das ist willkommen überall! they are always welcome!
Nicht Dilettanten, nein Musikanten These aren’t dilettantes, they’re musicians
sind sie und geben sich viel Müh’! who are doing their best!

Bogumil Bogumil
Ich schlag’ in die grosse Trommel fest hinein I hit the bass drum hard,
Sonst würde aus Rand und Band gleich Alles sein! otherwise everything would fall apart!
Effectvoll ist dies Instrument This instrument is effective
und macht Scandal potz Himmel saperment! and can raise a ruckus, oh my!

Chorus Chorus
Nur immer zu und fest hinein Strike hard, again and again,
das muss sein. that’s the only way.
Auch in weiter Fern Even from the distance,
muss man’s deutlich hör’n! one must be able to hear it!
Auf’s Piane sind sie nicht einstudirt They have not learned to play piano,
es wird nur forte musizirt. forte is all they know.

Each of the musical features cited corresponds to essential elements in the ensemble’s

acoustical profile: prominent trumpets, regular hits of the bass drum, heavy

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orchestration, and fullness of dynamics. Such clichéd representations reinforced in the

popular imagination the musical characteristics of military bands.

Vienna’s “March King” Josef Franz Wagner prepared a potpourri for military

band based on melodies from Millöcker’s operetta. Among the tunes is the march from

the onstage Stadtkapelle.60 The similarities that the arrangement bears with the original

confirm Millöcker’s attempt to approximate the sound of an actual military band.

Example 4.2 (appendix F). J. F. Wagner’s arrangement of stage music from

Millöcker’s Bettelstudent

Wagner arranged the Stadtkapelle’s tune in the style and scoring quintessential for

military marches. As is apparent in Table 4.4, this rendered Millöcker’s already thick

scoring even heavier, and moved the center of balance more fully to the brass timbres,

many of which were unavailable to Millöcker.

The fidelity of Millöcker’s imitation is all the more apparent in context of

another march from the same operetta. Earlier in act 1, the opening of the spring fair is

celebrated by a romping chorus in compound meter. An extended trumpet call from the

pit orchestra introduces a brief divertissement of townspeople who assemble to the

strains of an instrumental march indistinguishable from a military march in melody,

harmony, and even form.61

Example 4.3 (appendix F). Carl Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent, act 1, spring
fair march

The scoring, however, does not reach the same degree of fidelity as in the onstage

imitation later in the Stadtkapelle episode. Here Millöcker makes copious use of strings,

timpani, and triangle. Hardly four measures go by in the sixty-bar march without a shift

60 Potpourri aus der Operette Bettelstudent von Ch. Millöcker für Militärmusik von J. F. Wagner

Kapellmeister. Manuscript Score. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus.Hs.20730.

61 Form: Introduction (8), March (16), Trio (16), and March repeat (16), with the characteristic

lyrical countermelody in the trio.

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in texture. In the main march strain, for example, the thick orchestration, regular hits of

the bass drum and cymbals, and fortissimo so reminiscent of military bands alternate

with lighter textures, pizzicatos in the strings, piano dynamics, and the triangle. This

playful alternation of textures clearly distances the march from a military band on

parade while emphasizing the lighthearted, cheery disposition befitting its occasion.

Whereas the Stadtkapelle in the act 1 finale is a direct imitation, the military band is

invoked as a topic in the spring fair scene.

The softer passages of the spring fair march point to a kind of march as

pervasive in operetta as it is atypical for military marches: the light march.62 The light

march is distinguished from the military march primarily in orchestration, dynamics,

and expressive character. Its hallmarks include a light orchestration led by woodwinds

or strings. The most common percussion accompaniment is the least intrusive—

triangle—although one also finds quiet snare drum taps or no percussion at all. The

dynamics are soft and the expression delicate. Such characteristics do not appear in

military marches, for the lightness in sound and expression would have been lost in

transcription.

A light march nearly contemporaneous with Mahler’s Third Symphony comes

from Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Die Landstreicher (1899). Ziehrer was one of Austria’s most

famous military band conductors and operetta composers. Mahler repeatedly tried in

vain to commission him to write a ballet for the Court Opera.63 The march duet of the

62 Operetta also contains ceremonial and processional marches, but these will be excluded from
the present discussion because they are not distinctive to operetta as a genre, and because Mahler's Third
Symphony does not contain such marches.
63 In a letter to Ernest Pröll in 1903, Ziehrer wrote that “I have no desire to write a ballet

because such a thing just doesn’t sell. Mahler often pesters me to compose a ballet” (quoted in Max
Schönherr, Carl Michael Ziehrer: Sein Werk, Sein Leben, Seine Zeit; Dokumentation, Analysen und Kommentare
[Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1974], 472: “Ein Ballett zu schreiben, habe ich keine Lust, da ein
solches Ding nichts einträgt. Mahler sekirt mich oft, ein Ballett zu componieren”). Mahler also failed to

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first act of Die Landstreicher is a humorous number in which the two military officers,

pants roles played by two sopranos, discuss the sexual attraction that naturally accrues

with the donning of a military uniform.

Example 4.4 (appendix F). Carl Michael Ziehrer, Die Landstreicher, act 1,
no. 8, march duet

The introduction consists of one complete strain of the march’s refrain, “The magic of

the uniform” (Der Zauber der Montur), one of the operetta’s hit songs. Here the march

directly imitates the sound of a military band. The military tone, however, rapidly

evaporates in the introduction’s final two measures. With the entrance of the voices, the

dynamics pull back to the quietest reaches, from p to ppp. The orchestration is mildly

reduced, and the woodwinds and first violins assume the primary role in the texture. In

addition to pp flares in the snare drum, the triangle enters a few bars later. Two

archetypal operetta marches—a direct imitation of military marches and a light

march—thus stand side by side.

The mixture of military and sensual topics in “Der Zauber der Montur” points to

another salient feature of light marches. As transformations of military marches, they

were ideally suited to cheerful and buoyant expression and especially to topics like love

and wit, which often involve metaphors of conquest and battle.64 War and love are

thoroughly entwined in such operettas as Suppé’s Fatinitza and Strauss’s Der lustige

Krieg, both of which have military settings, women or cross-dressing soldiers, and light

marches in amorous contexts.65 Other operettas virtually lacking in martial topics used

commission a ballet from Franz Lehár, Vienna’s other leading military band conductor and operetta
composer (La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:476).
Another such topic was humor: the march septet (no. 19) of Suppé’s Boccaccio begins as a light
64

march and likens the writer’s wit to a sword.

65In Der lustige Krieg (act 2, no. 8), for example, a light march accompanies the princess
Artemisia as she reviews and gives the following instructions to her troops, who are all female:

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light marches, too. The climax of the final act of Lecocq’s La Fille de Madame Angot

constitutes the “Couplets de la dispute.” First heard in the operetta’s overture, the

couplets appear here in a dramatic situation far removed from the battlefield.66 In the

first strophe, Clairette accuses the actress Mademoiselle Lange of stealing her lover.

Lange retorts in the second strophe that Clairette is not the prim and innocent girl that

everyone takes her to be.

Example 4.5 (appendix F). Charles Lecocq, La Fille de Madame Angot,

“Couplets de la dispute”

The music is as far from military topics as the dramatic situation. The only brass are

two horns on the off-beats. Otherwise, the transparent texture consists entirely of piano

strings with accents in the triangle.

Another light march occurs in the march septet (no. 19) in act 3 of Suppé’s

Boccaccio.

Example 4.6 (appendix F). Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, no. 20, act 3 finale

Distinguishing it from a military march is the transparent orchestration, delicate

expression, and absence of heavy brass and military percussion. The military topic is a

clear reaction to the underlying metaphor, that Boccaccio’s wit is as sharp as a sword.

Stylizations of Military and Light Marches in Mahler’s Oeuvre

Insofar as Mahler’s marches bear similarities to military or light marches, it is

almost always a matter of stylization. Hardly a measure would seem plausible in actual

“Attention, right dress / Chins up! Eyes left! Chests out!” (Habt Acht, richt’ Euch / Kopf in die Höh’!
Augen links! Brust heraus!). See ch. 5 for an amorous light march from Suppé’s Fatinitza.
66 The only military element of the operetta comes in the finale of the second act. Soldiers

surround a secret political meeting. Their arrival is first indicated by off-stage trumpet fanfares. When
they storm the hall, the dissidents act as if they were preparing for a ball. The short Chorus of the
Hussars is in triple meter and, formally speaking, constitutes the introduction to the final waltz. Lecocq’s
operetta is typical of its genre in that soldiers and the military are vehicles for cheerfulness or comedy.

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military music or operetta. Rather than using “original dress” or “authentic” scoring,67

Mahler alludes to these genres by drawing on a few characteristic elements of the

original. The choice of elements depends on the genre. Military marches were most

clearly delineated by characteristic instruments and ways of scoring. These could even

been recognized apart from a march idiom. Timbral properties were less of a trademark

for operetta. Light marches are identifiable by a combination of orchestration, dynamics,

and popular tone.

Mahler based his allusions to military bands on their distinctive timbral

properties. The clearest instances occur in those passages that call for stock military

band instruments not commonly used in concert orchestras. Das klagende Lied (1878–80)

calls for an off-stage wedding band in the third movement. Like most civilian wind

bands, Mahler’s offstage ensemble is based on the sound of a military band, requiring

flutes in D-flat, clarinets in E-flat, flügelhorns, and cornets.68 Out of concern that that

these instruments might not be available for all performances, Mahler struck a

compromise when he revised the work two decades later. He rescored the passage for

standard orchestral winds, but requested wind-band instruments if available.69 Mahler

had already made a similar compromise in the Third Symphony just a few years earlier.

67See Henry-Louis de La Grange, “Music about Music in Mahler: Reminiscences, Allusions, or

Quotations?” in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen Hefling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 126;
and Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler Volume II: The Wunderhorn Years, rev. Paul Banks and David
Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 326.
68 The score refers more generally to a Blasorchester, and the dramatic context—a wedding—also

suggests a civilian ensemble. Because civilian wind bands were so closely related to military bands in
German-speaking lands, however, the comparison in scoring can be extended to military bands. See
Masel, “Wechselwirkungen,” 23–39.
69 Rudolf Stephan, Foreword to Das klagende Lied, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12 (Vienna:

Universal Edition, 1978). In a revision about five years earlier, Mahler had discarded the offstage music
altogether. The reorchestration coincided with the reinstatement of the material in 1898 (Edward R.
Reilly, “Das klagende Lied Reconsidered,” in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen Hefling [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997], 42–46). Mahler mentioned the relationship of availability and practicality of the
flügelhorn in a conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Killian, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen, 58).

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He wrote above the trumpet signals at m. 489 of movement one: “On a small cornet

when possible” (Womöglich auf kleinem Piston).70 Such examples show that Mahler was

certainly aware of the instrumentarium of military bands and occasionally drew on it in

his own works.

Using military band instruments is not the same as emulating a military march.

The only example in Mahler’s oeuvre that combines military band instruments with a

stylization of a march occurs in the offstage band in the “Hochzeitsstück” from Das

klagende Lied (mm. 79ff.). Nevertheless, the passage deviates in important ways from

wind-band scoring. The oboe almost never appeared in wind bands, and two of the most

characteristic instruments—snare and bass drums—are missing altogether. The active

horn lines and manically alternating eighths in the timpani would never have appeared

in the wind band repertoire, not to mention the sinister, chromatically inflected

melodies and extended triadic harmonies. The march music it plays is heavily stylized,

and these deviations from authenticity increase the effectiveness of the passage. The

realistic details throw into relief the grotesque distortions. Because of their reliance on

timbral properties, allusions to wind bands could remain audible even when little else in

the musical texture resembled wind band music.

After Das klagende Lied, Mahler never again called for more than one specialized

military band instrument at a time. When he emulated the sound of military bands and

their marches, it was mostly with the instruments of a traditional orchestra. The

70 In a revision notated into the first printed edition, Mahler later deleted the direction and gave
the signal to a muted trumpet. Whereas the cornet was a fixture of French orchestras, it was rarely heard
in German-speaking lands apart from military bands. A few other movements call for military brass
instruments but without suggesting replacements in case they were unavailable. The autograph score and
first edition of the Third Symphony call for a flügelhorn, which Mahler told Natalie Bauer-Lechner had
been a favorite instrument since he first heard it in the military bands of his youth (Killian, ed., Gustav
Mahler in den Erinnerungen, 58; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 61). The Seventh Symphony contains a
prominent solo for tenor horn and calls for a cornet in the last movement.

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offstage music from the fifth movement of the Second Symphony, for example, clearly

evokes a military band despite its significant deviations from an authentic

representation.

Example 4.7 (appendix F). Mahler, Symphony no. 2, mvt. 5

Each characteristic element that Mahler adopts is among those stereotypes of military

bands articulated by the chorus to the act 1 finale of Millöcker’s Bettelstudent chorus.

The offstage ensemble consists solely of trumpets and drums. The simultaneous use of

trumpets in different keys (F and C) and Mahler’s request for multiple players on a part

together yield an approximation of the trumpet-heavy core of a military band. The

illusion of a regular duple meter, and the foursquare rhythms of the bass drum and

attached cymbals, convey the military sphere even if they are augmented by the triangle

as opposed to the more typical snare drum. The lack of dynamic nuance and the signal-

like character of the trumpet line reinforce the martial tone, though military bands

would not have played signals with such chromatic inflections and tritone leaps (m.

350). Finally, the distance effect of the offstage band, “Placed in the farthest distance” (In

weitester Ferne aufgestellt), supports the impression of military ensembles, which

routinely played outdoors.71

Since the light march is a concept introduced in this dissertation to allow for

some differentiation of the popular marches in Mahler’s musical environment, it is

appropriate to examine this concept more closely before turning to the Third Symphony

in Chapter 5. Thumbnail sketches of a few light marches can provide corroborating

71 Mahler’s note to the conductor: “[The off-stage band] must be barely audible, so that the

singing character of the cellos and bassoons is in no way compromised. Roughly speaking, the author
imagines here snatches of barely perceptible music carried by the wind from afar” (“Muss so schwach
erklingen, dass es den Charakter der Gesangstelle Celli und Fag. in keinerlei Weise tangiert. Der Autor
denkt sich hier, ungefähr, vom Wind vereinzelnd herüber getragene Klänge einer kaum vernehmbaren
Musik.”)

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evidence of its integrity as a compositional type and give a sense of the expressive

purposes to which Mahler put it. The first two instances reside in texted works—“Der

Spielmann” from Das klagende Lied and the Wunderhorn song “Revelge”—thus enabling

more specific interpretations of expressive function than would be possible in purely

instrumental contexts. The remaining examples come from the two of Mahler’s works

most frequently brought into connection with operetta in recent secondary literature:

the Seventh and the Ninth Symphonies. Examining their light marches provides an

opportunity to scrutinize these claims at the same time that it offers comparative

examples of light marches in untexted symphonic movements.

Der Spielmann

Das klagende Lied tells the tale of a knight who commits fratricide in order to win

the hand of a proud queen.72 In the movement “Der Spielmann,” a minstrel stumbles

across the slain knight’s bone and carves from it a flute whose song reveals the evil

brother’s misdeed. The movement begins with a four-measure motive associated with

the minstrel, and its first major transformation, toward the end of the extended

orchestral introduction, is Mahler’s earliest extant light march.

Example 4.8 (appendix F). Mahler, Das klagende Lied, “Der Spielmann,”
mm. 3–6, 92–100

Although the march appears before any text, the movement’s title and the motive’s

strongly descriptive features make its referential content clear. Its clipped notes and

sturdy, agogic accentuation convey the minstrel’s wandering. The lyrical

transformation of the motive captures the other aspect integral to his profession: music-

72 In the work’s original version, these events take place in the first movement, “Waldmärchen,”
which Mahler jettisoned at some point between 1891 and 1893 (Reilly, “Das klagende Lied Revisited,” 42).
In the two-movement version, the cantata begins directly with “Der Spielmann.”

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making.73 It matches the light march type, marked by a popular march idiom, quiet

dynamics, sparse orchestration, and delicate accents from the triangle.

Whereas the march depicts a minstrel in the indeterminate past of fairy tales, its

constituent musical features draw on elements of contemporary Viennese entertainment

music. This relationship was cited by many critics who reviewed the work’s première in

Vienna on 17 February 1901. Theodor Helm claimed that the melody would make the

perfect Strauss waltz tune were it rendered in triple meter, and the reviewer for the

Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, the city’s most widely circulated newspaper, remarked that

“a march melody, the Leitmotiv of the minstrel, leaves no doubt that he was born in

Vienna.”74 Given the light orchestral idiom in which the minstrel’s march appears, one

should expect some comparisons to operetta or other orchestral popular music. That is

precisely what Josef Scheu offered in his review:

Among the details worth mentioning . . . is the march used to characterize the
minstrel. Its schmaltziness [Schmalzern] or gleeful shouts [Juchzern], which
seem so Viennese, remind us of the Schrammel brothers, of Eduard Strauss and
[Carl Michael] Ziehrer – and of Mahler’s D-major Symphony.75

Johann and Josef Schrammel, Eduard Strauss, and Carl Michael Ziehrer were among

Vienna’s most famous popular musicians in the years spanning the genesis, revision, and

73 This association is later confirmed by the texts that the motive accompanies, including: “Ein

Spielmann zog einst des Weges daher” (Once a minstrel came that way) and “Der Spielmann ziehet in die
Weite / lässt’s überall erklingen” (The minstrel wanders out into the world / playing his song
everywhere). All translations of the Das klagende Lied are Stanley Appelbaum’s from the Dover edition.
74h—m [Theodor Helm], “Außerordentliches Konzert der Wiener Singakademie [review of Das
klagende Lied],” Deutsche Zeitung, 19 February 1901; rbt, “Gustav Mahler’s ‘Klagendes Lied,’” Illustrirtes
Wiener Extrablatt, 19 February 1901, 9: “Im Orchester erklingt nämlich mehrere Male eine
Marschmelodie als Leitmotiv des ‘Spielmannes’, welche über des Letzteren Geburtsstätte Wien nicht im
Zweifel läßt.”
75 Scheu’s reference to the First Symphony, performed in Vienna just three months earlier, is

certainly to the trio of the Scherzo, which also contains a sweet, sentimental melody led by the violins and
animated by energetic, ascending leaps. Josef Scheu, “Konzerte [review of Das klagende Lied]”
Arbeiterzeitung, 24 February 1901: “Von Einzelheiten wären . . . der zur Charakterisierung des Spielmanns
dienende Marsch zu erwähnen, der uns mit seinen an die Brüder Schrammel, an Eduard Strauß und
Ziehrer wie an — Mahlers D-dur-Symphonie erinnernden Schmalzern oder Juchzern recht wienerisch
anheimelte.”

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première of Das klagende Lied. In 1901, Eduard Strauss was the only one of the three

Strauss brothers still living. Until he dissolved the Strausskapelle a few days before the

first performance of Mahler’s cantata, he had been director of the ensemble for thirty

years. Ziehrer was at the height of his fame as an operetta composer, buoyed still by Die

Landstreicher. The Schrammel brothers, both of whom had passed away in the mid

1890s, epitomized the tradition of Viennese pseudo-folk chamber music extending back

to the Biedermeier.

Sheu’s reference to the Schrammel brothers hints at the potent role that scoring

could play in steering associations to popular genres for Mahler’s contemporaries. The

ensemble that they founded in 1878—the year that Mahler began working on the text

for Das klagende Lied—consisted of two violins and bass guitar.76 The orchestration of

the second statement of the minstrel’s march alludes to this ensemble (mm. 183–91). In

lieu of the entire violin section, Mahler calls for three soloists, whose “Viennese” melody

rides atop staccato bassoons and pizzicato basses, reminiscent of the plucking

accompaniment of a guitar. The melody furthermore begins with a Schnalzer, a gesture

typical of Viennese pseudo-folk music traditions like Schrammelmusik: pick-ups into a

downbeat clipped short to create a hiccup before the subsequent tone on the next beat

(mm. 183–84). Equally important is what Scheu and other reviewers did not invoke to

describe the minstrel’s march: military bands. This omission does not stem merely from

the lack of martial topics in the cantata’s dramatic events. The reviewers, after all,

described the popular tone in terms of the musical environment in which they lived.

That none of these references was to military bands is most efficiently explained by the

76 The ensemble later added a clarinet in G. Many equivalent ensembles of the time also

contained an accordion. See Ernst Weber, “Schrammelmusik,” Österreichisches Musiklexikon, 4:2137–38.

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fact that the minstrel’s light march simply did not sound like the marches played by

military bands.

The minstrel’s march in Das klagende Lied sheds light on Mahler’s attitude

towards light marches and their expressive capacity. The minstrel is the dramatic

vehicle by which the brother’s death is avenged and the queen’s pride punished. His

light march emulates popular music without being the object of irony or parody. Its

innocent simplicity serves as the basis of normalcy against which the bizarre events of

the cantata unfold. This function can be clearly seen in both of the statements of the

light march after the orchestral introduction. In the imitation of Schrammelmusik, no

overtly musical cues indicate that the expressive effect should be anything other than

light and carefree. It is only in the incongruity between the music and text that the

grotesque effect takes hold: “And he saw a little bone gleam” (Da sah er ein Knöchlein

blitzen). The light march returns later in the movement intensified by the addition of

lyrical counterpoint in the horns (mm. 400–421). Its placement could not make its

aesthetic function any clearer. An interlude between the bone-flute’s chilling song and

the minstrel’s dramatic resolution to confront the fratricidal brother and his bride-

queen, the light march is a haunting reminder of simpler and more innocent times. It is

only by virtue of Mahler’s sympathetic treatment of the light marches, utterly devoid of

irony or grotesquery, that these darker sentiments can be so powerfully expressed.

Revelge

Mahler also turned to light marches in his penultimate Wunderhorn song,

“Revelge” (1899). The lied incorporates more stereotypes of military music than are

found in his other orchestral soldier songs. It makes widespread use of thickly doubled

woodwinds and snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals, with the latter two attached and

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played by a single player. Such clear allusions befit the song’s text, which deals with

marching soldiers and military music. It is the operetta-like light marches, however,

that effect the most harrowing moments, as when a fleeing soldier declines to help his

fallen comrade.

Example 4.9 (appendix F). Mahler, “Revelge”

Though the situation could hardly be more violent or the circumstances more dire, the

strophe is set to a light march fit for an operetta. The key shifts to the major mode for

the first time. The texture is radically reduced and the dynamic falls to piano and

pianissimo. The vocal line is marked Mit Ausdruck, while the accompanying first violins

are instructed to play singend. The melody is periodic, frequently enriched by parallel

thirds, and even closes with an authentic cadence. As David Josef Bach wrote, most

likely of this passage: it is “almost a Gassenhauer, but one that allows the dead to enjoy

themselves.”77 The immense disparity between the text and musical setting exposes the

disingenuousness of the fleeing soldier. As if to stress the point, a bass line alternating

tonic and dominant enters just at the words “May God help you.”78

Heightening the mordant sarcasm is the way that the passage is introduced.

Nowhere in the song is the evocation of a military band more pronounced than here

(mm. 30–31). This feature actually complements the operetta-like quality of the

subsequent measures, for many light marches begin with such imitations; heavy

orchestration, loud dynamics, and military percussion grab the listener’s attention and
77 Bach, Arbeiterzeitung, 5 February 1905. The full sentence reads: “In einem der Soldatenlieder

kehrt ein Thema, wie es ähnlich die Oboe im ersten Satz seiner dritten Symphonie bringt immer wieder:
beinahe ein Gassenhauer aber einer, bei dem die Toten sich vergnügen.” Bach must have had “Revelge” in
mind, because the only other soldier song on the concert, “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm,” does not
portray the dead.
78 Strophe 4 (mm. 57–72) is a slightly modified repetition of the previous strophe. Once again
there is an expressive gap between the text (the fallen soldier realizes his comrades are running past him
as if he were dead) and the blitheness of the light march, which is endowed with a popular bass
throughout the entire strophe.

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then dissipate into a light march for the entrance of the voice. Ziehrer’s march duet from

Die Landstreicher is one instance from a well-known Viennese operetta written in the

same year as “Revelge” (see ex. 4.4). Another is the Nechledil-March from Lehár’s Wiener

Frauen (1902), which begins with a statement of the main theme in the heavy style of a

military band. At the end of the introduction, a brass fanfare and bombastic cadential

phrase prepare the entrance of the voice and a light march.

Example 4.10 (appendix F). Lehár, Wiener Frauen, no. 13, Nechledil-
Marsch

The song also contains recurring nonsense syllables akin to the “Trallali” of Mahler’s

cantilena-like refrain. Although this piece could not have served as a model for Mahler,

it exemplifies the topicality of the gesture in operettas contemporary with the

composition and early performances of the song.79

Mahler also contorted light marches to fit a grotesque setting. As the fallen

soldier in “Revelge” surveys the carnage of the battlefield, the music returns to the most

potent timbral signifiers of military bands: snare drum, bass drum with cymbals, and

prominent trumpets and woodwinds (mm. 72f.). A fierce orchestral convulsion ushers in

a supernatural turn of events, as the soldier rouses his fellow casualties from the dead

with the beating of his drum. Mahler sets the gruesome scene with a thin texture that

retains its connection to military music only in the repeated taps of the snare drum,

imitated by the first violins, and the ghostly echo of the woodwind trills. Then, with the

entrance of the “Trallali” refrain, the overt references to military bands cease. The

musical idiom suddenly shifts to that of a light march. The texture thins to pianissimo

strings and soft woodwinds draping the vocal line in parallel thirds. This time, however,

79 Another, nearly contemporaneous example of a light march introduced by an imitation of a

military band is “Die beiden Kameraden” from Lehár’s Der Rastelbinder (1902).

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the light march is also imbued with grotesque musical touches: the voice continues Sehr

laut in utter disregard of the shift in demeanor of the accompanying voices, and the

melody is compressed at the repeated word Feind into a chromatic sneer reinforced by

the oboes. This grotesque turn of the light march leads back to the battlefield and the

timbral allusions to the military music (mm. 106f.). The snare drum returns, winds

again dominate the texture, and the strings resume their percussive imitations.

“Revelge” is Mahler’s only soldier song with light-march passages, and his use of

the topic here suggests that he did not view it as a means to represent soldiers or

military bands. In fact, the expressive function of light marches depends on their very

opposition to the military and on their capacity to transport the listener mentally away

from the battlefield. Such an effect does not ultimately depend on light marches

emanating from operetta to the exclusion of other popular genres. But sensing in them

the spirit of the operettas that populated Mahler’s musical environment is compelling. It

is in operetta, after all, that marches are always merry, battles bloodless, and endings

happy. Strauss Jr.’s military parody Der lustige Krieg, a work Mahler conducted eleven

times, is paradigmatic in this regard. Genoa and Massa declare war over a ballerina

booked to perform simultaneously in both principalities. Even though the officers of the

Massa army are replaced by a group of war-hungry women, neither side is willing to

escalate the hostilities; they prefer the song and drink at their camps. The outcome of

the merry war is not bloodshed, but the marriage of the female commander of the Massa

army with the leader of the Genoese troops.80 Heard in this context, the light marches

of “Revelge” are all the more monstrous, for a greater antithesis to its grim reality could

hardly be imagined.

80 The military is often a vehicle for eroticism in operetta, with soldiers and even entire armies

made up of pants roles. See also Suppé’s Fatinitza and Richard Genée’s Der Seekadett (1876).

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Symphony no. 7, movement II

Mahler’s two symphonies most often connected to operetta are the Seventh and

Ninth. In both cases, the supposed links are melodic quotations of Franz Lehár’s Die

lustige Witwe. The claims regarding the Seventh are confused and contradictory. Taking

into account likely misstatements and misprints, it seems that two motives from

Mahler’s Rondo-Finale have been linked to two melodies from Lehár’s operetta—the

first to the waltz duet “Lippen schweigen, ’s flüstern Geigen,”81 and the second is to the

march septet’s trio “Ja, das Studium der Weiber ist schwer.”82

Example 4.11 (appendix F). Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár I

Example 4.12 (appendix F). Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár
II

As Henry-Louis de La Grange has pointed out, Mahler could not have borrowed from

Lehár’s operetta, which premièred in December 1905, months after Mahler completed

his symphony. If connections between the two works do exist, then they must be shared

stylistic features. Adopting this stance immediately exposes the vacuity of both alleged

allusions. No parameter of Lehár’s waltz coincides with Mahler’s score except for the

unremarkable melodic sequence of four ascending notes repeated.83 And the

“astonishing” connection to the march septet likewise fails to pass muster.84 Lehár’s

melody is first introduced as a light march. Its quiet dynamics, spare orchestration, and

81La Grange briefly summarizes these claims, at times confusing and ill-supported, regarding
the Rondo-Finale and Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (Gustav Mahler, 3:878). Hans Ferdinand Redlich, for
example, writes that Mahler’s melody “comes dangerously close” to Lehár’s waltz (Bruckner and Mahler,
The Master Musicians [London: Dent, 1955], 204).
82 La Grange lists the alleged allusion in the appendix of his article “Music about Music in

Mahler,” 166. Instead of the same horn motive as in Example 4.17 above, however, he reproduces the
violin melody from mm. 31–33. The connection of this motive to Lehár’s trio is even more tenuous and
likely results from a printing error.
83 The same four-note sequence begins the famous Vilja Song at the beginning of act 2.
84 Sponheuer reproduces mm. 23–27 but misstates that it bears an “astonishing” similarity to

Lehár’s waltz (Logik des Zerfalls, 368). He must have meant the march septet.

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playful character are the inverse of the stately Meistersinger-tone of Mahler’s phrase.

Even the climax of Lehár’s trio, which projects the melody fortissimo in full orchestra, is

hardly more suitable for comparison on account of its effervescence and close imitation

of a military march. The melodic similarities allegedly connecting Mahler’s Seventh

Symphony to Die lustige Witwe are unconvincing not just chronologically but also on the

musical merits.

Indeed, single-minded scrutiny of melody has left by the wayside other passages

in Mahler’s Seventh Symphony more strongly reminiscent of operetta. Among the most

salient of these are the light marches in the first Nachtmusik (mvt. 2). Given the strong

association of the light march type with entertainment music, it comes as no surprise

that the early press attacked this movement more than any other for supposedly failing

to attain the aesthetic standards of a symphony. Julius Korngold remarked that,

Of the two other middle movements [second and third], we prefer the Scherzo
to such an extent that we could do without the first Nachtmusik entirely. It
marches in minor and major through the nocturnal darkness of the forest, but
for too long, too far and wide, and with thoughts that one should rather not
have in a symphony.85

Richard Batka, another Viennese critic generally sympathetic to Mahler’s works,

pinpointed the passage that Korngold most likely had in mind:

Daily life attracts Mahler, and he does not flinch at its triviality. He wants to
discover the poetry of the workday, and he makes music en plein air a specialty
of his symphonies. It is a matter of taste whether a melody like the one played
by the cello in the trio of the second movement is even appropriate for the
concert hall, or if it should not rather be played by a band at an outdoor
pavilion.86

Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Mahlers Siebente Symphonie,” Neue Freie Presse, 6 November
85

1909: “Von den weiteren zwei Mittelsätzen geben wir dem Scherzo in solchem Maße den Vorzug, daß wir
den anderen, die erste Nachtmusik ganz missen könnten. Hier in Moll und Dur durch nächtliches
Waldesdunkel marschiert, aber zu lang, in die Breite und in die Quere, und mit Gedanken, die man sich in
der Symphonie lieber nicht machen soll.”
86 B. [Richard Batka], “Gustav Mahlers ‘Siebente,’” Kunstwart 23, no. 6 (zweites Dezemberheft

1909): 427: “Der Alltag zieht ihn an, seine Trivialität hat keine Schrecken für ihn. Er will die Poesie des
Wochentags entdecken, und die Pleinairmusik bildet geradezu eine Spezialität seiner Symphonien. Es ist

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As a matter of fact, the trio begins with one of the most blatant light marches that

Mahler ever wrote (mm. 83ff).87 The simple, lyrical cello melody, the regular bass line,

the alternation of tonic and dominant, and the off-beat pattern in the horn—these few

measures are about the only passage in Mahler’s entire oeuvre that could plausibly

appear unaltered in popular music.

In Das klagende Lied and “Revelge,” Mahler’s light marches conveyed both ironic

and grotesque sentiments, but each time the effect depended on the discrepancy between

the text and musical expression, which was generally neither ironic nor grotesque. The

purely instrumental light marches in the Nachtmusik are likewise treated

sympathetically. Here they serve as the base of normalcy against which the Romantic

mystery of its surroundings is measured. The movement draws on many topics of

German Romanticism: distance effects, a call and answer in the horns, bird calls, and

other sounds of nature.88 Frequent juxtaposition of major and minor modes, grotesque

instrumental effects, and unusual timbral combinations cast ghostly shadows that

hearken back to the Romantic notion of the forest as a quintessential center of

supernatural and mysterious powers. In this context, the cheerful light march of the trio

is a remarkable contrast, like the emergence from the enchanted forest into the broad

daylight of the here and now.

Geschmacksache, ob eine Melodie wie das vom Cello geführte Trio des zweiten Satzes überhaupt noch als
konzertfähig gelten soll und nicht lieber von der Banda als Gartenmusik zu spielen wäre.”
87 The ambivalence of melody as a marker for genre reference can again be seen in descriptions of

this cello melody, which is variously described as folk or popular. Constantin Floros writes, for example,
of the “folksong-like” (völksliedmäßig) melody, while Bernd Sponheuer remarks on its “operetta-like
charm.” I would argue that its static melodic motion is not so typical of the operetta as are the
constellation of features that qualify it as a light march. See Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3, Die
Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985), 195; and Sponheuer, “‘O Alter Duft aus Märchenzeit,’”
477.
88 La Grange summarizes the multiple connections between Mahler’s movement and the poetry

of Eichendorff and provides references to further literature on the topic (Gustav Mahler, 3:875–86).

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 But these patches of sun are tenuous and continually slip away. The light march

type does not persist unabated through the bar form of the trio, but articulates the

beginning of each constituent phrase (mm. 83–95, 96–105, 106–21). Each time, the

idiom loses its airy expression and popular tone midstream. At the end of the first two

Stollen, the phrases right themselves as if in sudden recognition of having gone astray. A

strong half-cadence reintroduces the operetta-like tone in time for the next phrase, in

which the triangle, a strong timbral marker of the light-march idiom, appears. These

conspicuously formulaic cadences stand out in a movement that otherwise avoids

pronounced cadential arrivals. And they accentuate the contrasts with the more

mysterious expressive regions of the movement. Essential to this effect is the

sympathetic treatment of materials related to contemporary popular music.

Symphony no. 9, movement 3, Rondo-Burleske

The trio of the march septet in Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe is also involved in the

most widely accepted connection between operetta and a work by Mahler. Adorno was

likely the first to point out that the melody of the first episode of the Ninth Symphony’s

Rondo-Burleske “saunters to the rhythm of the ‘Women’ song in the Merry Widow, which

at that time squeaked from the brass horns of phonographs.”89 Most subsequent

commentators on the Ninth have accepted this assertion.90 In contrast to the alleged

links between Mahler’s Seventh and Lehár’s operetta, the likenesses here are

chronologically plausible and musically more robust. Alma Mahler’s anecdote about

attending a performance of Die lustige Witwe with her husband proves that he heard the

89 Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, 305; translated as in Mahler: A Musical

Physiognomy, 162–63.
90 Stephen E. Hefling, “The Ninth Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell

and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 485.

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work years before beginning the Ninth. The melodic parallels go beyond the rhythmic

profile cited by Adorno to include stepwise motion and direct repetition of the initial

four-bar phrase.

Example 4.13. (appendix F). Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár
III

Affinities notwithstanding, their status as an allusion remains inconclusive on account

of their brevity, lack of precision, and generic nature. The quotation of “Bruder Martin”

in the First Symphony consists of similarly generic melodic components, but their

length and precision dispel any doubt that they are a quotation. In the Rondo-Burlesque,

however, one may as plausibly speak of conscious borrowing as of unconscious

reminiscence or coincidental likeness.

The attention lavished upon melodic similarities has distracted from a more

fundamental link: the traits that Mahler’s and Lehár’s passages have in common are

succinctly encapsulated by the concept of the light march. Orchestration, expression,

and tone are all equal participants in steering one’s associations towards operetta. The

orchestration of the rondo’s refrain is heavy and bombastic but rapidly diminishes in

preparation of the episode. In contrast to the preceding fugato, the texture here—a

prominent melody and hints of a bass line in the cellos and basses—is hierarchical and

popular in tone. The predominately string texture and melodic doubling in the oboe

also contribute to the impression of an allusion to Lehár, whose trio begins similarly.

Rounding off the sense that Mahler’s episode is an operetta-like light march is the use of

the triangle, an instrument last heard in the symphony in conjunction with another

reference to a popular genre: a waltz idiom in movement two (mm. 466). Appealing to

the concept of the light march thus subsumes multiple parameters of the musical text

into its purview and links the episode to a compositional type that Mahler routinely

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used. It also makes the connection to entertainment music more substantial, for it relies

not on one-to-one correlation to a specific melody, but on the stylistic similarity to a

march type characteristic of operetta.

In contrast to the examples considered above, the light marches of the Ninth are

riddled with overtly ironic musical devices that function independently of a text:

dynamic jokes, unusual timbral effects, glissandos, and layers of flutter-tonguing,

sneering sixteenth-note runs, and instrumental Juchzer. Indeed, such antics form a

common denominator uniting all of the movement’s sections. The refrain’s fugato is

treated to the same descending sixteenth-note sneers that accompany the light march

(cf. mm. 79–88 and 146–53), and even the chorale-based second episode, which previews

the elegiac tone of the fourth movement, is not spared the mocking E-flat clarinets and

flutter-tonguing flutes (mm. 447–56). These features clearly motivate the movement’s

compound title Rondo-Burleske. The Rondo captures the movement’s variety: an

alternating series of formal units, each containing different generic references. Burleske

captures the expressive posture that reappears in each of the contrasting sections.

A central expressive feature of Mahler’s movement is the varying intensity of

the burlesque, which changes in tandem with the generic references. In general, the

intensity of the burlesque is directly proportional to the exaltedness of the genre

reference with which it coincides. The most withering sarcasm occurs in the second

episode, whose chorales, harp glissandos, and shimmering violin tremolos convey a

heavenly realm untouched by the concerns of quotidian existence. Less intense is the

burlesque that results from the fugato sections of the refrain. The high-mindedness and

learnedness inherent in the fugal topic is exalted yet clearly situated in the earthly

realm, and the precedent for romping fugues in the bass register of symphonic scherzos

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softens its blow, too.91 The light-march idiom in Viennese operetta, however, is never

far from similar high jinks as those in Mahler’s Ninth. Hearing the first episodes as

indebted to operetta gives rise to the impression that the burlesque is part of the genre

reference itself, and that the light march is the only genre reference that Mahler treats

sympathetically.

Lehár’s trio can again serve as a comparison. The light march at the beginning is

straightforward, but throughout the trio Lehár uses a number of antics to transform it

into boisterous comedy. Short, loud interjections from the full orchestra punctuate the

soft dynamics (mm. 67–70, 137–42). Layers of voices accumulate as the march proceeds,

and five men shout “Ach die Weiber, diese Weiber!” out of rhythm overtop the march

(mm. 57–63, 73–80). Chromatic trills and sixteenth-note ornaments in the high

woodwinds playfully decorate the march (mm. 95f.). And finally, the men enter in a

cascading stretto whose final entrance grotesquely imitates a woman’s voice (mm. 129–

35). In this way, Lehár treats his own march to buffooneries not entirely unlike those

used by Mahler in his symphony: dynamic jokes, sixteenth-note decorations, and

unusual timbral effects among them. Of course, the parallels in musical technique can

only go so far. Mahler rarely surpassed the motivic, rhythmic, and tonal complexities

that constitute this movement. But their purpose, to lampoon irreverently, was part and

parcel not of fugues or chorales or even symphonies, but of operetta. It is no coincidence

that Burleske was a common genre modifier for operettas in the German-speaking

world.92

91 See the Trio of the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

92 Ehrmann-Herfort, “Operette,” 9. Examples include Offenbach, Toto: Burleske Operette; Sullivan,

Der Mikado, oder, ein Tag in Titipu: Burleske-operette; Straus, Die lustigen Nibelungen, burleske Operette. When
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, librettist of Die Rosenkavalier, suggested to Richard Strauss that they call it a
burlesque, Strauss rejected the idea because he thought that it would make people think of “Offenbach,

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 Mahler’s first episode and its repetition are thus the movement’s only sections

where the impulse to burlesque comes into alignment with the implications of its genre

reference. A correlate can be seen in the burlesque’s varying intensity to the standard

structure of dance movements, whose trios are generally less active, vigorous, or

intense. In Mahler’s movement, the trio-like character is conveyed not just by the

lighter orchestration and softer dynamics of the light march; here the sarcasm loses its

edge, too, as the Rondo’s at times devastating burlesque momentarily comes into

alignment with the generic reference.

*
* *

Mahler’s use of light marches conforms to what one would expect from a

composer who placed folksongs and Strauss waltzes on the same aesthetic rung. The

light marches in “Der Spielmann,” “Revelge,” and the Seventh Symphony are treated

with a sympathy typically associated with folk materials. Mahler saw in the light march

a potent and direct expression of gaiety and lightheartedness, and he did not hesitate to

exploit its effectiveness himself. This distinguishes him from many of his

contemporaries. As described in chapter 2, folksong collectors like Franz Böhme,

composers like Johannes Brahms, and critics like Robert Hirschfeld all held folksong in

an esteem that they did not extend to popular music. As one of the most significant

genres of entertainment music, operetta often found itself in the crosshairs of cultural

and musical commentary on the supposed decline of culture and disappearance of rural

folk traditions.93 Mahler’s sympathetic treatment of operetta-like marches, however,

Mikado” (Walter Frisch, German Modernism, California Studies in 20th-Century Music, vol. 3 [Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005], 216).
93 The most prominent contemporary critique of operetta came from Karl Kraus. See, for

example, “Grimassen über Kultur und Bühne,” Die Fackel 10, nos. 270–71 (19 January 1909): 1–18.

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suggests that he did not share these views. For him, the hallmark of music and the mark

of a great composer resided in the development of musical materials. He had no need for

an ideological discrimination between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate vernacular

styles of music.

Finally, the connections drawn between Mahler’s and Lehár’s works reveal how

the state of operetta today influences how scholars understand Mahler’s allusions to

popular styles. Lehár’s work is not an ideal basis of comparison. It premièred relatively

late in Mahler’s compositional career, after he had completed all of his songs and first

seven symphonies, and no evidence suggests that Mahler studied its score. There is of

course Alma Mahler’s colorful anecdote, which places the adult composer at the scene of

the crime. But a more fundamental reason for the prominence of Die lustige Witwe in

connection with Mahler’s symphonies is that it is among the few operettas still known

today. Alongside Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, it has earned an honorary position in the

repertories of opera houses, where it has remained familiar among audiences, critics, and

scholars of art music while eluding the fate of most other operettas. As exemplified in

this chapter, the many operettas that Mahler conducted early in his career, and whose

scores he studied long before composing the bulk of his works, constitute a body of

popular music more pertinent to the allusions in Mahler’s works.

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 CHAPTER 5

MAHLER THE SUBVERSIVE:

THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF THE THIRD SYMPHONY

I concede wholeheartedly that the desire to grasp this movement—and only this
movement—in purely musical terms can often be hampered by the impression
of extramusical elements [and] phantasmagorical images, which are pertly
mixed into the course of the music. Yet I feel that, this once, a wild and carefree
ingenuity should compensate for the stylistic problems.

—Bruno Walter on the first movement of the Third Symphony (1936)1

The first movement of the Third is among Mahler’s most daring and

challenging symphonic essays. Nowhere is his oeuvre are the time scales longer, the

vernacularisms more brazen, or the stylistic discontinuities more severe. Even Bruno

Walter, as steady a promoter of Mahler’s legacy as there ever was, had to revert to

special pleading when the topic came up in his monograph. Any analysis must come to

terms with those prominent aspects that Walter felt unable to reconcile: the purely

musical processes and the highly referential character, which resulted largely from the

1 Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel / Heinrichshofen-Bücher,

2001), 88: “Ich gebe aber rückhaltlos zu, daß bei diesem Satz – und nur bei diesem – der Wunsch, ihn rein
musikalisch aufzufassen, häufig durch den Eindruck von außermusikalischen Elementen phantastischen
Vorstellungen, die sieh [sic] keck in den musikalischen Ablauf mischen--behindert werden kann. Und
doch fühle ich, daß hier einmal eine wilde und unbekümmerte Genialität für die Problematik des Stils
entschädigen sollte.”

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vivid allusions to vernacular styles. The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of

the entire movement, including its formal processes and semantic content. In contrast

to the preceding chapters, which focused on the sources of isolated vernacularisms, this

chapter considers Mahler’s allusions to popular styles in their natural habitat, as it were,

as constituents of the symphony’s larger musical and semantic processes. The analysis

takes place in three stages. The first considers the music according to such immanent

properties as form, motive, harmony, and, most importantly, idiom. The second widens

in scope to take in the myriad allusions and quotations as well as their import for the

work’s meaning. The chapter closes by considering additional purposes for Mahler’s

allusions to popular styles.

Form as Manipulation of Idiom

Mahler felt a strong sense of propriety regarding the symphonic tradition. For

all their innovative aspects, the formal structures of his symphonies are heavily indebted

to conventional patterns. All opening movements (save that of the Fifth), for example,

are based on sonata form. Mahler even stated that the massive first movement of the

Third has “the same scaffolding and construction . . . as found in Mozart and, expanded

and exalted, in Beethoven, but which were actually created by the venerable Haydn.”2

Indeed, nearly every published analysis parses it accordingly.3 But the movement’s

2 Herbert Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg:
Wagner, 1984), 64: “dasselbe Gerüst, der gleiche Grundbau . . . wie sie bei Mozart und, nur erweitert und
erhöht, bei Beethoven sich finden, vom alten Haydn aber eigentlich geschaffen worden sind”; see also
Peter Franklin, Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber
Music, 1980), 66.
3 See La Grange, Mahler: Volume One (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 801–2; Dieter

Schnebel, “Über Mahlers Dritte,” in Mahler: Eine Herausforderung, ed. Peter Ruzicka (Wiesbaden:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 160–61; Bernd Sponheuer, Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem
in den Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978), 147–48; Constantin Floros, Gustav
Mahler, vol. 3, Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985): 86; Hermann Danuser, Gustav

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relationship to sonata is ambiguous; hence no two analyses pinpoint its internal

divisions in the same way. Mahler clearly intended to invoke sonata form, but the

formal processes that hold the movement together and sustain interest over the course

of its 875 measures do not derive from the tonal and thematic conventions of the

structure.

A major compositional problem in a movement of such gigantic proportions is

making its form apparent to the listener. Mahler’s approach was to eliminate transitions

between sections and replace them with striking musical gestures that highlight

structural divisions. Two gestures in particular mark the most important formal seams.

The first is the movement’s opening motto, whose indelibility arises not from its

melodic or rhythmic profile, but from its manner of declamation: eight unison horns,

fortissimo and with accents on nearly every note.

Example 5.1 (appendix G). Major structural gestures

Although the constituent motives recur frequently throughout the movement, the

motto reappears in this striking manner only once (mm. 643–55). The powerful sense of

return that it creates is reflected in the secondary literature: the only internal division of

the sonata agreed upon by all published analyses is this one, which is held to be the start

of the recapitulation.

Mahler reserves the full power of his imposing orchestral apparatus almost

exclusively for the movement’s other major structural gesture (see ex. 5.1). It first

Mahler und seine Zeit (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991), 157–58; Peter Franklin, Mahler: Symphony no. 3,
Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84–89; Friedhelm
Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1991), 59; Morten Solvik Olsen, “Culture
and the Creative Imagination: The Genesis of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony” (PhD diss., University
of Pennsylvania, 1992), 526–29; A. Peter Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire, vol. 4, The Second Golden Age of
the Viennese Symphony: Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Mahler, and Selected Contemporaries (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 596; Vera Micznik, “‘Ways of Telling’ in Mahler’s Music: The Third Symphony
as Narrative Text,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 322–
23.

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appears roughly midway between the two statements of the motto (mm. 362–68) and

again near the end of the movement (mm. 857–63). In both instances, the gesture

follows on the heels of a strong cadence that caps an extended march episode. It can be

called a rupture on account of its sudden appearance, disproportionate volume, harmonic

lurch, and relative independence from the rest of the movement’s motives. The motto

and rupture together divide the movement into a tripartite structure.

Figure 5.1 (appendix G). Major structural sections

Mahler further subdivides each major formal section with liquidations.4 These

gestures are typified by descending melodic lines, decreasing dynamics, and thinning

textures. In effect, the formal unit dissolves away, leaving either a sustained tonic pitch

or the non-tonal sounds of the percussion. Mahler distributes liquidations unevenly

throughout the movement.

Figure 5.2 (appendix G). Minor structural sections

The first one occurs after the movement’s motto and demarcates the end of the

introduction (mm. 14–26). Most of the other liquidations occur in the first major

structural unit. The remaining two precede and follow the return of the motto.

Mahler imbues these gestures with formal significance by coordinating them

with the movement’s motivic and tonal plan. The three liquidations in the first

structural unit, for instance, occur at the interstices between the two theme groups,

which are also distinguished by the keys that they inhabit. Figure 5.3 details the

coordination of the movement’s theme groups, major tonal areas, and structural

gestures.

Figure 5.3 (appendix G). Theme group, structural gesture, tonal center

4 Mahler used similar gestures in the finale of the Second Symphony, written the year before he

started the Third. See mvt. 5, mm. 36–42, 55–61, 94–96, 134–41.

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Only twice does Mahler pass from one theme group to the other without the aid of a

structural gesture. At measure 451, the first theme group melds seamlessly into the

next. And at measure 736, Mahler directly juxtaposes the theme groups without any

mediation.

This formal plan can be related to sonata form in multiple ways. One possibility

acknowledges Mahler’s consistent description of the movement as an introduction and

main movement.5

Figure 5.4 (appendix G). Sonata form option 1

On this view, the first theme group is a massive introduction (“Pan awakens”) to the

second theme group, which corresponds to the main movement (“Summer marches in”).

The three full statements of the second theme group constitute the exposition,

development and recapitulation, each separated by extended interpolations of material

from the introduction. An advantage of this interpretation is that it conserves the tonal

polarity inherent in the sonata principle; the exposition, in F major, modulates to D

major, while the recapitulation remains in F throughout.6

An alternative interpretation is to see sonata form as an all-encompassing

structure. This is suggested by many features: the ternary structure, dual theme groups,

tonal exploration in the middle section, exaggerated moment of recapitulation, and a

truncated final section.

Figure 5.5 (appendix G). Sonata form option 2

5 Already apparent in early stages of the symphony’s genesis (see appendix A.5–6), Mahler

clearly indicated this division in the autograph fair copy (see appendix A.21) and in the program to the
symphony’s first full performance (see ch. 1, “Mahler the Idealist,” 2).
6 The apparent tonal resolution in the recapitulation, however, does not take place by

recapitulating the identical material in the proper key, but by deleting it almost entirely.

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According to this view, the sonata has a double exposition, in which each of the theme

groups is stated twice. It also has a progressive key scheme, from D minor to F major.7

Some scholars find a substitute for the lack of tonal polarity in a dramatic conflict

between the theme groups.8 Nevertheless, this view is misleading; conflict implies

interaction, yet Mahler’s theme groups barely act on each other at all. As we have seen,

they are separated in almost all instances by one or more structural gestures—the

motto, rupture, and liquidation. The theme groups are like so many isolated blocks lined

up in a row.

Relating the movement’s structure to sonata form downplays its basic formal

logic: the cyclical alternation of two highly contrasting and isolated groups of music. A

more fitting account can be derived from the idea of “rotational form” developed in

recent years by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy.9 Rotational form is an

organizational principle based on a repeating sequence of motives. The first statement

of the motives comprises a cycle; each repetition of the cycle constitutes a rotation.

Mahler’s movement has four rotations, the first of which is aborted shortly after the

start of the second theme group.

7 Mahler had a penchant for double-exposition sonata forms. See the first movements of the

Second and Seventh Symphonies. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 57 furnishes a precedent. Mahler also had
a proclivity for progressive tonality, as already apparent in his first major work, Lieder eines fahrenden
Gesellen.
8 For example, see Franklin, Mahler, 12.
9 For more on rotational form, see James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony no. 5 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23–26, 58–84; James Hepokoski, “Back and Forth from Egmont:
Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation,” 19th-Century Music 25, no. 2/3 (2001–2); idem,
“Beyond the Sonata Principle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 91–154; Warren
Darcy, “Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 25 (2001): 49–74; and Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of
Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006). Hepokoski and Darcy continually developed their theory, such that its
codification Elements of Sonata Theory is far more elaborate and uses terminology not present in earlier
studies. Since only the basic outlines of rotational form are necessary for understanding the first
movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the more basic versions of the theory as presented in earlier
articles and chapters suffice here.

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 Figure 5.6 (appendix G). Rotational form

One aspect of Mahler’s rotations is particularly unusual: the radical independence of the

theme groups. They are so separated, in fact, that one could almost conceive of the

movement as two interlocking rotational forms with alternating cycles. Such a formal

anomaly is not argued for here, but its premise is reflected in the analysis below. Instead

of treating each cycle in turn, the analysis considers each theme group separately,

summarizing all four statements of the first before moving onto the second.

Although the basic sequence of motives remains stable throughout the cycles of

a rotational form, the motives can undergo any manner of development. In some

movements, the gradual progression of changes from one rotation to the next suggests

a goal, or telos, that is only attained in the final statement. This idea, which Hepokoski

and Darcy call teleological genesis, provides a flexible framework in which the

movement’s most distinctive features can assume structural significance. What makes

the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony special is not its key scheme or its

motivic development. The time scales are so large and the relationship to traditional

patterns so ambiguous that formal expectations play less of a role than usual in an

aesthetic experience of the movement. In such a context, idiom and sound take on an

increased importance. Indeed, Mahler gives them unprecedented structural significance:

the primary structural marker is idiom.

The movement’s telos is to achieve a yearning, singing idiom with melodic

closure in the major mode. In a typical rotational form, the goal appears at or near the

end of the movement. This telos is exceptional because it relates only to the first theme

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group. The two theme groups unfold in isolation, each with its own inner logic.10 The

first theme group reaches a telos at the end of its statement in the fourth rotation. The

second theme group, in contrast, is not goal oriented. As will be argued below, it derives

musical interest from the constant manipulations of its primary idiom, the march, which

continually snaps into and out of focus throughout the three large march episodes of the

second, third, and fourth rotations.

Introduction (mm. 1–27)

Prominent features of both theme groups are derived from elements in the

introduction.

Example 5.2 (appendix G). Motives in the introduction

Whereas this might normally constitute a unifying device, here it accentuates the

differences between the groups more than it binds them. Each of the motto’s constituent

motives is associated with one theme group but not the other. The opening phrase x1 is

a prominent march motive in the second theme group, and the tail-motive x2 is an

important melodic cell in the first theme group. Despite the brevity and indistinct shape

of x2, its scoring makes it easily recognizable; every statement save one (mm. 443–46) is

played fortissimo by multiple horns.11

The symphony’s first chords x3 shape both theme groups, though in different

ways. The descending second in half notes is a prominent melodic cell in the first theme

group, and the chord progressions also reappear, in measures 178–81, albeit in a
10 The motto and first liquidation constitute an introduction to the expositional rotation, and

their repetition before the final cycle can be understood as deriving from the form’s dialogue with sonata
principles. The rupture likewise stands apart from the rotational form.
11 The motive is stated by English horn in mm. 443–46, but because the main theme is quoted
here in full and unaltered from an earlier appearance (cf. 99–109), the motive is readily recognizable. All
statements of the first theme group’s main theme made by other instruments, including the lengthy
trombone solos, lack the cell altogether.

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modified version. The significance of x3 is even more profound for the second group of

themes, two of which plainly derive from the kernel of the descending melodic

statement. Mahler actually composes out the derivations at the start of the second

theme group, marked “Pan sleeps” (Pan schläft) in the manuscript score.12

Example 5.3 (appendix G). Derivation of march themes from x3

The passage begins by recalling x3 with a succession of melodic seconds (b1.1) and

mediant harmonies in the flutes. In the second four-measure phrase, a solo oboe (b1.2)

decorates the falling second with anapest pick-up notes. A solo violin (b1.3) then

elaborates the figure even further. The motivic evolution continues in the repetition of

“Pan sleeps” in the second rotation. Following the chords in the flutes, the basses

present yet another variant (b1.4). Both b1.3 and b1.4 are among the most important

motives in the subsequent march episodes.13

These motivic connections notwithstanding, Mahler’s aim was to create the

effect of two separate, independent groups. Over the course of the movement, he

systematically erases the motivic and harmonic ties to the introduction. Although x2 is a

prominent melodic cell in the initial rotations of the first theme group, it is stated only

once in the entire fourth rotation.14 Similarly, after their genesis from x3, the march

motives in the second theme group make no overt reference to their origins; in the

fourth rotation, “Pan sleeps” is even omitted altogether. The gradual disappearance of
12 Mahler’s programmatic titles are used in this analysis for identification purposes only. They

are easier to follow than abstract labels, which can be difficult to follow, and consequently facilitate
reference to specific sections of the music.
13The motive b1.3 becomes b7 (see ex. 5.6), which is heard at the climax of the second and fourth
rotations (mm. 351f., 846f.). The motive b1.4 is heard throughout these rotations (see fig. 5.8).
14 Manuscripts reveal that, in one case, Mahler actively lessened the explicitness of the reprise of

the chords from x3 (mm. 178–81). In the particell, the chord progress was quoted literally and followed by
similar undulations as follow x3 in the introduction. In the final version of the score, however, Mahler
scaled back the prominence of the quotation, omitting both the undulating figure and the descending
melodic second from the chord progressions.

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liquidations has a similar effect. This gesture first appears in the introduction (mm. 14–

26), and it constitutes the backbone of all the liquidations of the first two rotations. The

fourth rotation does not state it at all. Having forged multiple links between the

introduction and theme groups, then, Mahler sharpens their differences as the

movement progresses.

Rotation 1, First Theme Group (mm. 28–131)

The expressive distance that the first theme group must traverse to reach its

goal of a singing idiom could hardly be greater. Its austere beginning, marked “heavy

and dull” (Schwer und dumpf), has no theme, functional harmony, or phrasing. There are

not even continuous musical lines: just a collection of sharply cut motives that pop into

and out of existence at irregular intervals. Each outlines the D-minor triad and has a

distinctive timbre.

Example 5.4 (appendix G). First theme group: motives

The only deviation from diatonicism comes from the muted trumpets (a5), whose rising

fanfare falls a half step short of the upper octave. Although the grating dissonance

eventually resolves, its effect is not to tonicize D minor so much as disrupt the harmonic

field. The motive is the primary means by which Mahler prevents melodic closure

throughout the first three rotations.

In the absence of functional harmony and phrasing, an important organizing

principle, as in all rotations of the theme group, is the two- and three-fold repetition of

ideas. A musical event occurs either twice before moving on to a new event, or else three

times, with the third statement varied in such a way as to give the sense of forward

progress. Indeed, such moment-to-moment logic is the only means by which the

beginning of the first rotation is ordered. The entrances of the individual motives

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cluster in groups, their temporal relationship varying with each set, as elucidated by the

vertical line in figure 5.7.

Figure 5.7 (appendix G). Moment-to-moment logic in first theme group

After two groups of entrances (mm. 30–33, 34–38), there is a new musical event: a

dramatic scalar surge in the basses (a7). The other motives now clump in the wake of its

final tone, which is powerfully reinforced by the trombones and trumpets (a8; mm. 41,

48, 56). The third time that a7 occurs, its initial scalar surge is extended up to the tonic

pitch (mm. 52–53), thereby creating a sense of progress.

The varied statement of a7 signals an impending change: the appearance of the

group’s main theme A1.1 (mm. 57–78).15

Example 5.5 (appendix G). First theme group: themes

The emergence of a theme out of the chaotic beginning constitutes the first step toward

the theme group’s telos. Bombastic and angular, it alternates half notes and rests with

fits of motion. The theme begins like an extension of the motto, replicating the

distinctive mode of declamation and repeating the tail motive x2. The harmonic field of

D minor is replaced by the vii°7 of the same key. Like the dissonant leading tone of a5,

however, the chord does not function harmonically; it constitutes a new, dissonant

harmonic field. When it resolves to tonic at the beginning of the horns’ second phrase

(m. 65), the continuity of the theme’s declamation and the sudden reappearance of a7 in

the basses overwhelm any sense of harmonic resolution.

The second phrase of A1.1 introduces another aspect of the theme group’s telos.

The arrival of A1.1 on the tonic pitch (m. 69) is denied closure by the strong

15 Labels for motives have lower case letters and subscript numbers; themes have upper case
letters and full-size numbers. Because of the nature of their melodic construction, each statement of the
first theme is given its own label: A1.1, A1.2, A1.3, and so on. All statements of the theme are given in
Example 5.5.

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dissonances unleashed by a7 in the low strings. The horn theme circles back and makes

three runs at the cadence. With each attempt, the dissonance between the tonic pitch of

the melody and the orchestral accompaniment is lessened. The expected closure on the

third run, however, is disrupted by the appearance of yet another motive from the

beginning of the rotation: a5. Its searing C-sharp is even more dissonant than the

previous disruptions. The threefold repetition of a5 thwarts any sense of closure not just

here, but at the end of nearly every thematic statement in the first three rotations.

Overcoming this disruptive figure is a necessary step in achieving the theme group’s

goal.

The next passage introduces a new theme, A2, in a solo trumpet (mm. 83–98).

Distinct from the rest of the theme group in texture, motive, harmony, and phrasing, it

is like the intrusion of a foreign body.16 It possesses more clearly functional harmonies

and a recognizable sentence structure. The trumpet presents a four-measure phrase in C

minor and then directly repeats it a minor third higher. The continuation of the

sentence consists of an orchestral outburst based on the threefold repetition of a5, its

arpeggio distended to an augmented triad. In addition, four horns declaim x2 while low

winds adorn a7 with descending glissando sneers.

This remarkable passage pushes the tonal center to B-flat minor (via its

Neapolitan in mm. 95–98), which ushers in a return of the main theme A1.2 and a

reassertion of the stentorian tone of multiple horns. The differences between A1.1 and

A1.2 reveal important aspects of melodic construction. The identity of the theme is not

a particular melodic contour, but the aggregate of its component cells and its striking

16 The trumpet’s head motive, a descending fourth on half notes, is related to m. 65, but the rest
of the melody is new material. More will be said about the foreignness of A2 in the discussion of
referentiality below.

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sonority. Each restatement of the theme rearranges the component motives and

intersperses new ones among them. Despite their different beginnings, A1.2 is

immediately recognizable as a restatement of A1.1 on account of the eight unison horns.

The fate of A1.2 is the same as that of all other themes in the first rotation: the

three-fold repetition of a5 prevents melodic closure (mm. 109–15). This time, the

descending basses cast each repetition of a5 in a different light. In the final repetition,

the C-sharp of the muted trumpets and then the E-flat of the basses resolve by half step

to D, thereby initiating the section’s liquidation.

Rotation 2, First Theme Group (mm. 164–224)

The statement of the first theme group in the second rotation is more succinct

than in the first, covering just sixty instead of over one hundred measures. It represents

a significant advance toward the thematic telos in terms of texture and thematic

coherence. A solo trombone declaims the main theme A1.3 (mm. 166–209). Given the

importance of sonority to the melody’s identity, this represents a significant

transformation. Mahler takes great care to make the connection evident, distilling the

thirty-bar passage that gave birth to A1.1 into just a few bars here. Both rotations begin

with alternating statements of a2 and a3. Mahler then recycles the three thunderous As

(a8; mm. 41, 48, 56) in the opening phrase of the trombone solo. The solo then

integrates motivic cells from both A1.1 and A1.2 (but not from the trumpet solo, A2),

adding to them a new motive of its own.17

In addition to its texture, A1.3 represents an advance over the previous

statements in terms of thematic coherence. The solo runs almost continuously through

17 The motive in mm. 168–70 is modeled on A1.2 (mm. 98–100); mm. 172–73 are based on A1.1

(mm. 66–69); the new motive is in mm. 175–81.

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the entire theme group. Moreover, it is supported more frequently by functional

harmonies than any previous statement. For instance, the melodic motive at measures

171–73 is clearly derived from measures 66–69, yet its harmonic progression (i – V7/V

– V7 – I – i) is more clearly functional, integrating the theme into the key of D minor.

Like all previous thematic statements, this one fails to achieve cadential closure.

After the promising harmonic functionality, the first half of the solo ends with a new

cadential motive that comes to rest on open fifths (mm. 175–81).18 The second half of

the solo reverts back to the bombastic mode of declamation, the solo trombone being

reinforced intermittently by the full trombone section. Together they gain momentum,

culminating in a brilliant fanfare that moves strongly to the tonic (mm. 203–9). But the

harmonies turn shrill, and the cadential arrival is disrupted by the entrance of the

familiar threefold repetition of a5. Its dissonance here is even more grating, for the

leading tone does not resolve to the tonic, but is bent down to C. The bass line descends

by tritones, and the passage morphs into another liquidation.

Rotation 3, First Theme Group (mm. 369–450)

The first and third rotations are more closely related to one another than to the

other two, which also constitute a like pair. Hence nearly all of the material from the

first rotation reappears here in the same order, offering the opportunity to retrace the

development of the theme group. The next steps toward the telos are the weakening and

then disappearance of the disruptive gesture based on a5, and the insertion of a lyrical

transformation of the main theme near the end of the rotation.

18 This is the passage that recalls the chords of x3.

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 One of the few prominent deviations from the first rotation is the omission of the

opening section with the isolated motives (mm. 26–56); the main theme A1.4 emerges

directly from the preceding rupture with its original mode of declamation restored (mm.

369–97). Once again, the theme assimilates aspects of all previous statements.19 Its

denial of melodic closure parallels that at the end of A1.1. The horns make three runs at

the cadence, and the final attempt is nearly successful; their cadence on open fifths is not

disrupted by a5. But Mahler tacks on the cadential motive from the first half of the

trombone solo (mm. 175–81), delaying the disruption of the horn line until the end of

the extension, where an extra repetition of aa is given to the muted trombones (m. 392).

More signs of the waning potential for a5 to disrupt follow. With the entrance of

the trumpet solo A2 (mm. 398–404), the theme group resumes the course that it had

taken in the first rotation. Only cosmetic changes are made to the orchestration of the

trumpet’s two presentation phrases, but the subsequent outburst lacks its original

cataclysmic edge (mm. 405–10); x2 does not appear in the mix, and the descending

glissandos are relegated to fewer voices. What had been the most disruptive moment in

the first rotation appears here in a weakened state. Indeed, it is immediately

overshadowed by a return of the brilliant trombone fanfare from the end of A1.4 (cf.

mm. 204–209 with mm. 410–15). Whereas the fanfare had been denied closure, it leads

here, in the care of all eight horns, to the theme group’s longest patch of major mode

and to its first undisrupted cadence, albeit a plagal one that hurriedly dissolves in a

19 The repetitions of x2 use the same pitches as in the motto and A1.2 (mm. 6–9, 100–102); the
motivic content of the first phrase comes from A1.1 (mm. 57–62); the second phrase begins with a motive
from A1.2 (mm. 107–8), and so on.

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liquidation-like gesture.20 For the first time, a theme has ended without a disruption

from the threefold repetition of a5. The motive will never thwart another close.

The surprising emergence of a powerfully affirmative tone is fitting preparation

for the next clear advance towards the theme group’s telos: the transformation of the

main theme into a lyrical solo (A1.5). The motivic and expressive changes are initially

so thorough that the trombone timbre is a central component in securing the theme’s

identity. The theme initially bears the most resemblance to A1.2 (cf. m. 99 with mm.

425–27). It also features the descending seconds that have pervaded all statements of

the main theme, but they are turned into sighing figures that carry the performance

instruction “sentimental.”21 The transformation becomes only more radical as the solo

migrates to C minor (mm. 429f.) and the orchestral outburst, heard in a weakened

version just bars earlier, is rendered as a tender figure distilled to its essential gesture: a

pick-up, measure-long dissonance, and resolution. Any doubt of the connection between

it and the grotesque outburst is dispelled as the trombone quotes the closing motive

from the passage’s first appearance (cf. mm. 95–98 with mm. 436–40).

The rapid descent and the melodic tritone to the final tone prevent the lyrical

solo from achieving closure. The rotation instead ends with a ghostly reminder of the

main theme in the English horn. It is a literal restatement of A1.2, the version of the

theme that originally followed the grotesque outburst in the first rotation, and which

was replaced in this rotation by the lyrical trombone A1.5. This is the only time that a

version of the main theme is repeated verbatim. It is like a haunting memory of what the

20 The fanfare and cadence is a radical extension of the chord underpinning the third iteration of

a5: B major. In the first rotation, the chord acted as the Neapolitan of B-flat minor (mm. 95–98). It has the
same function here.
21 Mahler added the instruction only after the revised score was printed in 1906. It appears in the

critical edition.

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theme once was. The restatement is not complete, stalling on the descending seconds

instead of proceeding to a disrupted close. The theme melds seamlessly into the

beginning of the second theme group.

Rotation 4, First Theme Group (mm. 671–736)

The first theme group of the fourth rotation traces the evolution of the previous

three statements. The isolated motives from the beginning of the first rotation return,

their entrances still irregularly spaced (see fig. 5.7). As in the second rotation, the

trombone solo soon enters with strong iterations of a8. The solo is again divided into

two halves, the first of which very nearly recapitulates the first half of A1.3 (cf. mm.

166–87 with mm. 683–708). The second half, however, quickly assumes the lyrical tone

and motivic content of A1.5 (cf. mm. 423–37 with mm. 706–31). Rumblings in the low

strings amplify the delicate dissonances of the sighing figures. At the point that the

previous trombone solo collapsed, a more powerful tremor is felt in the Neapolitan

chord and timpani roll (mm. 719–22). This time, the lyrical solo develops in a new

direction, advancing toward closure in D major. An expressive turn figure and poignant

transformation of a7 initiate the move to the final cadence, which is taken over by the

cellos. Suspensions add a saccharine touch. The first theme group’s main theme finally

comes to rest on the third scale degree as part of a complete major triad, a fitting

compensation for the many open fifths that precede it. The telos has been finally fulfilled.

Second Theme Group

The first and second theme groups contrast in nearly every way. In the second

theme group, the emphasis on two- and threefold repetition is obviated by the more

consistently functional harmonic language and the attendant periodic phrases and

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cadences. The march themes are readily identifiable by their head motives, which are

altered only minimally.22 Ensemble textures predominate over the solo lines and

unfilled rests, and the march idiom dominates rotations two, three, and four. The most

profound difference, though, is in formal organization. The second theme group is not a

goal-oriented structure. There are, of course, changes from rotation to rotation, and one

can certainly point to unique aspects of the final rotation. But it is difficult to see any of

these features as a teleological goal that gradually emerges over the course of four

rotations. For instance, the end of the second rotation modulates to the submediant D

major, a tonal digression resolved in the final rotation (see fig. 5.4). Nevertheless, it can

hardly be maintained that the premise of the entire theme group and its three long

march episodes is this relatively minor tonal feature. The modulation to D major occurs

only very late in the rotation and is not dramatized. Moreover, its ultimate resolution is

achieved more through deletion than by restating the material in tonic. Mahler

organizes the form of the second rotation with more comprehensive and audible means.

Whereas the first theme group exhibits the gradual emergence of a song-like

idiom that cadences in the major mode, the structure of the march episodes is rooted in

the regular manipulation of the march idiom. Mahler alters the mode, motivic content,

rhythms, orchestration, and expressive character. These alterations are coordinated

such that many occur at once, thereby creating the sense that the march idiom tacks

between various degrees of deformation and normativeness. The essential traits of a

normative march idiom are a major mode, clear melody and bass line, functional

harmony, and affirmative tone. A march deformation is any march-like idiom lacking

22Their continuations, on the other hand, are often quite divergent. See Monika Tibbe, Über die
Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementalen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers, Berliner
Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, vol. 1, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan (Munich: Emil
Katzbichler, 1977), 109–11.

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one or more of these features.23 The more that are missing, the greater the deformation.

In the second theme group, the march idiom regularly shifts between more normative

and more deformed marches, remaining in one state briefly before switching quickly to

another.

The march episodes are not goal-oriented structures. One might compare their

pertinent aesthetic principle to that of the series paintings that occupied Claude Monet

in the 1890s.24 These works depict an object—stacks of hay, the Rouen Cathedral—in

multiple versions, each from a different time of day and with different atmospheric and

light conditions. Such series do not express any development toward a goal, but render

a single object in manifold ways. Mahler treats the march idiom much as Monet did the

stacks of hay, each march state is like a single painting within a series. The gradual

crescendos underlying the second, third, and fourth rotations are akin to the

intensifying brightness from daybreak to noontime. In place of changing atmospheric

conditions, Mahler manipulates many elements of the idiom.

Rotation 1, Second Theme Group (mm. 132–63)

Rotation 1 is aborted soon after the second theme group begins. A mere thirty-

two measures, the statement nonetheless presents the thematic and expressive germs

from which the three subsequent rotations of the second theme group develop.

Foreshadowing the juxtaposition of march idioms to come, the statement consists of

two, sharply delineated parts: “Pan sleeps” and a short intimation of a march that

23 Achim Hofer, a German scholar who has written extensively on military music and marches,
discusses Mahler’s march deformations as composing “over” a march (“Marsch,” in Die Musik in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, 2d ed., ed. Ludwig Finscher [Kassel and Stuttgart: Bärenreiter and Metzler, 1996],
Sachteil 5, cols. 1679–80).
24 For an introduction to these series, see Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York: Garland,
1981).

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quickly dissolves into a liquidation. We have already seen how Mahler derives two

march themes from x3 in the “Pan sleeps” section (see pp. 194–95). In the abbreviated

march, two additional motives are introduced in the low strings (b3.1, b3.2), a timbre that

initiates each of the movement’s march episodes (mm. 239f., 530f., 737f.).25

Example 5.6 (appendix G). Second theme group: motives

This statement of the second theme group also introduces an expressive dialectic

that runs through the subsequent statements. “Pan sleeps” introduces the lyrical

inflection. Soft dynamics, sparse scoring led by woodwinds, and delicate solos—the

violin solo is marked zart (tenderly)—confer a pastoral aspect that correlates with the

genial marches based on b1.4. The shrill tones of five clarinets (b2, mm. 148–50) cut off

the rhapsodic violin and demarcate a change to the martial inflection. The rising

arpeggio (b3.2) and foursquare rhythms of the percussion convey a latent martial

character that is most explicit at the end of the second and in the third rotations. (It is

not necessary at this point to consider likenesses to actual military bands; the martial

character is evident by the standards of symphonic composition.)

Rotation 2, Second Theme Group (mm. 225–361)

This statement of the second theme group begins with a varied repetition of the

statement from the first rotation. The motive x3 evolves still further in the “Pan sleeps”

section, becoming the lyrical march theme b1.4 (mm. 229–32). Once again, b2 brings

about an abrupt shift in character (m. 237), but this time the undulating line of the cellos

25 This prominent timbral association betrays one of the earliest programmatic titles Mahler

drafted for the movement: “Summer marches in (Fanfare – merry march, introduction with winds and
concertizing basses only)”; Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin: Schuster & Leffler, 1921), 106:
“Der Sommer marschiert ein (Fanfare – lustiger Marsch, Einleitung nur Bläser und konzertierende
Kontrabässe).”

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spawns additional voices in the upper strings and a march theme (b3.3) that launches the

first full-fledged march episode.

As shown in figure 5.8, the march episode is organized around the alternation of

various degrees of deformed and normative marches.

Figure 5.8 (appendix G). Idiom, motive, key in the march episodes

In the first section (mm. 247–330), Mahler coordinates manipulations of the march

idiom with a harmonic scheme derived from the opening two chords of the symphony.

The more normative marches are in F major, and the deformations A minor (x3, mm.

11–12). Mahler also distinguishes the marches with opposing groups of motives. The

second phase of the episode is similarly organized (mm. 331–47), but the underlying

tonal opposition is shifted down a third, alternating between the new tonic D major and

its mediant.

The first instance of the alternation between a deformed and normative march is

also the most fleeting. The march episode begins with a march deformation (mm. 247–

72). The basses have the only continuous line, and its predominantly stepwise motion

and dotted rhythms are not normative for the idiom. Individual motives (b2, b3.3, b3.1) are

projected above, their independence emphasized by the performance instruction for b3.2:

“without consideration of the tempo” (ohne Rücksicht auf den Takt; mm. 250f.). The

beginning of b4.1, however, sticks out for its more normative character (mm. 253–55).

The harmony brightens to F major, and the homophonic motive in the clarinets and low

strings moves clearly to the dominant. The deformation resumes as the motive is passed

on to the strings. The mode darkens to minor, and independent march motives appear

above the bass line, which opposes the other voices—harmonically in measures 258–59,

and rhythmically in measures 262–65.

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 In the first phase of the episode, all the normative marches are of the lyrical

inflection. The first instances are x1 and b1.4, both of which have periodic phrasing and

clearly functional harmonies that center on the tonic, dominant, and subdominant (mm.

273–97). A march deformation then take over as the four b4 motives appearing in a

shuffled order and more menacing character (mm. 297–314). When the marches based

on x1 and b1.4 return suddenly in F major (m. 315), they are treated to a lush texture and

new, lyrical counterpoint b6. This spirited march has the most fully normative march

idiom yet.

But the alternation continues. The march builds in intensity until its expression

becomes shrill. Interlocking groups of horns take up x2, the tail motive of the motto

(mm. 327–30). This is one of only two instances in which a prominent motive from the

first theme group appears in the second theme group. Each time, the migration has

significant consequences. Here, the motive pushes the tonal center to the submediant.

As so often in this movement, idiom trumps all else. The powerful effect of the march

idiom snapping into a strongly affirmative, heroic state completely overwhelms the

drama of the key change (m. 331). The marches in the D-major section are of the martial

inflection and have a vigorously heroic tone. The first march is based on x1, and as it

intensifies, the idiom once again collapses into a highly deformed march based on F-

sharp (the mode is closer to phrygian than to minor; mm. 341–46). The isolated march-

like motives, muted timbres and chromatic trills lend it a sinister cast. The second

rotation comes to a close with a final switch back to an affirmative tone (m. 347) and

then the new theme b7 (mm. 351f.), which is related to the violin rhapsody from the first

rotation (b1.3, mm. 140–47).

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Rotation 3, Second Theme Group (mm. 451–642)

The third rotation can be understood formally in two different ways. The

fantasy-like treatment of motives and exploration of foreign keys are reminiscent of the

development section of a sonata form. In this case, the logical basis for comparison is the

exposition, which corresponds to the second rotation (see fig. 5.4). Alternatively, the

movement’s binary implications, evident in the like pairs of the first theme group, invite

us to hear this statement in dialogue with the truncated first rotation. Indeed, this

statement of the second theme group consists of two varied restatements of the

statement from rotation one.

The first restatement retains the scope of the thirty-two bar original and arises

seamlessly from the ghostly repetition of A1.2 in the English horn (mm. 451–81). The

sudden entrance of b2 again delineates the switch from the lyrical to the martial

inflection. But the motive is an apparition of its original version, played here on the

fingerboard of the muted strings and with augmented triads in the harps (mm. 463–67).

The short march passage that follows is highly deformed. String trills and muted

timbres prolong the eerie pallor, and isolated march motives (b5, b3.2, x1) appear overtop

dissonant pedals and augmented triads.

The second varied statement is a free fantasy of grand proportions (mm. 482–

642). In it, the lyrical and martial inflections contained in the first statement of the

theme group are greatly intensified in expression. The first section concentrates the

lyricism into a rapturous episode based on b7. Initially stated by solo horn, molto

portamento and “softly and full of expression” (weich und ausdrucksvoll), it enters into an

intimately intertwining duet with a solo violin, reminiscent of b1.3. The effusive

expression continues, with a pastoral rendition of x1 and b1.4 (mm. 506–13) and a last,

209
sentimental airing of b7 over rolling harp arpeggios followed by a high backdrop of flute

and strings (mm. 514–29).26 The march-cum-love song is the proverbial calm before the

storm. The movement’s longest march episode follows directly, giving center stage to

the idiom’s martial connotations and potential for raw power. Mahler divides the

episode into three sections and, in the score’s fair copy, gives them the following

headings: “The Rabble” (Das Gesindel, m. 539), “The Battle Begins” (Die Schlacht beginnt,

m. 583), and “The Southerly Storm” (Der Südsturm, m. 605). Each section has its own

character: a grotesque deformation, followed by a more normative, heroic march, and

then a turbulent deformation.

The raucous tone for “The Rabble” (mm. 539–82) is established at the outset by

a grotesque version of b2. The section’s main theme (mm. 541–44), based on x2, is a

literal quotation of a horn motive from the first theme group.27 Mahler retains the

motive’s sonority, giving it here to five horns. Their boisterous closing leaps animate

the rowdiness of the grotesque march deformation that follows. Menacing chromatic

ornaments adorn nearly every note of the upper woodwinds. The stereotypical

downbeat-offbeat march accompaniment, which makes its only brief appearance here

(mm. 545ff.), is so exaggerated as to dominate the texture. The section comes to a close

by recalling the atmospheric march episode from the beginning of the rotation (cf. mm.

468–81 with mm. 574ff.), which began “ppp! As if from the farthest distance” (ppp! Wie

aus weitester Ferne). Though without the performance instruction here, the hushed

26 The interpolation of highly lyrical and intensely expressive material into the development is a
technique that Mahler would return to throughout his symphonies. They are often called fantasy
projections, and can be found in the first and third movements of the Sixth Symphony and in the first
movement of the Seventh.
27 The horn motive originally appears in combination with a and a in the orchestral outburst
5 7
that follows the solo trumpet (mm. 90–97).

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dynamics and radically thinned texture create a comparable effect. A collage of march

motives, drum signals, and trills rapidly build up to the next section.

“The Battle Begins” stands out for its decidedly more normative march idiom

(mm. 583–602). The key snaps into a diatonic C major as the trombones and piccolos

declaim x1 and b1.3 in counterpoint. The heroic tone and trombone-led texture recall the

end of the second rotation (mm. 315f.). But cracks in the façade soon appear. After

yielding to a new march theme in the horns in D major (mm. 591–94), the trombones

are unable to reestablish C major. The counterpoint in the winds, in E minor, creates a

bitonal effect. The harmonic complexity only increases during the powerful crescendo

into the next section.

“The Southerly Storm” bears the closest resemblance to the initial march

intimations from the first rotation (cf. mm. 148–63 with mm. 603–42). The motive b2,

restored to its original key D-flat major, articulates its beginning and is immediately

followed by a torrent of strings based on b3.1. The march idiom again reverts to a

greater degree of deformation. Various and sundry march motives are interjected

overtop the undulating strings. They culminate with a final gasp of x1. The motive’s

final two tones and b3.2 are the final march motives to be heard as the energy slowly

ebbs away. The rotation comes to a close with a liquidation, its final utterance from

multiple side drums placed offstage. They decrescendo as if into the distance and are

superseded by the recapitulation of the motto.

Rotation 4, Second Theme Group (mm. 737–856)

The final statement of the second theme group has a strong recapitulatory

impulse. It repeats the organizational scheme of the second rotation. The oscillation

between deformed and normative marches is even more regular and extended (see fig.

211
5.8). Because F major remains the tonic throughout the entire theme group, the

underlying harmonic scheme consists largely of the alternation between the keys from

x3, A minor and F major.

The rotation also recapitulates many of the march motives from the second and

third rotations. Only “Pan sleeps” and the march intimation from the first rotation are

conspicuously absent. There are at least two musical rationales for this. By beginning

directly with an atmospheric march, in B-flat major as opposed to A minor, Mahler

maximized the juxtaposition with the poignant end of the first theme group, which had

just attained its telos. (The chorale-like flutes of “Pan sleeps” would have blurred the

contrast.) Moreover, the fourth rotation, like many sonata recapitulations since Haydn,

is an abbreviated return of earlier material. Both theme groups in the rotation omit

passages from earlier sections of the movement.

Mahler even derives musical jokes from the convention of recapitulation. The

second theme group begins with an atmospheric march analogous to the one that begins

the march episode in the second rotation (cf. mm. 247–72 with mm. 741–61). In both

cases, x1 emerges in F major. Whereas it is a straightforward march idiom in the second

rotation (mm. 273–76), it is here deformed: muted, destabilized tonally, and

accompanied by march motives in A minor (mm. 750–53).28 Later on, after a particularly

vigorous march deformation (mm. 787–99), a resounding horn quartet suddenly clears

the air and “properly” recapitulates x1 (mm. 800–807). The point can hardly be

mistaken, for the horns belt the theme fortissimo above a sparse, quiet accompaniment.

And, as in the second rotation, they pass the baton to a homophonic string texture.

28 The march, presented in F major as in the second rotation, contrasts tonally with its A-minor

surroundings.

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 The general expressive character of the fourth rotation differs from that of the

second. Analogously to the different light conditions in a series by Monet, where the

paintings in morning can be distinguished from those in the afternoon, the marches of

the final rotation have an increased lyrical impulse and lushness of texture compared to

those of the second rotation. Mahler achieves this by supplementing most of the

marches in F major with lyrical counterpoint29 and, inversely, by diminishing the

martial elements. This is especially noticeable in the material restated from the third

rotation. Mahler’s performance instruction at the start of the march episode—

”Everything again as if approaching from the farthest distance” (Wieder Alles wie aus

weitester Ferne sich nähernd, m. 737)—relates the effect of the march to the analogous

point in the second rotation (mm. 247f.). The motivic content, however, recapitulates a

part of “The Southerly Storm” (cf. mm. 608–16 with mm. 742–53). The passage is but a

hollow shell of its former self. What had been the most turbulent and martial passage of

the second theme group is here safely relegated to the distance, as it were.30

The fourth rotation’s tendency toward increased lyricism and decreased martial

character is also apparent in the short restatement of material from “The Battle Begins.”

The unbridled bombast of the original passage is here contained (cf. mm. 583–86 with

mm. 816–19). Mahler omits the four piccolos from b1.3 and switches x2 from the

trombones to the horns. In addition, he adds a new, lyrical counterpoint in the flutes

and violins, whose contrary motion and harmonization lend the passage a touch of

sentiment.

29 He adds counterpoint to b
1.4 (cf. mm. 279–84, 762–67), to its varied repetition (cf. mm. 289–91,
777–79), and to x1 and b1.3 (cf. mm. 583–86, 816–19).
30 It is tempting to see in this general diminishment of martial elements a rationale for the
decrescendo of the offstage snare drums at the end of the third rotation (mm. 634–42). They are not just
part of the ebbing march episode, but represent the retreat of the martial march type more generally.

213
 Another significant change within the second theme group of the fourth rotation

is the role played by b1.4. Derived along with from “Pan sleeps” from x3 and featured

prominently in the F-major sections of the second rotation, it was largely absent from

the raucous march episode of the third rotation. It appeared there only once, in a

chromatically contorted version projected by two oboes above the din of the build-up to

“The Battle Begins” (mm. 579–83). This chromatic variant comes to govern its

evolution in the fourth rotation. Initially stated in its diatonic version (mm. 761f.), the

motive is added to a number of passages that originally lacked it.31 In these extra

statements, b1.4 gradually loses its airy expression and becomes ever more chromatic. In

the first two instances, it precipitates the collapse into a deformed march passage (see

fig. 5.8; mm. 769–71, 783–86). Its third statement is fully chromatic and intensifies the

grotesque expression of the march deformation to a point that could rival parts of “The

Rabble” (mm. 791–96). Having thus descended from a cheerful march to a disruptive

force, the motive is never heard from again.

The fourth rotation, being in a more lyrical vein, does not recapitulate the

heroic, martial section that brought the second rotation to its rousing close (mm. 331–

62). Most of that material, which constituted the D-major section, is simply

eliminated.32 The climax of the fourth rotation is a lush, spirited march akin in character

to that just before the modulation to D in the second rotation (cf. mm. 315–26 with mm.

832–45). In a goal-oriented structure, this would be a decisive moment in the formal

logic. Yet the climax lacks the two primary march protagonists, x1 and b1.4, even though

the motives formed the backbone of the passage in the second rotation. Instead, it is

31 Cf. mm. 286–89 and mm. 768–71; mm. 293–97 and mm. 782–86; mm. 301–307 and mm. 790–
96.
32 Measures 347–50 are restated in an earlier passage of the fourth rotation (mm. 808–11).

214
based on b7 and the unassuming counterpoint that had been added to the “domesticated”

restatement of “The Battle Begins” (mm. 816–24). Why these themes at this moment?

The question may be relevant if the theme group had a telos. But here, idiom trumps

theme. What is important is simply the normativeness and lushness of the march, its

immediate attractiveness and irresistible high-spirits. The march episode comes to an

end with a final, valedictory statement of b7.

Close (mm. 863–75)

The return of the rupture after the final march episode is a stark reminder that

the symphonic argument is not complete despite the powerful climax and intensely

affirmative tone that had been achieved. To bring the movement to its end, Mahler

packs a number of musical gags into a whirlwind close of just thirteen measures. The

first joke occurs just out of the gates from the rupture; the music begins in the wrong

key, remaining stuck in the rupture’s tonal center: G-flat major. After three bars, as if in

recognition of the mistake, the orchestra lurches to G-major and finally down to F,

without shying from parallel fifths and octaves. Not only does this create a wonderful

harmonic hiccup, but it also reinforces the isolation of the rupture from the statements

of the second theme group that surround it. The remaining few bars of the movement

are a menagerie of martial march motives that were prominent in the third rotation but

absent from the fourth: b3.1, b3.2, b3.3, and a vamp figure that underpinned “The Rabble”

(cf. 540ff. with mm. 871–72). Having given the fourth rotation a decidedly lyrical cast,

Mahler lets the martial motives have the last, rowdy laugh.

215
Allusions, Quotations, and their Meaning

Vital aspects of this music go missing when it is considered in isolation and on

the basis of intrinsic musical properties alone. The movement contains links to other

parts of the symphony, also quotations of and stylistic allusions to other works. In fact,

the nature of these references provides further distinguishing features of the two theme

groups. Mahler exploits stylistic allusions to a much greater extent in the second theme

group and reserves most quotations for the other. The motto portends this dichotomy.

Whereas the tail motive x2 is quoted in the fourth and sixth movements, the head

motive x1 never returns in any subsequent movement. Its simple melodic and rhythmic

contour intimates the vernacularisms that permeate the second theme group. This is all

the more apparent in later statements of x1 that, atypically for the second theme group,

also verge on melodic quotation (e.g., mm. 273–76). Carl Dahlhaus famously wrote of

the motive that it was as if the song “Ich hab’ mich ergeben mit Herz und mit Hand”

and the main theme of the finale to Brahms’s First Symphony were photographed on

top of one another.33

Example 5.7 (appendix G). Melodic allusion in x1

Indeed, the motive is a potent example of the referential plurality of the vernacularisms

in the theme group. “Ich hab’ mich ergeben” was known in many contexts: as a

Thuringian folksong, a children’s song in German-speaking lands more generally, and a

patriotic song closely associated with nationalist student organizations.34 It was this

33 Carl Dahlhaus, “‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’: Zum fünfzigsten Todestag Gustav
Mahlers,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 13 May 1961; quoted in Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav
Mahlers (Munich: Piper, 1982), 47.
34 The tune was originally a Thuringian folk melody, to which Hans Ferdinand Maßmann

penned the text “Ich hab’ mich ergeben mit Herz und mit Hand” in 1819. This version was sung by
German-nationalist student groups in Jena before they were disbanded by the Carlsbad Decrees. In 1820,
August Daniel von Binzer provided a new text (“Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus”) in response to
the crackdown. This was the version sung by students in Vienna in 1878, when Austrian authorities

216
latter version that Brahms quoted in Academic Festival Overture.35 Considered along with

Brahms’s symphony and the stylistic similarities to military music and operettas

discussed below, the motive is as powerful an example of multivalent evocation as the

posthorn solos in the third movement.

Second Theme Group: Allusions to Military Music and Operetta

The prominence that Mahler gives to the manipulation of idiom in the second

theme group throws into relief the references to vernacular styles. As the march

fluctuates, so too does its evocative potential. Deformed marches are more conducive to

military connotation, because this can be achieved with minimal orchestrational touches.

The atmospheric march that begins the march episode of the second rotation, for

example, has motives with martial connotations (mm. 247–72). Mahler colors these with

timbres commonly associated with military bands: trumpets, cymbals, bass drum,

piccolo, and snare drum. The more normative the march idiom, however, the more

strongly that it can evoke other kinds of popular marches, too. As in the example of the

posthorn solos, these more direct connections to the popular sphere are instances of

multivalent evocation. A sense of the referential ambiguity can be gleaned by

dissolved the German-nationalist Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, of which Mahler had been a
member. For an interpretation of the significance of Mahler’s allusion to this student song, see William J.
McGrath, “Mahler and Freud: The Dream of the Stately House,” in Gustav Mahler Kolloquium 1979,
Beiträge der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musik 7, ed. Rudolf Klein (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981), 40–
51.
35 Brahms took the songs that he quoted in the overture from the Commers-Buck (1861), a
collection of student songs that he owned (Arnim Raab, “‘Die eine weint, die andre lacht’: Akademische
Festouvertüre c-Moll, op. 80 und Tragische Ouvertüre d-Moll, op. 81,” in Johannes Brahms: Das
symphonische Werk. Entstehung, Deutung, Wirkung, ed. Renate Ulm [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1996], 87). It is
curious that Mahler’s theme is so frequently compared to both “Ich hab’ mich mit Hand und mit Herz”
and the finale of Brahms’s First, yet Brahms’s finale is rarely likened to the folksong or to his quotation of
it in the Academic Festival Overture. Discussions of Brahms’s symphony instead emphasize the theme’s
similarity to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” This is a telling reminder of how strongly associative hearing is
guided by preconceptions as opposed to actual musical connections.

217
considering a single passage (mm. 273–326) in terms of the sound profiles for military

marches and light marches developed in chapter 4.

For those listeners inclined to hear the echoes of military bands, this passage

approximates their sound with increasing fidelity.36 With the switch to a normative

march idiom (m. 273), many aspects become more like an actual military march. F major

dispels the minor mode, the texture becomes more clearly hierarchical, and Mahler

brings the winds to the fore. Bassoons and cellos resemble the alternation of tonic and

dominant pitches of a typical bass line. With the appearance of b1.4 (mm. 279–97), the

connections become even stronger. The strings all but disappear, and the bass line

becomes regular. Trumpet fanfares and flourishes on the snare drum convey the sounds

of functional military music.

After reverting shortly to a deformed march (mm. 298–314), the military march

style becomes a tick more realistic at the passage marked “Spirited” (Schwungvoll, mm.

315–30). Here, the military march appears in conjunction with a full dynamic and lush

orchestration. The placement of the countermelody b6 in the middle register of the

trumpets and its emphasis on the sixth scale degree are not unlike the pseudo-

counterpoint often heard in the tenor register of military marches. A strong bass line,

reinforced as often in military bands by the bass trombone, alternates tonic and

dominant pitches. The prominent snare drum part and the entrance of piccolos and E-

flat clarinets constitute additional ties to military music. Only the characteristic off-

beats are missing.

The overarching dynamic trajectory of the passage (and, indeed, the three march

episodes more generally) furthers the impression of military bands. Ever since the
36 Donald Mitchell’s writings are paradigmatic for this view. For him, the passage initiated by

the motto theme is “groundbreaking” first and foremost because of its “authentic” military band sonority.

218
distance effects indicated at the beginning of the atmospheric march deformation (“As if

from the far distance,” m. 247), the dynamics have continually increased and the

orchestration thickened.37 The impression of an approaching march thus coincides with

increasing fidelity of genre reference to military music. The nearer the metaphorical

ensemble, the more strongly the music depicts its object.

Listeners predisposed to hear operetta-like traits likewise find corroboration in

the same passage. The appearance of a more normative march in measure 273 coincides

with the disappearance of the signals and flourishes that had supported the martial

connotations of the foregoing atmospheric march deformation. What emerges is a light

march. The airiness of expression and orchestration (only half of the string section are

playing) correlates more closely with operetta than with military bands.

If there is any question that this music is cut from the cloth of a light march, all

doubt is dispelled with the statement of b1.4 beginning at m. 279. The march here is as if

tweaked to evoke the light marches of operetta. The orchestration consists almost

exclusively of instruments uncommon to an Austrian military band: flutes in F, oboes,

bassoons, cellos, basses, timpani, and triangle (the only exception is the clarinets in B-

flat). Just as revealing are the instruments that Mahler does not use: snare drum, bass

drum, and cymbals. These potent signifiers of military marches are heard often in the

movement and in the measures leading up to the entrance of x1, making their absence all

the more conspicuous. Finally, the performance instruction “With the most tender tone

production” (Mit zartester Tongebung) calls expressly for a delicate touch at odds with

the stereotypical heavy-handedness of military marches.

37 Constantin Floros identifies this stretch of music as a prototype of march music approaching

from the distance, a topic widespread in the symphonic literature and frequently used by Mahler (Floros,
Gustav Mahler, 2:157).

219
 The resemblance to operetta is readily apparent in a comparison with Franz von

Suppé’s Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann (1862).38 In the first number, a father gives a signal

for his ten daughters to assemble in the foyer. One of the girls strikes up a cadence on a

military drum, while the father mimics its sound. Together, they create a kind of

comically deformed march that, as the remaining daughters enter, yields to a light

march with very similar orchestration and melodic content as b1.4 in Mahler’s

symphony.39

Example 5.8 (appendix G). Franz von Suppé, Zehn Mädchen und kein
Mann, no. 1, Entrance of the Girls

Even the trumpet signals and snare drum rolls that accompany the varied

restatement of b1.4 (starting at m. 289) reinforce the operetta-like traits. In the Act 3

Trio of Suppé’s Fatinitza, trumpet signals bridge the gaps between melodic motives

much as they do in Mahler’s score, growing longer with each entrance until they

assume an almost obbligato role in the melody’s repetition.

Example 5.9 (appendix G). Franz von Suppé, Fatinitza, no. 23

The most purely military elements are mockingly exaggerated by the reporter Julian,

who mimics the trumpet signals and drum rolls with a series of nonsense syllables “Ta-

ta ra-ta-ta ta, rum.” The lightly parodic and comic effect of the passage is typical of

operetta’s treatment of the military. The soldier Vladimir sings about the love’s

38 Suppé’s operetta was well known in the Habsburg Monarchy during Mahler’s lifetime. A

staple at the theater in Iglau during Mahler’s childhood (see appendix 2), it was performed both in
Olmütz and Vienna while he resided there. In Kassel Mahler’s romantic interest, Johanna Richter,
performed in a version of the operetta re-titled 15 Mädchen und kein Mann, but the concert’s review does
not identify the conductor (Hans Joachim Schaefer, Gustav Mahler in Kassel [Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag,
1982], 59). The operetta was performed at least 251 times on German stages in the years 1897–1921
(Otto Keller, Die Operette in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [Leipzig: Stein-Verlag, 1926], 437).
39 Both make use of the rising third and fourth as anapest pickups, repeated and then contrasted
with stepwise motion. The first phrase of each melody descends from the initial downbeat, and the second
begins with a leap up to the highest note, a third above the starting point.

220
inspiration to vanquish his enemy, yet Vladimir is a pants role sung by a woman. The

song’s effect is rooted more in homoerotic titillation than in stirring patriotic fervor. As

so typical for operetta, military references are used as metaphors of love and sexual

conquest, for levity and frivolity as opposed to the national and patriotic import that

would ordinarily inhere in direct imitations of military marches.

Mahler’s varied statement of b1.4 is also a vehicle for musical comedy. The

trumpet signals, likewise piano, balance the quiet march in the reduced string ensemble,

a point that Mahler stresses by marking the highest—and most powerfully projecting—

note of the signal sempre piano. In total disproportion, the snare drum rolls and, later,

the four horns and timpani overpower the march and signals with forte interjections.

Peppering a quiet passage with sudden, loud outbursts has belonged to the stock antics

of musical comedy time out of mind. Precedents can even be found in symphonies like

Haydn’s no. 94, whose monikers in English (Surprise) and German (mit dem Paukenschlag

[with the timpani stroke]) stem from a similar musical joke. In the second half of the

nineteenth century, however, the device was hardly conceivable in the rarified

atmosphere of the Austro-German symphony as Weltanschauungsmusik. It would have

been more frequently encountered in newly written operettas.40

Viennese operettas also contained lush marches similar to that of the spirited

march in Mahler’s episode. In the Act 3 finale of Suppé’s Boccaccio, the climactic march,

like Mahler’s, appears in conjunction with a sudden shift to fortissimo out of a previously

softer dynamic.

Example 5.10 (appendix G). Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, act 3 finale

40 Other examples include the Act 1 finale of Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent, which Mahler had

conducted nearly a dozen times in the spring of 1896, just weeks before composing the first movement of
the Third Symphony, and the Act 1 finale of the Offenbach’s Les Brigands.

221
Suppé’s swashbuckling melody, led by the flutes, clarinets, and violins, resembles the

shape and register of b6. The orchestration of both marches contains pronounced basses,

alternating tonic and dominant pitches, and regular percussion flourishes. And the

scoring of both marches feature instruments common to the military band.41

The topos of military bands approaching from the distance was also common to

the operetta stage. How much Mahler’s march episode overlaps with these conventions

can be gauged by the appearance of a Stadtkapelle in the first act finale of Carl

Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent (see ex. 4.1). Millöcker’s imitation of a band takes place

outdoors amidst a large crowd assembled for a spring fair marking the end of winter.

Mahler’s erstwhile title for the movement was “Summer Marches In. Fanfare and

cheerful march” (see appendix A5–6). In a conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, he

likewise invoked the imagery of a band playing outdoors.42 Underpinning these

programmatic similarities are common features of musical construction. Both composers

use distance effects and similar rhythmic and melodic clichés.43 Operettas did not

generally evoke an approaching band over as many measures as in Mahler’s march

episodes, but the similarity in procedure is nonetheless apparent and, for a symphony at

the fin de siècle, jarring.

That the same passage can be heard as imitating either military bands or

operetta illustrates how the vernacularisms in the Third Symphony can be referentially

ambiguous. These divergent impressions result from describing the same musical

Boccaccio contains no military characters or events, but the texts often use military metaphors.
41

Here, Boccaccio’s wit and demeanor are likened to sharp weapons.

42 See appendix B.1.
43 Millöcker creates a sense of distance by having the band play off-stage fanfares. The band’s

melody is similar to b1.4, in that both are assembled from multiple anapests, grace notes, a sixteenth-note
turn, and a rounding-off figure—three-shorts played on the beginning of the final beat of a phrase. The
intervallic fund of both melodies contains many rising thirds and fourths, and each is cast in a strictly
homophonic texture.

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details from opposing points of view and from prioritizing features of the musical text in

different ways. Like the posthorn solos, they are instances of Mahler’s technique of

multivalent evocation, written in such a way as to invite comparison to multiple

domains of music making. Reducing the associative thickness of the marches to any

particular origin is a strongly interpretational act, not a mere description.

*
* *

Mahler intensified the lyrical and martial expressive registers in the third

rotation of the symphony, creating a rapturous love song and an expansive set of

marches militaires. Although the latter lose in referential ambiguity by exhibiting a more

clearly military character, they nevertheless remain only evocations and never

constitute wholesale imitations of military marches. In “The Rabble,” for example, the

woodwind trills and downbeat/off-beat alternation in the trombones, both characteristic

elements of march textures, appear in grotesquely exaggerated form (mm. 539–53).

Mahler also draws on timbres closely associated with military marches in “The Battle

Begins.” He introduces the section with a four-square rhythm on the bass drum and

attached cymbals, then gives x1 to soli trombones and b1.3 to four piccolos, three

clarinets in B-flat, and two clarinets in E-flat (mm. 582–86). Little else in the texture at

this point is related to actual military marches, but the accumulation of these

orchestrational details, together with the martial motives and affirmative tone, strongly

evokes them.44 “The Southerly Storm” (mm. 605ff.) is akin to the atmospheric marches

of the second and fourth rotations, in that timbres and motives evocative of military

bands are interjected as particulates above a continually surging bass line. The offstage

44 Thereafter, the woodwind trills, foursquare rhythms in the percussion, and the trumpet

flourishes reinforce the connection to military bands.

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drum signal that closes the rotation (mm. 634–42) is a realistic effect that recalls the

side drum cadences that introduced marches in functional music. The reference is all the

more vivid because the drum strikes its own tempo.

Mahler’s evocations of military bands, however, go beyond the sound profile

developed in chapter 4. He also alludes to formal and topical conventions of

programmatic military music.45 The history of these descriptive pieces has important

parallels with the history of the posthorn (see ch. 3). Composers started writing

keyboard and vocal works depicting military conflicts as early as the sixteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, they also marshaled the coloristic resources of the orchestra

for battle music.46 With the emerging dichotomy between art and popular spheres in the

early nineteenth century, however, these genres, like imitations of the posthorn, fell

squarely into the popular sphere.47 The defeat of Napoleon inspired the creation of the

last exemplars by composers of art music before the genre became the nearly exclusive

domain of military band concerts and the salon.48

Salient features of Mahler’s march episode are related to conventions of military

Tongemälde from the end of the century.49 The evocation of military music and division

45 The genre was known under various terms. The most common were Schlachtenmusik,

Tongemälde, or Tonbild. Pieces often had characteristic titles related to the military.
46 The article on battle music in Grove Music Online focuses almost exclusively on the genre as

cultivated by composers from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries (Alan Brown, “Battle Music,” in
Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/02318 [accessed March 20, 2010]).
47 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth includes a wholesale condemnation of

such pieces.
48 These pieces include Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg, oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria (1813), Peter

Winter’s Schlachtsymphonie (1814), Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s Schlachtsymphonie (1814), and Weber’s
Kampf und Sieg (1815). Later works related to battle music include Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht (1856–57) and
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880).
49There is little secondary literature on the genre after it entered the popular sphere. The best
overview is Eugen Brixel, “Tongemälde und Schlachtenmusiken: Ein militärmusikalisches Genre des 19.

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into sharply delineated sections, for example, recall the potpourri-like structure of the

popular genre. By around 1880, Tongemälde consisted of contrasting episodes stitched

together with signals and fanfares in lieu of transitions.50 Under the influence of the

large potpourris so beloved at military concerts, many of these works consisted almost

entirely of material borrowed from diverse sources: functional military music,

entertainment music, folksongs, or operas. Both of these features are present in Mahler’s

march episode, though in attenuated form. Although there are no overt quotations, the

vernacularisms do constitute stylistic borrowing. And even though Mahler does not do

away with transitions entirely, he does delineate the breaks between the individual

sections with fanfares and signals (mm. 579–82, 603–4, 634–42).

The topical similarities are even more compelling. The episodes of programmatic

military music were highly characterized scenes drawn from a body of clichéd ideas.51

Most of these scenes had nothing to do with battle, but were familiar topics from salon

and popular music subsumed under a loose narrative sequence. Except for “The Rabble,”

all of the sections in the third rotation’s second theme group correlate with these naïve

clichés: the rapturous transformation of b7 (mm. 492ff.) strongly recalls love music,

“The Battle Begins” a triumphant march, and “The Southerly Storm” storm music.

Moreover, the progression in Mahler’s symphony from the rapturous episode, in the

rich key of G-flat and with undulating harp arpeggios, to a march episode centering on

E-flat minor, parallels the frequent juxtaposition of love and war in Tongemälde. The

Jahrhunderts,” in Eugen Brixel zum 60. Geburtstag (Graz: Internationale Gesellschaft zur Erforschung und
Förderung der Blasmusik, 1999), 27–40.
50 Brixel, “Tongemälde und Schlachtenmusiken,” 30.
51 In the potpourri-like exemplars of the genre, composers often borrowed the same material in
order to depict the same clichéd scene. Hence Carl Michael Ziehrer and Heinrich Saro borrowed a melody
from Otto Nicolai’s Die lustige Weiber von Windsor (no. 12, “O süßer Mond, o holde Nacht”) for their
characterizations of nighttime. See Brixel, “Tongemälde und Schlachtenmusiken,” 35.

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greater part of Béla Kéler’s Soldatenleben (A Soldier’s Life), a modest keyboard work for

salon, consists of a serenade followed by a march. The “Love Serenade of the Warrior”

(Des Kriegers Liebesständchen) is in D-flat major and has a rolling Alberti bass; the march

is in E-flat and, like Mahler’s, divided into three sections. Moreover, programmatic

military music often used dynamics to imitate the effect of an approaching band. In his

Österreichische Militärrevue, Alfons Czibulka creates the impression through a large-scale

crescendo—a procedure not unlike the dynamic trajectory of Mahler’s march episodes

in the second, third, and fourth rotations (see fig. 5.8).

The topical commonalities extend far beyond these limited examples. One of the

most popular Tongemälde at the turn of the century was Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Traum

eines österreichischen Reservisten (Dream of an Austrian Reservist, 1890).52 As was typical

for the genre, Ziehrer created a written commentary summarizing the programmatic

sequence. The musical and poetic topoi it contains overlap widely with those in Mahler’s

Third Symphony and his descriptions of it.

Table 5.1 (appendix G). Program to Ziehrer’s Traum eines

österreichischen Reservisten and topically related works by Mahler

In Ziehrer’s work, for example, the reservist goes to the tavern to drink and celebrate, a

scenario that resonates with Mahler’s description of the march episodes in the Third:

“That I can’t do without trivialities is only too well known. This time, however, I

exceed all permitted limits. One can sometimes believe that one is in a tavern or

soldier’s quarters.”53 The battle scenes in Ziehrer’s Tongemälde take place under the

52 The version of the work used here is Hans Krenn’s piano reduction (Vienna: Josef Weinberger,

?1897). Jason Stephen Heilmann gives a useful summary of the work and its shifting content in “O du
mein Österreich: Patriotic Music and Multinational Identity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (Ph.D.
diss., Duke University, 2009), 189–200.
53 Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahlers Briefe, 2d ed. (Vienna: Zsolnay: 1996), 191: “Daß es bei mir
nicht ohne Trivialitäten abgehen kann, ist zur Genüge bekannt. Diesmal übersteigt es allerdings alle

226
pretence of a dream. Not only was the Greek god Pan associated with dreams, but the

eerie effects out of which the third rotation’s rapturous and march episodes emerge

create an effect akin to entering a dream state (mm. 463–81).54 The storm episode of

Ziehrer’s work, like “The Southerly Storm,” is underpinned by running sixteenth notes.

Ziehrer uses the cadence of a solo bass drum to introduce the funeral march at the

section “Corpses of fallen soldiers,” an effect akin to Mahler’s use of the instrument at

the beginning of the first theme group (mm. 23f., 161f.).55 Signals and marches suffuse

many parts of Ziehrer’s Tongemälde and include extended side drum cadences between

sections in much the same way as Mahler brings the third rotation to a close (mm. 634–

42). Two other examples concern passages treated in chapters 1 and 3. Traum eines

österreichischen Reservisten includes travelling Gypsy musicians, which parallels Mahler’s

allusion to style hongrois in the First Symphony, as well as bird calls and a postal

carriage, both of which are related to the third movement of the Third Symphony.56

It must be emphasized, however, that the march episode in the third rotation

cannot be reduced to its affinities with programmatic military music. As with

erlaubten Grenzen. Man glaubt manchmal, sich in einer Schänke oder in einem Stall zu befinden.” The
translation of Stall is extremely difficult. The word generally means a stall for animals, but it is not clear
what Mahler would have meant by such a comparison. Perhaps he did mean stables at a military
encampment. The translation here, however, is based on an entry in the historical Deutsches Wörterbuch,
which indicates that word was also slang for a shed occupied by non-commissioned officers (Jacob Grimm
and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, http://germazope.uni-
trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/dwb/WBB/dwb/wbgui [accessed 21 March 2010]). See also
Knud Martner, ed., Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, Bill Hopkins
(New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), 189.
54 This passage ushers in the second varied statement of the material from the first rotation.
55 Ziehrer borrows the funeral music from Donizetti’s Don Sebastian, which Mahler quotes in the

third movement of the First Symphony (Alexander Ringer, “‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’: Allusion
und Zitat in der musikalischen Erzählung Gustav Mahlers,” in Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte –
Ästhetik – Theorie. Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Danuser, et al [Laaber:
Laaber, 1988], 599–600).
56One of Ziehrer’s birds is a cuckoo, whose call Mahler includes in the accompaniment to his
song “Ablösung im Sommer,” the basis of the third movement’s refrains. Ziehrer represents the posthorn
with a quotation of “Jede Dienstpost,” an official signal of the Austrian postal service from at least 1844.

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vernacularisms in general, the music retains some referential plurality. Operetta can

again provide a counter example. The grotesque exaggerations that characterize “The

Rabble” were not common in programmatic military music, but they were certainly at

home in operetta. A tendency to parody the military was common to both Parisian and

Viennese incarnations of the genre. We have already seen two examples of comic

imitations of drum signals, in Suppé’s Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann and in Fatinitza.

Offenbach also parodied the sounds of military bands in the Regimental Song (no. 4) and

onstage military march (no. 6) of La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein. Moreover, parody

was but one element in a distinctive expressive balance. Operetta typically brought

together parody with sentiment, kitsch with deep feelings. Mahler creates a similar

aesthetic profile by juxtaposing the grotesquerie of “The Rabble” with the rapturous

sentiment of the preceding episode. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, an early

proponent of Mahler’s music, wrote Liebeserklärung [declaration of love] above the

violin solo in his score, most likely as a result of his conversations with Mahler about

the symphony.57

*
* *

The final statement of the second theme group is marked by an increase in the

lyrical march inflection at the expense of the martial character. Some of the resulting

changes have analogues in the operetta literature. One of these is the addition of a

lyrical cello line to the repetition of the light march (mm. 762–67).58 The eponymous

57 Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 198. Incidentally, the sentiment in Mahler’s
lyrical episode is not only operetta-like within the context of the expressive character that follows it, but
also in its musical features. Compare measures 505–22 with the Trio (no. 8) at the beginning of act 2 of
Strauss Jr.’s Der Zigeunerbaron.
58 Indeed the phenomenon is not limited to marches, but occurs in dances, too. The addition of a
lyrical counterpoint was a favorite technique of Strauss’s. He uses it again in the first act finale to enhance
the repetition of a freely declamatory section for chorus.

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march of Strauss’s operetta Der lustige Krieg is a light march akin to Mahler’s. When it

is repeated in the Act 1 finale, Strauss adds a lyrical countermelody in the cello, doubled

by the soprano.

Example 5.11 (appendix G). Johann Strauss, Jr., Der lustige Krieg, no. 14,
Violetta’s march with lyrical cello

Mahler’s singing cello line extends no farther than the antecedent phrase and is

enriched by an imitative entrance in the second violins just two bars later. The brevity

and intimation of fugato clearly distinguish Mahler’s implementation of this standard

procedure of popular music, but not without conjuring the association in the first

place.59

The rousing march that closes the second theme group is a second analogue to

operetta. Such march climaxes were a familiar formal practice in operetta, heard often at

the ends of overtures and acts. To consider only the operettas that Mahler himself

conducted, such marches appear in the finale to the Act 3 of Suppé’s Fatinitza; in the

overture and finales to Acts 1 and 3 of Suppé’s Boccaccio; in the finales to Acts 1 and 3 of

Suppé’s Donna Juanita; in the overture and Act 1 finale of Strauss’s Der lustige Krieg, and

in the finales to Acts 1 and 3 of Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent.60 They were far less

common in other genres. Programmatic military pieces tended toward more pompous,

hymnic closes.61 And animated marches with military inflections appeared only rarely at

This is neither the first nor most straightforward time that Mahler had adopted the technique.
59

On the repetition of the Ländler theme in the second movement of the Second Symphony, the texture is
enriched with the addition of a lyrical cello countermelody in a manner even more analogous to the
Lustiger Krieg march and other examples from Strauss’s oeuvre. Strauss used the technique in purely
instrumental compositions like the “Johannis-Käferln” waltz op. 82, in which the first waltz strain, “Im
Ländlerstil,” is adorned with a lyrical cello accompaniment upon its repetition.
60 Other examples of spirited marches can be found in two of the most famous Viennese

operettas, with which Mahler was almost certainly familiar: in the finale to Act 2 of Strauss’s Der
Zigeunerbaron and in the finales to Acts 1 and 3 of Zeller’s Der Vogelhändler.
61 Brixel, “Tongemälde und Schlachtenmusiken,” 279, 287.

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the climaxes in the classical repertoire. It is telling that the clearest examples appeared

decades before Mahler’s Third Symphony in French comic opera, a repertoire that

greatly influenced Suppé.62

The marches that close Mahler’s movement and the overture to Suppé’s

Boccaccio proceed through very similar stages. In both cases, the march climax begins

lushly scored and with a melody more lyrical than martial (cf. mm. Suppé, 338–53;

Mahler, mm. 832–35).

Example 5.12 (appendix G). Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, overture, mm.
353–87

After fully stating the themes, Suppé and Mahler intensify their marches with the

addition of rising chromatic lines (cf. Suppé, mm. 368–80; Mahler, mm. 836–45). They

then reach a new high point in which another march theme (b7 in Mahler’s case) is

stated in the lower voices under a blanket of trills or tremolos in the treble range (cf.

Suppé, mm. 381–93; Mahler, mm. 846–57). The final stages of both consist of frenetic

repetitions of march motives that quickly bring the pieces to their close (cf. Suppé, mm.

394–403; Mahler, mm. 863–75). The only major structural difference between Suppé

and Mahler is that Mahler inserts the rupture between his last two stages (mm. 857–

63). Being of such contrasting tonal and motivic content, it reminds of larger issues to

be resolved in later movements.

First Theme Group: Quotations and their Consequences for Meaning

Mahler alludes to vernacular styles far less in the first theme group. To be sure,

some motives can be heard in terms of non-symphonic repertoires. The bass drum

62 Examples of French comic opera with march finales are the overtures to Fra Diavolo (1830)

and La Fille du Régiment (1840).

230
cadence of a1 and the low, pulsing rhythms of a2 hint at a funeral march, but without

ever being integrated into a fuller rendition of the idiom. Their effect is not so much

referential as expressive. As in other instances of stylized funeral music, Mahler uses a1

and a2 to create an oppressive atmosphere that intimates death.63 Additionally, a5 can be

heard as a deformed quotation of the Austrian military signal “attention” (Habt Acht).

Example 5.13 (appendix G). Comparison of a5 with “Habt Acht”

The similarities are undeniable, yet they could have arisen by chance. The motive’s

distinctive traits can be accounted for by its context and function: a5 appears in the

midst of many motives with similarly elemental design, and its disruptive function in

the first theme group requires a penetrating sonority and harsh dissonance.

Mahler connects the first theme group to other parts of the symphony primarily

through quotation. He intended to unify the work in this way from very early on. In the

summer of 1895, he incorporated material from the projected finale, “Das himmlische

Leben,” into the second and fifth movements.64 These links were lost when Mahler

omitted the song in June 1896. He then reconstituted inter-movemental unity by

drawing material from later parts of the symphony into the first movement—and more

specifically, its introduction and first theme group.65

63 The slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony is the most obvious precedent, but

Mahler’s evocation comes closer to the final bars of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Because
funeral music was an established topic in the symphonic (not to mention the operatic) tradition also
diminishes the referential character of a1 and a2. Lacking such precedents, the animated style of military
and popular marches conveyed a stronger sense of stylistic allusion.
64 Mahler jettisoned “Das himmlische Leben” so late in the compositional process that he had

already included its material in sketches for the marches of the first movement (Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek S.m. 22794; facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,”
410–18, 598–600; transcription in Franklin, Mahler, 100–104).
65 Mahler almost certainly introduced some material from the first movement when he revised

the sixth movement in late July 1896. It is difficult to know for sure what precise changes he made,
however, because no draft score of the sixth movement survives. For Mahler’s remarks on the revisions,
see Herbert Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg: Wagner,
1984), 66.

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 Mahler created a particularly strong connection between the first and fourth

movements. The fourth movement is a song in two strophes. At the beginning of each,

x3 and x4 appear together and at the same pitch level as in the introduction of

movement one (cf. IV/12–17, 83–93 with I/11–23, 655–66). The descending second of

x3 is a prominent melodic cell throughout the fourth movement as it had been in the

first theme group. The song also quotes x2 at the same pitch level as it appears in the

motto, A1.2, and A1.4. Finally, Mahler states A2 throughout the fourth movement in

various forms, instrumental and vocal.66

Re-using instrumental motives in a song setting has important consequences for

the symphony’s meaning. In a letter to the critic Max Marschalk, Mahler wrote of the

Second Symphony that “The conceptual basis is clearly articulated in the words of the

final chorus. The sudden entrance of the alto solo [in the fourth movement] casts an

illuminating light on the initial movements.”67 Mahler used an analogous procedure in

the Third Symphony, on which he was working at the time of the letter. The symphony

begins with three instrumental movements followed by two songs and an instrumental

finale. The patchwork of quotations and tonal relationships that link the symphony’s

songs to its instrumental movements are a musical correlate to the “illuminating light.”

As in the Second Symphony, the song texts contain a conceptual basis for interpreting

the symphony as a whole.68

66 See mm. 24–27, 29–34 (hrns.); mm. 57–60, 63–66 (vlns.); mm. 101–3, 106–10, 115–22 (vln.

solo); mm. 119–22 (alto).

67 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 163: “Die gedankliche Basis des Werkes ist deutlich in den

Worten des Schlußchores ausgesprochen, und auf die ersten Sätze wirft das plötzlich einfallende Altsolo
ein erhellendes Licht.” See also Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 172.
68 Mahler understood that the manifold links could not be fully appreciated in a single hearing,

which is why he advocated exhaustive score study in order to determine how the work’s disparate parts
relate to one another. See ch. 1, pp. 36–37; Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 134, 164, 175, 277;
Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 151–52, 173, 182, 262; La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of

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 The text of the fourth movement is the “Drunken Song of Midnight” from

Nieztsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883–85).69

O Mensch! Gib Acht! O man! Take heed!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? What says the deep midnight?
Ich schlief! I slept!
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht! I have awoken from a deep dream!
Die Welt ist tief! The world is deep,
und tiefer als der Tag gedacht! and deeper than day surmised!
O Mensch! Tief! O man! Deep!
Tief ist ihr Weh! Deep is its woe!
Lust tiefer noch als Herzeleid! Desire [is] deeper still than heart’s sorrow!
Weh spricht: Vergeh! Woe says: perish!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, Yet all desire wants eternity,
will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit! wants deep, deep eternity!

The song raises the ultimate questions of existence and frames them in a way that

resonates with Mahler’s idealist worldview. There is more to the universe than the

everyday world illuminated by the Enlightenment and light of reason. The ultimate fate

of humankind is determined by metaphysical truths that cannot be directly known. The

suffering caused by awareness of this tragic condition is great, but not as strong as our

instinctive desire to go on living, even in death.

Mahler uses a network of motivic and tonal relationships to indicate that the

symphony’s overarching argument concerns the issues raised in Nietzsche’s text.

Indeed, in the first movement, the motivic links with the song all reflect expressively

the conceptual content of the text with which they will be eventually associated. The

motives x2 and x3 are the first orchestral utterance of the symphony following the

motto. In the fourth movement, these same motives set the words “O Mensch!” By

transplanting the passage to the symphony’s beginning, Mahler suggests that, not just

Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 523, 525; Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler
Unbekannte Briefe (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 1983), 149.
69 For a fuller discussion of the philosophical import of Nietzsche’s text as well as Mahler’s

changes to it, see Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination,” 252–56, 267–80.

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the song, but the entire symphony is an address to humankind.70 The treatment of x2 in

the first movement likewise takes on greater significance in light of its text in the fourth

movement: “Tief ist ihr Weh!” (mm. 100–101). Mahler bestows nearly every statement

of x2 the onerous sonority of fortissimo, unison horns. Moreover, in successive

statements of the main theme in which the motive is embedded (A1.1, A1.2, A1.4),

Mahler frequently combines open horns with the abrasive sound of stopped horns. The

tumultuous character and timbral abrasions vividly convey the suffering articulated in

the fourth movement. Mahler also hints that the main theme is an expression of

suffering even when it does not contain x2 or the horn sonority. By repeating the word

“Tief!” as two whole notes before proceeding to “Tief ist ihr Weh!” (Deep is its woe, mm.

97–101), Mahler creates a reminiscence of opening gesture of the trombone solos in the

second and fourth rotations (A1.3, A1.6).

Nietzsche’s text also helps to make sense of the remaining link between the first

and fourth movements: A2. In the first movement, it was like a foreign body, never

integrated fully into the first theme group’s proceedings. It appears throughout the

fourth movement in various guises, first as an instrumental premonition (mm. 24–27),

then as a full-blown instrumental statement (mm. 57–60), and then with an arabesque

quality (mm. 101–3). Only at the end is it sung to the line: “Yet all desire wants

70 Recall that Mahler composed the first movement the summer of 1896, having largely
completed the other movements a year earlier (see ch. 1, pp. 13–16). This link between the first and fourth
movements suggests a possible reason for Mahler to quote an actual military signal in a6. The second half
of the address “Take heed” (Gib Acht!) is closely related semantically to the function of the trumpet signal
“Attention” (Habt Acht). Moreover, such a connection would not have been overly cryptic in Mahler’s day.
It is reasonable to assume that a good part of the public had at least a passing familiarity with specific
signals. Military bands were a major presence in the musical lives of many cities, and programmatic
military music, like Ziehrer’s Traum eines österreichischen Reservisten, routinely quoted military signals and
named their function in the score or program.

234
eternity” (mm. 119–22).71 The insertions of A2 in the first theme group of movement

one can thus be understood as brief expressions of the longing for eternal life in the

midst of the strife and turbulence of the main theme. By turning A2 into the most

prominent theme of the fourth movement, he gives greater emphasis to the resilience of

human longing. As stated just a couple lines earlier: “Lust tiefer noch als Herzeleid!”

(Desire [is] deeper still than heart’s sorrow!).

The telos of the first theme group reinforces this interpretation through an

apparent allusion to the song “Urlicht” in the Second Symphony, specifically, a short

cadential passage that appears between the song’s two stanzas.

Example 5.14. Allusion to Mahler, Symphony no. 2, mvt. 4

The song’s text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, deals with the same basic themes as

the “Drunken Song of Midnight”: death and what lies beyond. Like Nietzsche’s poem,

the first stanza of “Urlicht” focuses on man and his suffering in the face of mortality.

The second stanza conveys the human spirit’s resolve for eternal life, even though an

angel tries to block the way to heaven. The telos of the first theme group recalls the

passage immediately following the last line of this stanza: “I would rather be in

heaven!”72 Moreover, the D major and chorale-like texture of the telos forecast the key

and texture of the sixth movement, thereby implicating the symphony’s finale in the

solution to the human predicament.

71 This semantic dimension makes even more compelling the motive’s similarity to the secondary

theme of the first movement of the Second Symphony (mm. 48–50), which has a strongly celestial quality.
72 There is even a subtle similarity between the line “O no! I won’t be turned away!” (mm. 51–53)

and the theme A2 (mm. 83–90). Both begin with a descent of a fourth, A2 by leap and the song a
diminished fourth by step, and then rise by step with a short downward turn at the end. In addition, but
motives are directly restated at a higher pitch level. The allusion is an apt one, given the function of A2 as
an oasis within the pain caused by our mortal condition.

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 Mahler turns the progression from suffering to comfort in the first theme group

of the first movement into the premise of the finale. Broadly speaking, the finale is a

grand chorale in D major with three tumultuous episodes based on material from

movement one. The first episode begins with a melodic reminiscence of the rupture (cf.

I/366–68, VI/71–75), which ushers in the c#°7 harmonic field that had underpinned the

beginnings of A1.1 and A1.4 (cf. I/56–64, 369–75 with VI/74–79).73 At this point,

Mahler introduces a new theme closely related to A1 in harmony, melodic shape,

sonority, and expression.

Example 5.15 (appendix G). New theme in first episode

The second episode is based on x2 with its characteristic horn sonority from movement

one (mm. 180–92). It is a pitch-specific quotation not only of the motto and A1.4, but

also of “Tief ist ihr Weh” from the fourth movement, as is increasingly apparent in the

augmented statements of the motive.74 Mahler thus connects the turbulent episodes of

the finale explicitly with the suffering described in the Nietzschean text of movement

four. The third episode, which appears at the moment that one expects a triumphal

codetta affirming the cadence in D major, quotes the most disruptive gesture from the

first movement: the rupture (mm. 219–24). There, the theme A1.4, blared by unison

horns, grew directly out of the first rupture (mm. 369f.). Analogously, the new theme

from the finale’s first episode emerges here, its woodwinds and violins reinforced

canonically by eight horns by (mm. 224–33). Mahler whips the theme into a frenzy that

culminates in a final reminiscence of the first movement: the threefold disruptions,

73 The melody at the beginning of A1.2 outlines the same chord, but with a harmonic

underpinning of B-flat minor.

74 The augmented statement is also a pitch-specific quotation of the horns in mm. 111–15 in the

first movement.

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especially the version that followed the statements of A2 (cf. VI/234–44 with I/91–98,

406–10). The phrasal gesture remains normative, but Mahler changes the harmonies

and motives. Instead of a5 or x2, the horns declaim the theme from the finale’s first

episode, its disruptive power finally being stifled in a closing tag: E-flat, D, C. The three

tones are an inversion of x2 and a fitting symbol for the imminent end to the suffering

that x2 and its related themes had embodied. With this, the last tumultuous episode of

the finale ebbs away. The chorale returns one more time and grows resolutely and

inexorably to a resounding, D-major climax.

Mahler includes in the finale five prominent melodic quotations to figures in his

pantheon of great composers: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, and Hans Rott.75 These

references are more than mere homage. They also strengthen the movement’s semantic

content, too. The main chorale theme of the finale, an example of multivalent evocation,

simultaneously recalls both Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 135 and Wagner’s Parsifal.76

Example 5.16 (appendix G). Melodic allusions in main theme of mvt. 6

Mahler did not just pick any two works from these composers whom he venerated

above all others; he chose their last major works, the final musical testaments to their

75 The last two names of this list may be somewhat unexpected. Despite criticizing Brahms’s
music on occasion with friends, Mahler clearly respected the elder composer. Mahler paid Brahms annual
visits from 1893 until 1896, the summer before Brahms passed away. Shortly before taking a break from
work on the first and sixth movements of the Third Symphony to visit Brahms in 1896, Mahler wrote to
Anna von Mildenburg that Brahms is “a gnarled and sturdy tree, but with mature, sweet fruits. It is a joy
to see the powerful trunk thick with foliage” (Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 184: “ ist ein knorriger
und stämmiger Baum, aber reife, süße Früchte, und eine Freude, den mächtigen, reichbelaubten Stamm
anzusehen.”) Hans Rott was a fellow composition student at the Vienna Conservatory. Mahler—and
Bruckner—greatly admired Rott’s abilities as a composer. Tragically, Rott died very young, just 21 years
old. For more on Mahler and Rott’s relationship, see Paul Banks, “Hans Rott and the New Symphony,”
Musical Times 130, no. 1763 (March 1989): 142–47; and Stephen McClatchie, “Hans Rott, Gustav Mahler,
and ‘The New Symphony’: New Evidence for a Pressing Question,” Music & Letters 81, no. 3 (August
2000): 392-401.
76The similarities to Beethoven’s theme are especially compelling: a ten-note melodic quotation
with altered rhythm and meter, similar voice leading and harmonies. Moreover, both appear at the
beginning of the movement and have closely related performance instructions.

237
mortal lives before they were forced to confront that greatest of questions that animated

Mahler’s symphony. In fact, Beethoven’s String Quartet expressly states the question,

albeit whimsically, at the start of the finale: “Must it be? It must be!” The moment from

Parsifal to which Mahler alludes is equally telling. It occurs at the beginning of the first

act as Gurnemanz kneels with two squires and prays.

Later on in the finale, Mahler quotes Brahms’s song “Feldeinsamkeit.”77

Example 5.17 (appendix G). Quotation of Brahms

Nominally a meditation on the pleasures of lying in the grass, Brahms emphasizes the

more profound, metaphysical implications of Hermann Allmers’s elegant poem. It is not

just the vast sky that is contemplated, but the great beyond, too. The melody that

Mahler quotes is the song’s refrain, which sets the last line of each stanza. Both invoke

metaphors for heaven; the second is particularly close to the semantic impetus of

Mahler’s symphony:

Ich ruhe still im hohen grünen Gras I am resting quietly in the tall, green grass,
Und sende lange meinen Blick nach oben, And gaze longingly above,
Von Grillen rings umschwirrt ohn Unterlaß, With crickets chirping incessantly all around,
Von Himmelsbläue wundersam umwoben. Enshrouded in heaven’s wonderful blue.

Die schönen weißen Wolken ziehn dahin The beautiful, white clouds are floating there,
Durchs tiefe Blau, wie schöne stille Träume, Through the deep blue, like beautiful, quiet dreams,
Mir ist, als ob ich längst gestorben bin I feel as if I had long passed away,
Und ziehe selig mit durch ew’ge Räume. And were floating blessedly through the eternal
expanse.

Mahler’s greatest homage was to his departed friend, Hans Rott. Not only does

the main theme allude to Rott’s slow movement (see ex. 15.16), but so do the two

critical elements of the movement’s climax, too.78 The finale’s third, calamitous episode

77 I am indebted to R. John Wiley for drawing my attention to this connection. The rising sixth

figure at the beginning of these melodies also serves as the basis for the lyrical trombone solos of the first
movement (see mm. 424–311, 710–14).
78 These quotations were first identified by Paul Banks in his article “Hans Rott and the New

Symphony,” Musical Times 130, no. 1763 (March 1989): 142–47. The article contains discussions and
facsimiles of all the quotations discussed here.

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culminates in a quotation of the rupture from the first movement; after the rupture ebbs,

the trumpets enter ppp with a transcendent rendition of the choral theme (mm. 251f.).

The entire complex—rupture, ebb, trumpet chorale texture—appears in a strikingly

similar form at the high point of Rott’s slow movement.79 Mahler’s borrowings are here

so extensive as to go beyond a simple semantic impulse. Nonetheless, their import is

similar to that of the allusions to Beethoven and Wagner. This was Rott’s only

symphony. Soon after its completion, he was committed to a mental hospital and died

four years later. Mahler’s thoughts turned to life’s ultimate questions as he constructed

the Third Symphony’s finale; it was fitting that he should think on Hans Rott, too.

*
* *

The premise of the Third Symphony is contained in the structural gestures and

first theme group of the first movement. In the fourth movement, Mahler supplies a

semantic dimension to these materials: they convey existential angst and the desire to

transcend the human condition. In the sixth movement, the suffering is finally overcome

in the glory of a D-major chorale. Since Mahler omits the second theme group of the

first movement from the inter-movement network of motivic connections, its semantic

role within the symphony is best gauged by what it is not. The second theme group is a

foil to all that the first theme group represents; it gives expression to the joy of living

unclouded by premonitions of our mortality. This interpretation gains plausibility from

the vernacular allusions. Paul Bekker once wrote that, for Offenbach and Strauss,

operetta was an expression of the “wish to raise spirits, be it through wit, through grace,

79 Franklin, Mahler, 74–76.

239
or through a zest for life.”80 The same could be said of military bands. These genres

were the purest language of amusement and cheerfulness in the popular culture in

Mahler’s day. Allusions to these genres provided the perfect relief from the oppressive

mood and existential angst that pervaded the first theme group.

Understanding vernacularisms in this way helps make sense of the third

movement, too. Its refrains are an instrumental version of Mahler’s song “Ablösung im

Sommer.”81 The song’s text concerns death, albeit with an ironic twist: a cuckoo has

died, and a replacement is needed to while away the time. Its episodes, in contrast, are

the symphony’s other most striking vernacularism: the posthorn solos. Underpinning

the movement, then, is the same semantic premise that pervades the first movement: the

alternation of sections associated with death and life. In both cases, Mahler uses highly

evocative vernacularisms to give voice to mortal life. Yet whereas the marches are

brimming with energy, motion, and élan, the posthorn solos are lingering and nostalgic.

This is not the joy of life held in blissful disregard of the certainty of death, but in full

awareness of it. The posthorn was the perfect symbol for this task. Like the vernacular

marches, its topicality could forge immediate connections with the musical life of the

everyday. Yet it was also a nostalgic symbol for a something remote or lost to the past.

Hearing the marches and posthorn as hermeneutically related is not far fetched,

given the way that Mahler connected them musically. After the second posthorn

episode, Mahler eschews a final rondo refrain. He instead repeats a couple of the

80 Paul Bekker, Briefe an zeitgenössische Musiker (Berlin: Hesse, 1932), 172; quoted in Sabine

Ehrmann-Herfort “Operette,” Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich

Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2001), 13: “Wunsch der Erheiterung, sei es durch Witz, sei es durch
Grazie, sei es durch Lebenslust.”
81For more on Mahler’s treatment of the song as the basis for this instrumental movement, see
Monika Tibbe, Über die Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementalen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen
Gustav Mahlers, Berliner Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, vol. 1, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan
(Munich: Emil Katzbichler, 1977), 85–97.

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refrain’s motives incessantly, ever faster and in more voices, until they culminate in a

gesture strongly reminiscent of the rupture that had superseded the first and third

march episodes in the first movement (mm. 529–56). Out of the cataclysm, six unison

horns (and three trombones) recall the sonority that, more than any other, Mahler links

with the suffering of mortal existence.82

The notion of vernacularisms as an expression of zest for life is strengthened

again in the fifth movement, the second vocal movement of the symphony. Its text is

based on another Wunderhorn poem: “Armer Kinder Bettlerlied” (Poor Children’s

Begging Song). It describes a heavenly scene in which Jesus dines with his disciples. As

the angels rejoice, an unnamed person cries, for she has broken the ten commandments.

Jesus proclaims how one gains admittance to heaven nonetheless: “Only love God

forever!” Mahler bases the song, like the first movement, on a march idiom. But these

marches are different. They do not evoke popular music to the same extent as the

marches of the first movement or as the posthorn solos. The song’s main theme is an

accessible melody that would be at home in vernacular genres.83 But Mahler has dialed

down the referential character so as not to convey the sounds of military bands or

operettas with such vividness. This is not love of mortal, everyday life, but love of

heavenly life eternal.

Another vital aspect of multi-movement unity in the Third Symphony is its key

scheme. These tonal relationships reinforce both the motivic and the expressive links

82 Though Mahler did not quote the first movement directly, he did say that the episode recalls
the “uncrystallized, inorganic matter” of the first movement. See appendix 2E.
83The first phrase of the main theme (mm. 6–8), for example, closely resembles the folksong
“Um die Kinder still und artig zu machen.” The song is reproduced in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler:
Volume One (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 761. Mahler based a song on this text, but the melodic
connection is much stronger to the fifth movement of the Third Symphony.

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between the movements. Mahler reserves F major for those sections based on

vernacular styles: the marches in the first movement, the posthorn solos in the third,

and the marches in the fifth. He reserves D minor/major for those sections that, based

on their motivic connections with the fourth movement, concern suffering and the

overcoming of same. Hence the turbulent first theme group of the first movement is in

D minor and its telos in D major. The minor inflection of D returns for the fourth

movement, and D major for the resplendent chorale finale.

Local inflections of F and D major in the fourth and fifth movements reinforce

these associations. When Mahler uses x4 in the fourth movement, he abbreviates the

motive and makes a very telling harmonic change: instead of ending on open fifths that

imply the dominant of D minor, the motive implies F major. The only times that this

harmony appears in the entire song are in the two statements of x4. Each time, it follows

the same word, “Mensch,” acting as a subtle reminder of ultimate cause of man’s

suffering: his love of life. Mahler thus concentrates the human predicament into this

tonal nuance. The fifth movement is not so subtle. The F-major marches of the

movement’s main sections are regularly interrupted by short insertions of contrasting

music. Whereas the marches set mostly the text that deals with the joys of heavenly life,

the contrasting material accompanies the lines that concern admission to heaven.

Table 5.2 (appendix G). Chorale insertions in mvt. 5

The key and idiom associated with these insertions are telling: D-major chorales.84

Hence this unassuming song, only a fraction the length of the imposing first movement,

is based on the same tonal premise of D alternating with F, of joyful marches with the

chorale promises of an eternal life.

84 The middle section of the movement, which returns to the expressive world of suffering, is

tonally centered on D, too, but with modal inflections (mm. 65–81).

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The Associative Power of Vernacular Styles

This chapter has so far considered the immanent musical processes of the Third

Symphony as well as the way that Mahler uses multi-movement linking and referential

elements to transfer the semantic content of the song texts to the rest of the work. The

opening movement’s vernacularisms were irrelevant to the first approach, which focused

on such aspects as motive, harmony, and idiom. The second approach examined

vernacularisms more closely, but their role in bearing the meaning of the song texts did

not depend on specificity of reference. All that mattered was the vernacular tone more

generally. The multivalent evocation of vernacular styles, therefore, is not constitutive

of form and meaning in the movement. Certainly, Mahler could have composed in such

a way as to shun connections to other pieces and repertoires. What did he stand to gain

by having such palpable allusions to military Tongemälde and operetta?

Multivalent evocation is one facet of Mahler’s general predilection for

ambiguity. With its multiplicity of references, the motto of the first movement points,

like the epigraph of a written text, to the ambiguities that pervade much of the work.

These occur at many different levels, including structure. For instance, after signaling

the recapitulatory function of the fourth rotation with a literal repetition of the

introduction, Mahler goes on to conflate the recapitulation of disparate sections into a

single passage. The appearance of x1 at m. 750 recalls the motive’s entrance in the

second rotation (cf. mm. 273f); both instances come after a martially inflected

atmospheric march and coincide with a switch to F major. At the same time, the passage

also recalls b4.1 from the second rotation (mm. 253f.), because the fleeting patch of F

major folds quickly back into an atmospheric march in A minor. In addition, the passage

simultaneously recapitulates the turbulent culmination of the third rotation and its final

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melodic shreds.85 Dahlhaus’s description of the movement’s motto applies here, too: at

the first appearance of x1 in the fourth rotation, it is as if three different points from the

second and third rotations were photographed, one on top of the other.

Mahler delighted in referential and expressive ambiguity, too. This was part of

the allure of vernacularisms. The rise of popular music in the nineteenth century made

allusions to vernacular styles in art music ambiguous in a way that they had not

previously been. For centuries, instrumental music had become increasingly self-

sufficient from the genres of vocal, dance, and functional music out of which it grew.86

Nevertheless, it continued to draw expressive devices from these generic origins.

Chorales, for instance, retained their religious connotations and minuets their

associations with court even when they appeared as stylistic references in works

intended for the recital or concert hall. By Mahler’s time, however, the connotations of

many such materials in the context of art music had ceased to be univocal. The posthorn

was no longer just a nostalgic symbol of departure, as it had been for Johann Sebastian

Bach; having meanwhile been established as a topic of entertainment music, the

posthorn also connoted the aesthetic and social milieu of that domain. Stylized marches

could carry the impressions of operetta or Tongemälde as much as functional military

music and romanticized images of lansquenets.

Despite the multivalent evocation that characterizes the marches and posthorn

episodes, contemporary critics were generally convinced of the apparent referential and

expressive clarity of Mahler’s music. Robert Hirschfeld, for example, wrote that

85 The entire first section of the fourth rotation’s march episode is a transformed recapitulation of

the climax of “The Southerly Storm” (cf. mm. 609–26, 741–53).

86 Walter Wiora, “Zwischen absoluter und Programmmusik,” in Festschrift Friedrich Blume zum

70. Geburtstag, ed. Anna Amalie Abert and Wilhelm Pfannkuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 384–85.

244
 With Mahler, everything is obvious—blindingly obvious—and lies with crystal
clarity before us. There is no combination that weighs upon us; no darkness that
must be illuminated. . . . march is march and operetta is operetta . . . What else
remains?87

Similarly, the Austrian composer and critic Joseph Marx argued that the expressive

effect of Mahler’s vernacularisms in the Third Symphony was all too clear:

The themes, which mostly have a folk-like character, are often set directly next
to one another. This creates scenic effects that are more or less intended. . . .
The more easily one grasps this kind of popular effects music, the more difficult
it is to develop a sympathetic connection with it: there is nothing to miss, but
also nothing to discover.88

Such opinions are not simply the invective of crank critics. They also inform the

secondary literature, in which scholars, believing that Mahler’s vernacularisms are as

clearly referential as actual quotations, discern the origins of these materials by dint of

intuition.89

Yet Mahler’s allusions to folk and popular styles usually were not univocal.

Rather, he left them open-ended, so that each listener could determine the reference

according to her expectations, experiences, and ideological agenda. This presupposes a

view of musical reception similar to that of earlier proponents of idealist aesthetics. In

contrast to the mimetic aesthetic theorists of the eighteenth century, idealist thinkers

understood listening to be an active process requiring participatory imagination.

Wackenroder wrote that listening to music “consists of the most attentive observations

87 Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 296 (28 December 1904): “Bei

Mahler liegt aber alles klar, zum Greifen klar, mit platter Deutlichkeit vor uns; da ist keine Kombination,
die uns bedrückt, beklemmt, kein Dunkel, das erhellt werden müsste. . . . Marsch ist Marsch und Operette
ist Operette . . . Was bleibt sonst übrig?”
88 Joseph Marx, Betrachtungen eines romantischen Realisten. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Vorträge und Reden
über Musik, ed. Oswald Ortner (Vienna: Gerlach & Wiedling, 1947), 166–67: “Die meist volkstümlich
gehaltenen Themen werden häufig unvermittelt nebeneinander gestellt, wodurch sich gewissermaßen
beabsichtigte szenische Wirkungen ergeben . . . Der Weg zu dieser Art populären Effektmusik ist um so
schwerer zu finden, je leichter sie einem eingeht: da ist nichts zu überhören, aber auch nichts zu
entdecken.”
89 See ch. 2, pp. 98–99.

245
of the notes and their progression; in the complete surrender of the soul to this

torrential stream of emotions.”90 Similarly, Mahler wrote that “I think it is vital for the

motivic web to be clear to all listeners. . . . At a first hearing . . . the primary concern

should be to give yourself over to the mercy of the work and to let its human-poetic

expression wash over you.”91 Both Wackenroder and Mahler believed in the important

role of a listener’s imagination in shaping the musical experience. By using

vernacularisms that could be interpreted in multiple ways, Mahler could exploit the

manifold and even contradictory associations obtaining in them.

The idealist notion of participatory imagination was closely related to the

associative mode of listening common in the reception of popular music.92 Characteristic

titles, programmatic headings, a common vocabulary of musical topics, and sound

effects derived their emotional efficacy in part from the joy of remembering, as the

music triggered the release of emotions initially experienced in other contexts. The

critic Max Graf captured this idea in his description of Mahler’s posthorn solos:

A posthorn plays a folk melody . . . one of those songs that you start to sing
when you are between fifteen and twenty-five and have fallen head over heels in
love . . . We start to be moved a bit—not by the melody, but by memories . . .
sweetheart and springtime; forest reveries and sentimental country walks.93

90Wackenroder, letter to Ludwig Tieck; quoted in Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the
Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 50, no. 2/3 (summer – autumn 1997): 394.
91 Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 134; Martner, ed., Selected Letters, 151–52. See ch. 1, p. 36.
92 For descriptions of associative listening, see Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J.

Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 311–20; and Ludwig
Giesz, Phänomenologie des Kitsches, 2d ed. (Munich: W. Fink, 1971).
93 Max Graf, “Die dritte Symphonie Gustav Mahlers,” Neues Wiener Journal (20 December 1904),

6: “Auf dem Posthorn wird eine Volksliedmelodie geblasen . . . eine jener Lieder, das man anstimmt, wenn
man recht eselhaft verliebt ist, zwischen fünfzehn und zwanzig Jahren . . . Wir fangen an, gerade ein
wenig gerührt zu werden—nicht durch die Melodie, sondern durch Erinnerungen . . . Jugendliebe und
Frühlingszeit, Waldträumerei und sentimentale Feldwanderungen.”

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Robert Hirschfeld perceptively saw this as a trait binding Mahler’s works to popular

music:

His technique of preparing a new dish from many old ones is masterly. . . . One
can see in entertainment music, how the so-called hit songs always strike upon
those turns of phrase to which we have already been made receptive by related
melodies or even just the same intervals. Gustav Mahler’s music lives by this
method. He ingeniously mixes into his creations . . . folksongs, the flügelhorn in
the rondo of the Third—in short, those things that are already stored in our
hearts.94

Hirschfeld polemically elevates the technique to the premise of Mahler’s composition so

as to make its affront to the imperative of originality all the stronger. As so often,

however, his scathing remarks touch on an important aspect of Mahler’s music left

unarticulated by Mahler’s supporters. The specific vernacularisms in Mahler’s

symphony may have contributed little to the work’s meaning directly, but they

contributed much to the emotional experience of the work by fostering associative

listening.

The evocativeness of these vernacularisms increased by virtue of their being in a

symphony. At the end of the nineteenth century, no genre had a stronger imperative to

shun the mundane and to distinguish itself from lower forms of entertainment.95 Such

vernacularisms as popular marches and posthorns had little precedent. Ernst Krenek

cogently articulated this effect:

The opening motive of the Third Symphony is literally identical with the first
phrase of a marching song which all Austrian school children used to sing.
Produced by eight French horns playing at full blast in unison and placed in an

94 Hirschfeld, “Mahler und Strauß in Wien,” Österreichische Rundschau 1 (November 1904 –

January 1905): 536: “seine Technik, aus mehreren Gerichten ein neues zu bereiten, ist meisterlich. . . .
Man wird in der trivialen Musik immer beobachten, daß sogenannte ‘Schlager’ jedesmal diejenigen
Stellen treffen, die durch verwandte Melodie oder auch nur gleiche Intervalle bereits empfänglich
geworden sind. Gustav Mahlers Musik lebt von dieser Methode. Sein raffiniertes Klangwesen läßt . . .
Volkslieder, im Rondo der Dritten das bewährte Flügelhorn der Gartenmusik, kurz Dinge, die in unserem
Gemüte schon lagern, angenehm mitschwingen.”
95 See ch. 2, pp. 57–63; Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21–43.

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 empty space, without any accompaniment, at the beginning of a symphonic
movement of unheard-of dimensions, this motive takes on a very special
significance precisely because of its being associated with that innocent little
tune; a significance, however, that it would be difficult to analyse.96

Krenek, like most commentators, responded only to the association most immediate to

him. Acknowledging the multivalent evocation of vernacular styles compounds the

effect he described. After all, Krenek could just as well have considered why the

symphony opens with a distortion of a theme that came from the finale of the First

Symphony by Brahms (who in turn modeled it on Beethoven’s Ninth). Or he could have

asked why the theme later appears in forms that variously suggest operetta, battle

music, and a love song. Krenek is right about the difficulty in analyzing the significance

of such associations. Presumably, their purpose was not so much to contribute to any

meaning one might put into words—at least as manifest in the texts of the fourth and

fifth movements—as to initiate the associative chain in the listener.

The potential associations were not just personal and affective in character.

They also involved strongly held views on musical taste and aesthetic hierarchies.

August Spanuth, a native German who reviewed the American première of Mahler’s

Third Symphony in 1906, remarked:

If Mahler does not please you at least he stirs you. Sometimes, as in the first
movement of the third symphony, when after a tremendously imposing and
mysterious passage, a simple and gay march-melody, fit for an operetta, strikes
the ear, one feels at the moment like striking the composer in return. But we
must not forget that we needed many decades to get used to certain
idiosyncrasies of Beethoven that originally produced a like effect.97

96 Ernst Krenek, biographical essay in Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler, trans. James Galston (New

York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 193–94.

97August Spanuth, “Gustav Mahler: The Composer Whom Boston First Hears This Week,”
Boston Evening Transcript, 31 January 1906; quoted in Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and his World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 246.

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The symphony was at the fin de siècle the epitome of art as philosophy and ersatz

religion. Aesthetic conservatives especially believed that it should be correspondingly

suffused with sublimity of expression and loftiness of style. Hence, Mahler’s sudden

descent to an aesthetically inferior style was jarring for listeners like Spanuth.

Nonetheless, he had the presence of mind to realize that many associations provoked by

Mahler’s vernacularisms were ephemeral, since tastes and aesthetics changed over time.

One way out for critics who balked at the connections to popular music but were

otherwise sympathetic to Mahler’s music was to assume that Mahler had ironic

intentions. This was especially suited to the reception of the posthorn episodes, where

the parodic intent was located in the military signal “fall out,” which suddenly cuts off

the sentimental solo (mm. 345–47).

The person apparently comes riding in the postal wagon, and the forest puts
him in a romantic mood. A flügelhorn sounds from the distance with a
sentimental melody cut in the shape of a folksong; Des Knaben
Wunderflügelhorn. Mahler knows as well as we do that this flügelhorn solo will
raise the suspicion that his passenger is related to Nessler’s Trompeter. He has
certainly also heard the expressive “Die Post im Walde” on a beautiful summer
evening at a concert in a beer garden. He must be making fun of his sentimental
traveler, which seems to be suggested by the brutal trumpet signal that
parodically cuts off that outpouring of sentiment.98

Korngold was a decided admirer of Mahler’s music, yet was sometimes ambivalent

about Mahler’s more blatant allusions to popular styles.99 In this instance, however,

98 Julius Korngold, “Mahlers III. Symphonie. Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse, 17 December 1904:

“Er kommt offenbar mit dem Postwagen gefahren, und der Wald stimmt ihn romantisch. Ein Flügelhorn
ertönt aus der Ferne mit einer sentimentalen, volkstümlich zugeschnittenen Melodie; Des
Knabenwunderflügelhorn. Mahler weiß so gut wie wir, daß dieses Flügelhornsolo seinen Postpassagier
der Verwandtschaft mit Neßlers Trompeter verdächtigt. Er hat auch gewiß schon an einem schönen
Sommerabend bei einer Biergartenmusik die gefühlvolle ‘Post im Walde’ gehört. Er macht sich also wohl
nur lustig über die sentimentalen Reisenden, und darauf scheint auch das brutale Trompetensignal
hinzudeuten, das jenen Gefühlserguß parodistisch abschneidet.”
99 For example, Korngold wrote of the marches in the first movement of the Third and the
second movement of the Seventh that Mahler uttered musical ideas that had no business being in a
symphony. The passage to which he referred in the Seventh Symphony is the light march discussed in ch.
4, pp. 178–81.

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such unsymphonic material was more palatable to Korngold because Mahler himself did

not appear to take it seriously, but as a vehicle for irony.

A perspicacious account of the posthorn episodes was penned by David Josef

Bach, critic for the socialist newspaper Arbeiterzeitung:

Naturally, the military bands in the Prater also play posthorn solos! If it’s the
Prater, then it is a metaphysical one. Besides, just three steps from the military
band is deepest nature, whose magic inspires the entire symphony. But if it’s a
banality, then Mahler is still allowed to use it. It is as if he had foreseen that the
public, ashamed of their susceptibility to the posthorn solos, would mistake the
triviality of their own sensations for simple-mindedness on the part of the
composer. Mahler then has his fun and lets it rip—”fall out”!100

Bach’s plausible account of the way that many in Mahler’s audience likely reacted

highlights a salient point about musical taste: its intimate connection with broader

issues, not least of which was social status. Orchestral concerts were elite cultural

events. The Vienna Philharmonic performed just eight concerts a year; the limited

availability and high prices of tickets excluded all but the city’s most privileged classes.

The Prater, by contrast, was (and still is) an amusement park with a wide variety of

entertainment, including popular offerings like military bands, café house ensembles,

operettas. Bach suggests that some in Mahler’s audiences bristled at the charms of the

posthorn solos on account of their associations with aesthetically and socially inferior

music.

In addition, Bach acknowledges, albeit briefly, the multivalence of the posthorn

episodes and the great potential for vernacularisms to provoke highly contradictory

reactions. Bach clearly heard the similarities of the posthorn solos with entertainment

100 David Josef Bach, Arbeiterzeitung, 20 December 1904: “Natürlich, im Prater lassen die

Militärkapellen auch ein Posthornsolo blasen! Wenn’s der Prater ist, dann ist es ein metaphysischer.
Ueberdies — drei Schritte weg von der Militärkapelle atmet wieder die tiefste Natur, deren Zauber die
ganze Symphonie beseelt. Wenn es eine Banalität war, Mahler durfte auch damit spielen, und, wie wenn
er es vorausgesehen hätte, daß das Publikum, als ob es sich seiner Eindrucksfähigkeit schämen wollte, die
Einfachheit des Komponisten in die Trivialität des eigenen Empfindens verkehren würde, treibt er jetzt
seinen Spaß und läßt — abblasen!”

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music, yet this association did not color his response to the music. For him, the context

and Mahler’s treatment of the posthorn transfigured the episodes and imbued them with

metaphysical significance. Bach shared Mahler’s view that the ultimate distinction

between high and low resided not in particular melodies or materials, but in the

treatment of them. This position, however, was far from universally held. If reception

history is any guide, then many, if not most, believed that vernacularisms tainted the

work with indelible associations with their origins. Mahler did not subscribe to this

view, but he wished to exploit it. He was keenly aware of the associative power of

vernacularisms to shape the experience of his works. By transgressing aesthetic

boundaries, Mahler knowingly crossed social ones, too.

Mahler enhanced the ambiguity already inherent in vernacularisms by making

them allude to disparate musical styles and repertoires with contradictory implications.

To assert that Mahler draws on this or that specific melody or musical type is to flatten

the referential ambiguity of the music, however many commentators have been induced

to do so by the deceptive immediacy of the reference. The process by which ambiguity is

rendered as univocality is independent of the music; it emanates from the chain of

associations set off in each listener—a complex calculus influenced in no small part by

prior experiences, aesthetic viewpoints, and social outlook. Clarifying the referential

ambiguity is thus tantamount to projecting one’s own experiences and ideological

agendas onto the music. The reception of Mahler’s works was so fraught and polarized

in part because the music was only a touchstone to other, deeply held views. That these

views could cut both ways, either in Mahler’s favor or against it, made it a risky

strategy, but one that was almost certain to generate lively debate and commentary.

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 Of course, it is virtually impossible to prove the influence of specific ideas on the

aesthetic reactions of particular individuals. Nevertheless, some supporting evidence for

this account of their associative power can be gleaned from tendencies in the reception

of Mahler’s symphony. This dissertation has presented evidence for the multivalence of

the marches and posthorn episodes in the Third Symphony. The vast majority of

commentary about the vernacularisms, however, treats the referentiality and expression

of these sections as all too clear. The basic trends identified in chapter 2 apply here.

Mahler’s prominent (often assimilationist) defenders generally emphasized the

indebtedness of the march and posthorn episodes to folksong, the Austrian military

bands of Mahler’s youth, and German Romanticism. Paul Bekker’s monograph of 1921

is exemplary. He shuns virtually all possible references to popular culture. For him, x1 is

“the mixture of a folk tone and a splendidly striding march.”101 He likens b1.2 to the call

of a shawm, a quintessential shepherd instrument, and remarks that the briefly intact

march idiom of b4.1 has a “folk-like, cheerful melodic arch.”102 And he likens the regular

bass alternation that accompanies the varied repetition of b1.4 (mm. 289ff.) to an infantry

band. Bekker places the posthorn episode even more squarely in the domain of folk

music:

The idea, to insert [a] folk tune abruptly and without artistic finish as the trio
of a symphonic scherzo, was as strange as it was daring. But the risk succeeded.
This posthorn episode has a romantic magic about it, whose authentic,
captivating naïveté disarms all resistance. The posthorn awakens memories and
fantasies and effusively develops them in a folk tone.103

101 Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1921), 113.
102 Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 117.
103 Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 126: “eine ebenso absonderliche wie kühne Idee, diese

Volksweise unvermittelt und ohne kunstvolle Verarbeitung als Trio in ein sinfonisches Scherzo zu setzen.
Aber das Wagnis ist gelungen. Gerade diese Posthornepisode trägt einen romantischen Zauber in sich,
dessen echte Naivität widerstandslos gefangen nimmt. Erinnerungen, Fantasie werden geweckt, die die
Posthornweise schwärmerisch im Volkston weiterspinnen.”

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Most critics who perceived likenesses to popular music were interested in wielding such

connections as a club. Many a negative review alleged similarities to the sounds of

operetta, especially in the march episodes of the second and fourth rotations.104

Similarly, countless reviews derided the likenesses of the posthorn episodes to

entertainment music, often expressly citing Nessler’s Trompeter von Säkkingen and “Post

im Walde.”105 Hirschfeld, in particular, was relentless in drawing astute comparisons to

popular music. He not only recognized the operetta-like character of the marches and

the similarities to “Post im Walde,” he even likened the expressive and topical content

of the Third Symphony to programmatic military music.106

Aesthetic conservatives who sought to police the borders separating art music

from popular music naturally saw Mahler’s appropriation of popular elements as an

affront to the integrity of the classical tradition. Yet such discourse was not their

exclusive domain. Anti-modern and anti-Semitic discourses overlapped in the decades

104 Specific references to these march episodes, which reviewers generally referred to as the

second theme, include: Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Konzerte”; Hans Liebstoeckl, “Gustav Mahler’s ‘Dritte,’”
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, no. 347, 15 December 1904, 6; Maximillian Muntz, “Gustav Mahler’s dritten
Symphonie,” Deutsche Zeitung, 16 December 1904; and August Spanuth, “Gustav Mahler.” General
comparisons to operetta were made in the following reviews: Hirschfeld, “Mahler und Strauß in Wien,”
537; Theodor Kroyer, Signale für die musikalische Welt 62, no. 25 (30 March 1904): 409; review by Arthur
Smolian, Leipziger Zeitung (1904), quoted in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3, Vienna:
Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63; Hans Teßmer, “Der
Fall Mahler,” Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 16 June 1921.
105 Reviews that specifically cite these pieces include: Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Konzerte”;

Korngold, “Mahlers III. Symphonie”; review by Smolian, quoted in La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:63; Max
Vancsa, Neue Musikalische Presse, no. 23/24 (December 1904); review by Richard Batka, quoted in
Franklin, Mahler, 29; Richard Batka, Prager Tagblatt, 27 February 1904, 6; Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton. Zwei
Mahler-Sinfonien,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 254, 5 November 1909; W. Pastor, Tägliche Rundschau [Berlin],
12 December 1911; Otto Besch, “Hermann Scherchen dirigiert Mahlers ‚Dritte’. Fünftes Sinfoniekonzert
der Folge A,” Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 January 1929. Reviews that more generally attack the
triviality or banality of the passages include: Wilhelm Klatte, “Die 38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des
Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins zu Krefeld,” Die Musik 1, no. 19 (1902): 1761-66; Max Hasse, Die
Musik 2, no. 4 (1902): 314–16; Theodor Kroyer, Signale für die musikalische Welt 62, no. 25 (30 March
1904): 30, quoted in Mirjam Schadendorf, “Bürgerliche Rezeptionsmuster der Dritten Symphonie von
Gustav Mahler,” Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung 35 (April 1996): 5; Muntz, “Gustav Mahler’s dritte
Symphonie”; E. E. Taubert, Die Musik 6, no. 9 (1907): 188–89.
106 Hirschfeld, “Mahler und Strauß in Wien,” 540.

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preceding World War I. Wagner’s polemical essay “Modern” (1878), for example,

hardly distinguishes between the ills of modernity and those of liberal Judaism, which

he represented as an urban, middle-class phenomenon threatening the German folk.107

Operetta was the musical incarnation of these traits: urban, middle-class, market-

oriented, exploiting folk musical traditions; and it was closely tied to Jews in its

production and consumption. Stigmatizing a work as “trivial” and comparing it to such

popular music as operetta was a stock strategy of anti-Semitic music criticism.108 So it

occasions little surprise that links to popular music are most commonly asserted in the

anti-Semitic reception of Mahler’s works. Maximillian Muntz, for example, was an open

anti-Semite at the expressly anti-Semitic paper Deutsche Zeitung. He wrote of the

Viennese première of the Third Symphony that

what the listener now experiences, after he has been happily rescued from the
floods of the first theme, could represent not only the entrance of Pan, but also a
fair [Jahrmarkt] and perhaps even the Prater. Above the strolling march of the
basses, the woodwinds start playing a march of downright scandalous triviality.
Similarly coarse jokes are made by painting with deliberately bright
instrumental colors and by the whirling sounds of the snare drum, cymbals, and
tambourine. The listener forgets where he is; he mistakenly thinks that he is in
the temple of the scantily clad muse of the operetta theater.109

Such invective is all too easy to dismiss for its repugnant, racial motivation. Yet to

discount it is to forgo so much of what made Mahler’s Third special: not the least its

actual allusions to operetta, and Mahler’s intent that these allusions provoke. Besides,
107Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2005), 12. Wagner’s essay can be found in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 5th ed.,
ed. Richard Sternfeld and Hans von Wolzogen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911), 8:54–60.
See Federico Celestini, “Der Trivialitätsvorwurf an Gustav Mahler: Eine diskursanalytische
108

Betrachtung (1889–1911),” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 62, no. 3 (2005): 165–76.

109Maximillian Muntz, “Gustav Mahler’s dritten Symphonie,” Deutsche Zeitung, 16 December
1904: “was der Zuhörer nun erlebt, nachdem er aus den Fluten des ersten Themas glücklich gerettet,
könnte nicht nur den Einzug des Pan darstellen, sondern auch einen Jahrmarkt und vielleicht sogar den
Prater. Ueber einer schlendernden Marschbewegung der Bässe stimmen die Holzbläser einen Marsch an,
dessen Melodie von geradezu unerhörter Trivialität ist und noch durch absichtliche instrumentale
Buntmalerei, durch Wirbel der kleinen Trommel, Becken- und Tambourinklänge und ähnliche gemeine
Spässe gemacht wird. Der Zuhörer vergißt den Ort, wo er sich befindet; er wähnt sich im Tempel der
leichtgeschürzten Muse im Operettentheater.”

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Mahler himself would not likely have been so dismissive of Muntz’s review. Not long

after the Third Symphony had its first performance in Vienna, he told Alfred Roller, the

theatrical producer at the Court Opera: “Funny how the anti-Semitic newspapers, or so

it seems, are the only ones who still have any respect for me.”110

In fact, it is precisely in the anti-Semitic reception of Mahler’s Third Symphony

that one finds the strongest apprehension of his Jewishness. Countless authors have

attempted to articulate Jewish qualities in Mahler’s music.111 Claims that he used

specifically Jewish folk or liturgical music have yet to turn up compelling evidence.

Claims that there is something Jewish in the expressive disposition or spiritual content

of his works make the dubious presupposition of an authentically Jewish spirit or mode

of expression. The most concrete sense in which Mahler was a Jewish composer was by

the standards of anti-Semitic musical discourse in his day. His vernacularisms were as if

calculated to fulfill these Jewish stereotypes, at least for all those listeners with ears to

hear them: stylistic eclecticism, influence of popular musical genres, inauthentic

imitation of German folksongs, lack of originality. Mahler, the attentive reader of

reviews and of Wagner’s prose writings, was certainly aware of these tropes and the

potency of his music to elicit their application.

The multivalent evocation of vernacular styles was therefore a subversive

compositional strategy, allowing Mahler to transgress against deeply held convictions

of his audiences even as he conformed to them. His works could be seen as taking

nourishment, as symphonies had traditionally done, from folksong—because they in fact

did so. His works could be seen as embodiments of anti-modern disregard for aesthetic

110 Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna: E. P. Tal, 1922), 23.
111 For some of these attempts, see ch. 2, pp. 79–82.

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standards in their forging of alliances with ostensibly inferior entertainment music—

because they in fact did so. And his works could be seen as exemplifying stereotypes of

Jewish music—because they in fact did so. Just as each of these positions could be

supported by appealing to actual properties of the music, each necessarily excluded

other equally valid ways of interpreting Mahler’s allusions to vernacular styles.

Mahler calculated his music to elicit strong reactions in a culture where attitudes

about the vernacular intersected broader ideologies central to how people saw

themselves and came to terms with their world. This guaranteed that his music would

be discussed, and discussed passionately. The vernacularisms and the strong reactions

they triggered likely did more to promote his symphonies than the programmatic

guides ever did. And here perhaps lay the reason for one of the most outstanding traits

of the Third Symphony: its length. Mahler knew that he had a captive audience. By

making the march and posthorn episodes so long, he exaggerated the most subversive

qualities of his symphony, ensuring that his audience wallowed in their strong reactions,

positive or negative, to his provocations. In the end, the multivalent evocation of

vernacular styles made Mahler the quintessential composer of a fractious time: the

Romantic, modern, German, Austrian, Jewish composer par excellence.

*
* *

The experiences and ideologies that guided the chain of associations to Mahler’s

vernacularisms did not just differ between groups and individuals, but could also vary

over time within the same listener. With his monograph on Mahler’s symphonies, Paul

Bekker established himself as one of the composer’s strongest proponents. The

monograph exemplifies assimilationist arguments of the strongest sort. But Bekker had

not always represented this view.

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 In 1907, Mahler conducted the Third Symphony in Berlin. At the behest of

Bekker, then the critic for the Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten, the erstwhile programs to

the symphony were once again printed after a period of dormancy. Bekker later wrote,

in an article for the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, that the

alliance of vulgarity and grace, superficiality of character and technical mastery,

impertinent mockery . . . sets [him] outside of the entire guild of composers. He
is Heinrich Heine’s musical doppelgänger, equal in the power to rip the mask
from venerable things, to dig up the roots of traditions, to satirize devastatingly
the highest values of the cultural world.112

One might easily imagine that the “vulgarity” applied to the marches of the first

movement. The refrains of the symphony’s Schubertian minuet were the epitome of

graceful expression. The posthorn episodes could very well be said to exhibit

superficiality of character. “Technical mastery” was consistently attributed to all of

Mahler’s works by friend and foe alike, and “mockery” might be what Mahler intended

by so many allusions to popular styles. Finally, Mahler was often likened to Heine, both

in terms of the tone of their works and because both were Jews assimilated into German

culture.113 Yet Bekker was not writing about Mahler at all; he was writing about the

operetta composer Jacques Offenbach.

Less than four years later, Bekker had the melancholy task of writing Mahler’s

obituary. His somewhat ambivalent summary of Mahler’s significance as a composer

culminated in the following observation:

112Paul Bekker, “Die Lustige Witwe und ihre Familie,” Allgemeine Musikzeitung no. 38, 20
September 1907, 612: “Dieser einzige Bund von Gemeinheit und Grazie, Oberflächlichkeit des Charakters
und technischer Meisterschaft, frechem Spott . . . stellt Offenbach außerhalb der ganzen
Komponistenzunft. Er ist Heinrich Heines musikalischer Doppelgänger, ihm gleich in der Macht,
ehrwürdigen Dinge die Maske herunterzureißen, Traditionen die Wurzeln abzugraben, höchste Werte
der Kulturwelt vernichtend zu persiflieren.”
113Prominent writers that invoked Heine in discussing Mahler included Julius Korngold, Max
Graf, Max Vancsa, and Richard Batka. See Korngold, “Mahlers III. Symphonie”; idem,
“Randbemerkungen zum Mahler-Zyklus,” 2 October 1920; Max Graf, “Gustav Mahlers vierte
Symphonie,” Neues Wiener Journal, 13 January 1902; Vancsa, Neue Musikalische Presse, 23 December 1904;
Richard Batka, “Das Jüdische bei Gustav Mahler,” Kunstwart 23 (1910): 97–98.

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 Another trait of Mahler as a composer reveals his perhaps most original side:
his humor. It is a rustic and burlesque kind of humor; refined wit and irony
recede into popular coarseness. Paradoxical though it sounds, it may not be
wrong to say that in Mahler an operetta composer was lost.114

It need not sound paradoxical or wrong.

114 Paul Bekker, Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1911; quoted in Painter, Mahler and his World, 351.

258
 APPENDIX A
Formal Programmatic Commentaries on the Third Symphony1

A.1. Musical sketches for movements 1, 2.

Was das Kind erzählt:

What the child tells:

Date: [early June 1895]

Comments: The title appears at the top of this manuscript, just above sketches of
the second movement. The leaf is dated “1895” in a hand other than
Mahler’s. Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports that Mahler composed
movement two at the start of his summer vacation, which began on 5
June 1895.2 This is therefore among the earliest sources for the
symphony’s programmatic movement titles. It is placed before A.2
because it is the only time that Mahler associated the “Kind” title with
material from what would become movement two. Beginning with A.2,
Mahler used this title only with the symphony’s projected finale, the
song “Das himmlische Leben.”
Source: Stanford University Library (Stanford 631, p. 5); discussion and
facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and the Creative Imagination”
(PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 403–9, 591–97.

A.2. Draft list of movement titles (Alma Mahler I).

DAS GLÜCKLICHE LEBEN
Ein Sommernachtstraum.
(Nicht nach Shakespeare, Anmerkung für Rezensenten und Shakespearekenner)
1. Was mir der Wald erzählt.
2. Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt.
3. Was mir die Liebe erzählt.
4. (Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt.)

1 The original German is given first, and the translation appears directly underneath in smaller

italics. All translations are my own. The dates for many of the sketches and drafts are uncertain. The first
six entries, for example, are given here the same tentative date “early June 1895?” The sequence in which
they appear constitutes one possible, albeit tentative interpretation of their chronology. The rationale
behind these decisions is given in the “Comment” for each entry of uncertain date. All references to
movement and measure numbers refer to the final version of the symphony unless otherwise indicated.
Mahler used a V-like marking as a symbol for insertion; it is represented here by the letter V.
2 Herbert Killian, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, rev. Knut

Martner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1984), 49; Peter Franklin, ed., Recollections of Gustav Mahler by
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 52.

259
 5. Was mir der Kuckuck erzählt.
6. Was mir das Kind erzählt.

THE HAPPY LIFE

A Summer Night’s Dream.
(Not after Shakespeare, comment for reviewers and Shakespeare connoisseurs)
1. What the Forest Tells Me.
2. What Twilight Tells Me.
3. What Love Tells Me.
4. (What Twilight Tells Me.)
5. What the Cuckoo Tells Me.
6. What the Child Tells Me.

Date: [early June 1895?]

Comment: It is possible that this draft of movement titles precedes Mahler’s
vacation. The appearance of “Was mir das Kind erzählt” as the final
movement here suggests that Mahler had by this time switched that
title from the minuet (see A.1) to the song “Das himmlische Leben.” In
all other drafts and letters from the summer 1895, the movement
appears as the finale under the “Kind” or the song’s original title. Were
the “Kind” title actually to refer to the minuet here, then this draft of
titles would imply that was planning on the minuet as a finale. This is
highly unlikely, since all of Mahler’s symphonic finales are in duple
time.
Source: Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Amsterdam: Bermann-
Fischer, 1949), 53.

A.3. Musical draft of second movement.

Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen.

What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.

Date: [early June 1895?]

Comment: This draft confirms that Mahler switched the title of the minuet at an
early stage. The manuscript stems from about the same time as the lists
of movement titles in A.4, A.5 and A.6, all of which contain this title in
full.
Source: The manuscript is held in private hands and available only in
photocopy; discussion and facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and
the Creative Imagination,” 419–22, 601–6.

A.4. Draft list of movement titles (Bekker I).

Das glückliche Leben, ein Sommernachtstraum (nicht nach Shakespeare,
Anmerkungen eines Kritikers Rezensenten):
I. Was mir der Wald erzählt,
II. Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt,
III. Was mir die Liebe erzählt,

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 III. Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt,
IV. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen,
V. Was mir der Kuckuck erzählt,
VI. Was mir das Kind erzählt.

The Happy Life, A Summer Night’s Dream (not after Shakespeare, comments of a critic
reviewer):
I. What the Forest Tells Me,
II. What Twilight Tells Me,
III. What Love Tells Me,
III. What Twilight Tells Me,
IV. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,
V. What the Cuckoo Tells Me,
VI. What the Child Tells Me.

Date: [early June 1895?]

Comment: This draft of movement titles probably postdates A.2 because the title
“Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen” appears here in full. The
considerable parallels with A.2, however, may indicate a common
source.3
Source: Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler,
1921), 106.

A.5. Draft list of movement titles (Bekker II).

I. Der Sommer marschiert ein (Fanfare – lustiger Marsch, Einleitung nur
Bläser und konzertierende Kontrabässe),
II. Was mir der Wald erzählt (1. Satz),
III. Was mir die Liebe erzählt (Adagio),
IV. Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt (Scherzo, nur Streicher),
V. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen,
VI. Was mir der Kuckuck erzählt,
VII. Was mir das Kind erzählt.

I. Summer Marches In (Fanfare – cheerful march, introduction winds and concertante

double basses only),
II. What the Forest Tells Me (Movement 1),
III. What Love Tells Me (Adagio),
IV. What Twilight Tells Me (Scherzo, strings only),
V. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,
VI. What the Cuckoo Tells Me,
VII. What the Child Tells Me.

Date: [early June 1895?]

3 For a discussion of the sources underlying the lists of titles reported by Alma Mahler and Paul
Bekker (A.2, A.4–6), see Susan Melanie Filler, “Editorial Problems in Symphonies of Gustav Mahler: A
Study of the Sources of the Third and Tenth Symphonies” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1977),
35–46.

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 Comment: No title given for the symphony. This draft seems to belong after the
previous entries because of its greater detail and fidelity with the
symphony’s ultimate titles. Its terminus ante quem is 24 June 1895, the
day that Mahler wrote the title “Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen”
on a draft of the fifth movement (A.7). The draft represents one of the
first sources of the title “Der Sommer marschiert ein.” The parenthetical
description of the first movement’s character and instrumentation
correlates well with the musical sketches in Stanford 631 (pp. 6, 11) that
likely stemmed from 1895 (see Solvik, “Culture and the Creative
Imagination,” 403–9, 591–97; and the comment to A.17 below).
Source: Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 106.

A.6. Draft list of movement titles (Alma Mahler II).

EIN SOMMERNACHTSTRAUM
1. Der Sommer marschiert ein.
(Fanfare und lustiger Marsch) (Einleitung) (Nur Bläser mit
konzertierenden Contrabässen).
2. Was mir der Wald erzählt. (1. Satz.)
3. Was mir die Liebe erzählt. (Adagio.)
4. Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt. (Scherzo) (nur Streicher.)
5. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen. (Menuetto.)
6. Was mir der Kuckuck erzählt. (Scherzo.)
7. Was mir das Kind erzählt.

A SUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

1. Summer Marches In
(Fanfare and cheerful march) (Introduction) (Winds only, with concertante double
basses).
2. What the Forest Tells Me. (Movement 1.)
3. What Love Tells Me. (Adagio.)
4. What Twilight Tells Me. (Scherzo) (Strings only)
5. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me. (Minuet.)
6. What the Cuckoo Tells Me. (Scherzo.)
7. What the Child Tells Me.

Date: [early June 1895?]

Comment: This draft is most likely based on the same source as that used for A.5.
It is unlikely that Mahler would have created a new list simply to add a
title and two parenthetical comments.
Source: Mahler, Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler, 65.

A.7. Piano draft of movement 5.

Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählten

What the Morning Bells Told Me

262
 Date: 24 June 1895
Comment: The title appears at the top of a piano draft of movement 5. The past
tense of the titular verb suggests that Mahler had not yet settled on the
characteristic form of the titles, which are in the present tense in the
final version. “Morgenglocken” remained the fifth movement’s title until
August, when the first suggestion of “die Engel” appears in a
conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner (see A.11).
Source: Lehmann Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library (Albrecht 1147D);
discussion and facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and the
Creative Imagination,” 457–61, 625–28.

A.8. Draft orchestral scores of movements 2, 3, 4, 5.

[Mvt. 2] Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen
[Mvt. 3] Was mir die Dämmerung erzählt Thiere im Walde erzählen
[Mvt. 4] Was mir die Nacht erzählt!
[Mvt. 5] Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen

[Mvt: 2] What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me

[Mvt. 3] What Twilight Tells the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
[Mvt. 4] What Night Tells Me!
[Mvt. 5] What the Morning Bells Tell Me

Date: [by 18] August 1895

Comment: The titles are printed on folios wrapped around each manuscript. The
four surviving draft orchestral scores were completed in August 1895.
Mahler must have changed the third movement’s title from
“Dämmerung” to “Thiere” no later than 17 August, for every reference
to the movement’s title thereafter reflects this change. Each of the title
folios contains multiple movement numbers and crossings-out,
betraying the fluctuation in Mahler’s thinking about movement order
before articulating a stable version in a letter to Arnold Berliner (A.9).
Source: Mvt. 2: Rosé Manuscript (private collection); mvts. 3–5: Cary
Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library (Albrecht 1147C); discussion and
facsimile reproduction of title pages in Solvik, “Culture and the Creative
Imagination,” 462–70, 490–94, 629–38.

A.9. Letter to Arnold Berliner.

„Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“
Ein Sommermorgentraum.
I. Der Sommer marschiert ein.
II. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen.
III. Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen.
IV. Was mir die Nacht erzählt.
V. Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen.
VI. Was mir die Liebe erzählt.
VII. Das himmlische Leben.

263
 “The Gay Science”
A Summer Morning’s Dream.
I. Summer Marches In.
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.
IV. What Night Tells Me.
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me.
VI. What Love Tells Me.
VII. The Heavenly Life.

Date: 17 August 1895

Comment: These titles match those on the title folios to the draft orchestral scores
and those in the letter to Hermann Behn from the same day (A.8, A.10).
Source: Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 2d ed. (Vienna: Zsolnay:
1996), 149; Knud Martner, ed., Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, trans.
Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, Bill Hopkins (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1979), 163–64.

A.10. Letter to Hermann Behn.

Symphonie Nro III.
„Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“
Ein Sommermorgentraum.
I. Der Sommer marschiert ein
II. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen
III. Was mir die Thiere im Walde erzählen
IV. Was mir die Nacht erzählt
V. Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen
VI. Was mir die Liebe erzählt
(nicht die irdische, sondern die ewige)
VII. Das himmlische Leben.

Symphony No. III.

“The Gay Science”
A Summer Morning’s Dream.
I.Summer Marches In
II.What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
III.What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
IV. What Night Tells Me
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me
VI. What Love Tells Me
(not the worldly, but the eternal)
VII. The Heavenly Life.

Date: 17 August 1895

Comment: These titles are identical to those on the title folios to the draft
orchestral scores and to those sent on the same day to Berliner (A.8–9).

264
 Source: Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler: Unbekannte Briefe (Vienna: Paul
Zsolnay Verlag, 1983), 23–24.

A.11. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Die Titel der Dritten werden der Reihe nach lauten:
1. Der Sommer marschiert ein.
2. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen.
3. Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen.
4. Was mir die Nacht erzählt (Der Mensch).
5. Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen (Die Engel).
6. Was mir die Liebe erzählt.
7. Was mir das Kind erzählt.
Und das Ganze werde ich „Meine fröhliche Wissenschaft“ nennen – die ist es
auch!

The titles of the Third are called, in order:

1. Summer Marches In.
2. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.
3. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.
4. What Night Tells Me (Man).
5. What the Morning Bells Tell Me (Angels).
6. What Love Tells Me.
7. What the Child Tells Me.
And I will name the whole piece “My Gay Science”—and that’s what it is!

Date: [18–21?] August 1895

Comment: Bauer-Lechner gives “Summer 1895” for this conversation. The letter
was most likely written after 17 August, because Bauer-Lechner gives
parenthetical alternatives to the titles for the fourth and fifth
movements that Mahler did not cite in the letters written on that day
(A.9–10), but which he did include in the letter from 29 August (A.12).
Since Bauer-Lechner did not accompany Mahler when he left Steinbach
no later than 21 August, the conversation must have taken place by this
time. Further commentary for this letter appears in appendix B.2.
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 35–36; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 41.

A.12. Letter to Friedrich Löhr.

Symphonie Nro. III.
„DIE FRÖHLICHE WISSENSCHAFT“
Ein Sommermorgentraum
I. Der Sommer marschiert ein.
II. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen.
III. Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen.
IV. Was mir die Nacht erzählt. (Altsolo).
V. Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen. (Frauenchor mit Altsolo).
VI. Was mir die Liebe erzählt.

265
 Motto: „Vater sieh an die Wunden mein!
Kein Wesen laß verloren sein“!
(Aus des Knaben Wunderhorn)
VII. Das himmlische Leben. (Sopransolo, humoristisch).

Symphony No. III.

“THE GAY SCIENCE”
A Summer Morning’s Dream.
I. Summer Marches In.
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.
IV. What Night Tells Me. (Alto Solo).
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me. (Women’s Chorus with Alto Solo).
VI. What Love Tells Me.
Epigraph: “Father, look upon my wounds!
Let no being be lost!”
(From Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
VII. The Heavenly Life. (Soprano solo, humorous).

Date: 29 August 1895

Comment: Mahler printed the titles on a separate sheet of paper. He also
paraphrased them in the body of the letter (see appendix B.2), where he
included parenthetical alternatives for the fourth and fifth movements,
“(der Mensch)” and “(die Engel),” respectively, which reflect the ultimate
titles that he settled on at some point before June 1896.
Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 150–51; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
165.

A.13. Letter to Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Die Titel sind folgende
I. —? Zug zu Dionysos od. Sommer marschiert ein
II. Was mir die Blumen auf d. Wiese erzählen.
III. Was mir die Thiere im Walde erz.
IV. Was mir die Nacht erzählt (der Mensch)
V. Was mir die Morgenglocken erz. (die Engel)
VI. Was mir die Liebe erzählt
Motto: Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein
kein Wesen lass verloren sein
VII. Was mir das Kind erzählt.

The titles are the following:

I. —? Procession to Dionysus or Summer Marches In
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.
IV. What Night Tells Me (Man)
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me. (Angels)
VI. What Love Tells Me
Epigraph: Father, look upon my wounds

266
 Let no being be lost
VII. What the Child Tells Me.

Date: 3 September 1895

Comment: This letter documents Mahler’s reconsideration of the first movement’s
title after having completed the rest of the symphony just a few weeks
earlier.
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 38.

A.14. Letter to Anna Mildenburg.

Eben bin ich daran fertig zu stellen:
I. Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt
II. Der Sommer marschiert ein!
Merk Dir das – die Welt wird sich es auch noch merken müssen. Dies sind die
beiden ersten Sätze meines Werkes. Hierauf folgen:
III. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen
III. Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen
IV. Was mir der Mensch erzählt
V. Was mir die Engel erzählen
VI. Was mir die Liebe erzählt!
Das ganze heißt wahrscheinlich:
„Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
Ein Sommermittagstraum“.

I am just about ready to complete:

I. What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me
II. Summer Marches In!
Take note of that—the world will have to take note of it, too. These are the two opening
movements of my work. After them follow:
III. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
IV. What Man Tells Me
V. What the Angels Tell Me
VI. What Love Tells Me!
The entire piece will probably be called
“The Gay Science
A Summer Midday’s Dream.”

Date: [21?] June 1896

Comment: Herta Blaukopf gives this letter, written on a Sunday, the uncertain date
of 28 June 1896 because Mahler, in his letter to Mildenburg on 1 July,
responds to a question about the symphony’s titles. The use of the title
“Was mir die Felsgebirge erzählt,” however, suggests that the letter
was perhaps written on the previous Sunday, around the time of a
conversation with Bauer-Lechner in which he also mentioned the
“Felsgebirge” title (A.15, uncertainly dated 22 June). Were the letter
from 28 June, then Mahler would have given the introduction two
different titles on the same day.
Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 188.

267
A.15. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.
[I]ch hätte den [ersten] Satz auch nennen können: „Was mir das Felsgebirge
erzählt“ . . . Der Titel: „Der Sommer marschiert ein“, paßt nicht mehr nach
dieser Gestaltung der Dinge im Vorspiel; eher vielleicht „Pans Zug“ – nicht
Dionysos-zug!

I could also have called the [first] movement: “What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me”
… The title “Summer Marches In,” is no longer appropriate after this arrangement of
the things in the prelude; rather perhaps “Pan’s Procession”—not Dionysus’s
Procession!

Date: 22[–27?] June 1896

Comment: The entry is dated 22 June, but because Bauer-Lechner refers to
conversations that took place on different occasions, it is possible that
the entry summarizes exchanges spread over many days. One day
before the next dated entry, 28 June, is the terminus ante quem. A longer
extract from this entry is quoted in appendix B.5.
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 56; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 59.

A.16. Musical sketch of movement 1.

Pan schläft ! V

Pan schläft
V

Pan sleeps! V

Pan sleeps
V

Date: second half of June 1896

Comments: The first inscription and insertion mark appear at the end of a clean
sketch of mvt. 1 (mm. 164–223); it was a reminder that the passage
should continue with “Pan schläft.” Mahler crossed it out after
continuing the sketch in this way on the next page (corresponding to
mm. 225–37). The second inscription and insertion come after rough
sketches to the same movement (mm. 150–63; 225–39). Solvik makes a
persuasive case that the second entry of “Pan schläft,” being with other
text at the bottom of the second page, is part of a series of short-hand
notes that Mahler made to indicate the formal plan of the music to be
inserted following the measures sketched on the page.
Source: Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB S.m. 22794);
discussion and facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and the
Creative Imagination,” 410–18, 598–600.

268
A.17. Musical sketch of material from movements 1, 2, and 3.
Naturlaute

V Pan schläft

Sounds of nature

V Pan sleeps

Date: [second half of June 1896]

Comments: The first inscription is centered above a staff with a sketch of mvt. 1
(mm. 463–71). The insertion mark and second inscription are at the
beginning of a sketch for mvt. 1 (mm. 463–71). This manuscript comes
from Stanford 631, an earlier leaf of which is discussed in A.1. This leaf
is dated “1895” in a hand other than Mahler’s. The leaf begins with
sketches for movement two that must have been made in early June
1895. Although usually given the same tentative date of 1895, the rest
of the leaf contains sketches and inscriptions for the first movement.
These stem more likely from the second half of June 1896 for three
reasons. First, the sketches of mm. 463–71 are more advanced than
sketches for the same material in ÖNB 22794 (A.16), whose probable
date is June 1896. Second, the insertion mark means that, had Mahler
really sketched these measures in 1895, then he must have written “Pan
sleeps” by that time, too. The first documented association of the Third
Symphony with Pan, however, is from 28 June 1896 (appendix B.5). It
seems unlikely, then, that Mahler sketched “Pan sleeps” but only began
discussing it a year later. Third, when returning to a manuscript,
Mahler generally used a different color ink or pencil hue. The sketches
of movement two at the top of this leaf are in pencil, whereas the rest of
the page, including the sketches of the first movement, is in brownish
ink with sharp black emendations. That the sketches originated in the
second half of June 1896 cannot be proven beyond all doubt. Yet such a
scenario explains better the sequence of sketches for mm. 463–71 and
fits better to the chronology for Mahler’s references to Pan.
Source: Stanford University Library (Stanford 631, p. 7); discussion and
facsimile reproduction in Solvik, “Culture and the Creative
Imagination,” 403–9, 591–97.

A.18. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Nun habe ich auch den Titel für die Einleitung gefunden: „Pans Erwachen“,
worauf folgt: „Der Sommer marschiert ein“.

Now I have also found the title for the introduction: “Pan’s Awakening,” after which comes:
“Summer Marches In.”

Date: 28 June 1896

Comment: This is the first time that Mahler mentioned Pan in connection with the
introduction to movement one.
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 57; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 60.

269
A.19. Letter to Bruno Walter.
Die Titel der ersten beiden Sätze, die allerdings eng verbunden sind, lauten I.
Pan erwacht attacca 2. der Sommer marschiert ein!

The titles of both opening movements, which, by the way, are closely connected, are I. Pan Awakes
attaca 2. Summer Marches In!

Date: 2 July 1896

Comment: This letter is the first documentation of the final version of the title
“Pan erwacht.” The letter also indicates that Mahler was at this late
date still considering a separate introduction and main movement. A
longer extract from this letter appears in Mahler’s commentary from
this letter can be found in appendix B.9.
Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 191; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
188–89.

A.20. Letter to Max Marschalk.

Ein Sommermittagstraum.
I. Abteilung.
Einleitung: Pan erwacht.
Nr. I: Der Sommer marschiert ein (Bacchuszug).
II. Abteilung.
Nr. II: Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen.
Nr. III: Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen.
Nr. IV: Was mir der Mensch erzählt.
Nr. V: Was mir die Engel erzählen.
Nr. VI: Was mir die Liebe erzählt.

A Summer Midday’s Dream.

Part I.
Introduction: Pan Awakes.
No. I: Summer Marches In (Bacchic Procession).
Part II.
No. II: What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.
No. III: What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.
No. IV: What Man Tells Me.
No. V: What the Angels Tell Me.
No. VI: What Love Tells Me.

Date: 6 August 1896

Comment: This letter is the earliest source of the final version of the symphony’s
programmatic titles.
Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 196; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
192–93.

270
A.21. Autograph fair copy.
Symphonie Nro III in F-Dur
Einleitung: Pan erwacht
folgt sogleich
Nro I: Der Sommer Marschiert ein
(„Bachuszug“)
[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
Der Weckruf! [m. 1]
Pan schläft [m. 132]
Der Herold [m. 148]
Das Gesindel! [m. 539]
Die Schlacht beginnt! [m. 583]
Der Südsturm! [m. 605]
[Inscription at end of movement]
Dem, der da kommen wird!
Denen, die da sein werden!

Nro. 3 [sic] / Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen

Nro. 4 [sic] / Was mir die Thiere im Walde erzählen

[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
Der Postillion [mm. 256, 482]

Nro. 5 [sic] / Was mir der Mensch erzählt

[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
Der Vogel der Nacht! [mm. 32, 102, 132]
(Der Vogel der Nacht!) [m. 71]

Nro. 6 [sic] / Was mir die Engel erzählen

Nro. 6 / „Was mir die Liebe erzählt“
[Inscription at beginning of movement]
„Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein!
Kein Wesen lass verloren sein!“

Symphony No. III in F Major

Introduction: Pan Awakes
followed immediately by
No. I: Summer Marches In
(“Bacchic Procession”)
[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
The Call to Awaken! [m. 1]
Pan sleeps [m. 132]
The Herald [m. 148]
The Rabble! [m. 539]
The Battle Begins! [m. 583]
The Southerly Storm! [m. 605]
[Inscription at end of movement]

271
 To he who will get here!
To those, who will be there

No. 3 [sic] / What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.

No. 4 [sic] / What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
The Postillion [mm. 256, 482]

No. 5 [sic] / What Man Tells Me

[Intra-movemental programmatic headings]
The Bird of the Night! [mm. 32, 102, 132]
(The Bird of the Night!) [m. 71]

No. 6 [sic] / What the Angels Tell Me

No. 6 / “What Love Tell Me”

[Inscription at beginning of movement]
“Father, look upon my wounds!
Let no being be lost!”

Date: 22 November 1896

Comment: Mahler completed the manuscript to the sixth movement on this date.
All other movements were finished earlier in the year.
Source: Autograph fair copy, Pierpont Morgan Library (Albrecht 1147B);
transcription in Peter Franklin, Mahler: Symphony no. 3 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 92–99.

A.22. Draft of program note for première of movement 2.

Symphonie in F-Dur: „Ein Sommermorgentraum“
Einleitung: „Pan erwacht“
Nro 1: „Der Sommer marschiert ein“. (Bachuszug.)
Nro 2: „Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen“. (Menuett)
Hauptthema: mit immer sich reicher entfaltender Variation.
[musical example: mm. 1–4]
Im Verlaufe dieses Themas entwickelt sich
[musical example: mm. 28–31]
Hernach entwickelt sich ein 2. Thema
[musical example: mm. 70–73]
ein 3. Thema
[musical example: mm. 50–57]
ein 4. Thema
[musical example: mm. 179–80]
folgt
Nro 3: „Was mir die Thier im Walde erzählen“. (Rondeau)
Nro 4: „Was mir der Mensch erzählt“. (Altsolo)
Nro 5: „Was mir die Engel erzählen“. (Frauenchor mit Altsolo.)
Nro 6 (Schlusssatz): „Was mir die Liebe erzählt“. (Adagio)

272
 Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein
Kein Wesen lass verloren sein!

Symphony in F Major: “A Summer Morning’s Dream”

Introduction: “Pan awakes”
No. 1: “Summer Marches In.” (Bacchic Procession.)
No. 2: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.” (Minuet)
Main theme: with ever more richly unfolding variation.
[musical example: mm. 1–4]
In the course of this theme develops
[musical example: mm. 28–31]
Whereafter develops a 2nd theme
[musical example: mm. 70–73]
a 3rd theme
[musical example: mm. 50–57]
a 4th theme
[musical example: mm. 179–80]
after which follows
No. 3: “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.” (Rondo)
No. 4: “What Man Tells Me.” (Alto Solo)
No. 5: “What the Angels Tell Me.” (Women’s Chorus with Alto Solo.)
No. 6 (Closing Movement): “What Love Tells Me.” (Adagio)
Father, look upon my wounds,
Let no being be lost!

Date: [October/November?] 1896

Comment: This hand-written draft varies in minor details from the printed
program note (A.23).
Source: Krummacher, Gustav Mahlers III: Symphonie, 182; facsimile in Donald
Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years, ed. Paul Banks and
David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), 137, 318–20.

A.23. Program note for première of movement 2.

Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen
aus der Symphonie, in F Dur (III) ‘Ein Sommermorgen-Traum’
Hauptthema: mit immer sich reicher entfaltender Variation.
[Musical example: mm. 1–4]
Hernach entwickelt sich:
[Musical example: mm. 28–31]
ein 2. Thema:
[Musical example: mm. 70–73]
ein 3. Thema:
[Musical example: mm. 50–57]
Coda:
[Musical example: mm. 179–80]

Die Symphonie besteht aus folgenden 6 Sätzen:

273
 Einleitung: „Pan erwacht“
No. 1. „Der Sommer marschiert ein“. (Bachuszug.)
No. 2. „Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen“. (Menuett.)
No. 3. „Was mir die Thiere im Walde erzählen“. (Rondeau.)
No. 4. „Was mir der Mensch erzählt“. (Altsolo.)
No. 5. „Was mir die Engel erzählen“. (Frauenchor mit Altsolo.)
No. 6. (Schlusssatz). „Was mir die Liebe erzählt“. (Adagio.)

What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me

from the Symphony in F Major (III) “A Summer Morning’s Dream”
Main theme: with ever more richly unfolding variation.
[musical example: mm. 1–4]
After that develops
[musical example: mm. 28–31]
a 2nd theme:
[musical example: mm. 70–73]
a 3rd theme:
[musical example: mm. 50–57]
Coda:
[musical example: mm. 179–80]

The symphony consists of the following 6 movements:

Introduction: “Pan awakes”
No. 1: “Summer Marches In.” (Bacchic Procession.)
No. 2: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.” (Minuet.)
No. 3: “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.” (Rondo.)
No. 4: “What Man Tells Me.” (Alto Solo.)
No. 5: “What the Angels Tell Me.” (Women’s Chorus with Alto Solo.)
No. 6 (Closing Movement): “What Love Tells Me.” (Adagio.)

Date: 9 November 1896

Comment: The printed program note differs slightly from its hand-written draft
copy (A.22).
Source: Franklin, Mahler, 24–25.

A.24. Program note for concert with movements 2, 3, 6 [reconstructed].

[Die Symphonie besteht aus folgenden 6 Sätzen:]
[Einleitung: „Pan erwacht“]
[No. 1. „Der Sommer marschiert ein“. (Bachuszug.)]
No. 2. „Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen“. (Menuett.)
No. 3. „Was mir die Thiere im Walde erzählen“. (Rondeau.)
[No. 4. „Was mir der Mensch erzählt“. (Altsolo.) ]
[No. 5. „Was mir die Engel erzählen“. (Frauenchor mit Altsolo.)]
No. 6. (Schlusssatz). „Was mir die Liebe erzählt“. (Adagio.)
Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein
Kein Wesen lass verloren sein!
[Note to mvt. 3:] [D]as ruhige, ungestörte Leben des Waldes vor dem
Erscheinen des Menschen. Dann erblicken die Tiere den ersten Menschen und

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 ahnen, obwohl er ruhig an den Entsetzten vorüberschreitet, künftiges Unheil
von seiner Seite.

[The symphony consists of the following six movements:]

[Introduction: “Pan awakes”]
[No. 1 :“Summer Marches In.” (Bacchic Procession.)]
No. 2: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.” (Minuet.)
No. 3: “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.” (Rondo.)
[No. 4: “What Man Tells Me.” (Alto Solo.)]
[No. 5: “What the Angels Tell Me.” (Women’s Chorus with Alto Solo.)]
No. 6 (Closing Movement): “What Love Tells Me.” (Adagio)
Father, look upon my wounds,
Let no being be lost!
[Note to mvt. 3] The quiet, undisturbed life of the forest before the appearance of man. The
animals then see the first man and sense future havoc from his kind, even though he quietly walks
past the horrified animals.

Date: 9 March 1897

Comment: A copy of the program for this concert, conduced by Felix Weingartner
in Berlin, has never been published. Above is a reconstruction based on
surviving references in the secondary literature. The program was
quoted in print first by Ernst Otto Nognagel in 1902.4 Paul Moos’s
review, reprinted in La Grange’s biography, reveals that Mahler
included the motto to the last movement and the titles for at least those
movements that were performed. It seems unlikely that Mahler would
have omitted the titles to the unperformed movements; they thus appear
here in brackets.
Source: Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler: Volume I (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1973), 399–400; Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3,
Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1985), 94.

4 Ernst Otto Nognagel, Jenseits von Wagner und Liszt: Profile und Perspektiven (Königsberg:

Ostpreußischen Druckerei, 1902), 14.

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 APPENDIX B
Informal Commentaries on the First Movement of the Third5

B.1. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

„Der Sommer zieht ein“ soll das Vorspiel werden. Da brauch ich sogleich ein
Regimentsorchester zur Erzielung der derben Wirkung von der Ankunft meines
martialischen Gesellen. Es wird wahrhaftig sein, wie wenn die Burgmusik
aufmarschierte. Ein Gesindel treibt sich da herum, wie man es sonst nicht zu
sehen kriegt. Natürlich geht es nicht ohne Kampf mit dem Gegner, dem Winter,
ab; doch er wird keck und leicht über den Haufen geworfen, und der Sommer in
seiner Kraft und Übermacht reißt bald die unbestrittene Herrschaft an sich.
Dieser Satz, als Einleitung, wird durchaus humoristisch, ja barock gehalten.

“Summer Arrives” should be the prelude. There I’ll need a regimental orchestra straight off to
achieve the crude effect of the arrival of my martial wayfarer. It will really be just like the
military band on parade. A rabble is hanging around such as one seldom sees otherwise. Of
course, it does not come off without a battle against the enemy, winter, who is jauntily and easily
overthrown. With its power and superior strength, summer seizes the undisputed power. This
movement, as the introduction, will be humorous throughout, even eccentric.

Date: [18–21?] August 1895

Comment: This commentary accompanied a full list of the symphony’s
programmatic titles (see appendix A.11).
Source: Herbert Killian, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-
Lechner, rev. Knut Martner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1984), 35–
36; Peter Franklin, ed., Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-
Lechner, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 40–41.

B.2. Letter to Friedrich Löhr.

Die Betonung meines persönlichen Empfindungslebens (als, was die Dinge mir
erzählen) entspricht dem eigenartigen Gedankeninhalt. II-V inkl. soll die
Stufenreihe der Wesen ausdrücken … Nro. I D[er] Sommer marschiert ein, soll
den humoristisch-subjektiven Inhalt andeuten. Der Sommer als Sieger gedacht, -
- inmitten alles dessen, was da wächst und blüht, kreucht und fleucht, wähnt und sehnt
und schließlich, was wir ahnen. (Engel – Glocken – transzendental). – Über alles
hin webt in uns die ewige Liebe – wie die Strahlen in einem Brennpunkte
zusammenfließen. Verstehst Du nun?

5 The original German is given first, and the translation appears directly underneath in smaller

italics. All translations are my own.

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 The emphasis on my personal emotional life (as in, what the things tell me) corresponds to the
peculiar conceptual content. II–V together should express the stepwise order of being … No. 1,
Summer Marches In, should convey the humoristic-subjective content. Summer [is] conceived as
the victor—in the middle of all that grows and blossoms, crawls and soars, imagines and
yearns and, finally, what we sense. (Angels—Bells—transcendental). Above all else, eternal
love weaves in us—like rays of light flowing together to a focal point. Do you understand now?

Date: 29 August 1895

Comment: The letter contained a sheet of extra sheet of paper with the titles
printed in full (see appendix A.12).
Source: Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 2d ed. (Vienna: Zsolnay:
1996), 150; Knud Martner, ed., Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, trans.
Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, Bill Hopkins (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1979), 164–65.

B.3. Conversation with Josef Bohuslav Foerster.

Ich sehe vor mir, wie [Mahler] mir den gewaltigen Plan seines symphonischen
Bauwerks auseinandersetzt. „Sieghaftes Erscheinen des Helios, das
Frühlingswunder vollzieht sich“ [im ersten Satz].

I can still see, how [Mahler] explained to me the imposing plan of his symphonic structure.
“Victorious appearance of Helios, the wonder of spring takes place.”

Date: [September 1895 – May 1896?]

Comment: Foerster records no date. The conversation must have taken place after
Mahler’s programmatic conception had crystallized in August 1895.
Foerster reveals later in the passage that Mahler had not yet come upon
the idea of “Pan erwacht” for the first movement, which means that the
conversation must have taken place by June 1896. Since Foerster, a
friend of Mahler’s in Hamburg, did not visit Mahler that summer, the
conversation most likely occurred before Mahler left for his vacation.
Source: Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger: Erinnerung eines Musikers, trans.
Pavel Eisner (Prague: Artia, 1955), 456–57.

B.4. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Aber wenn Mahler sich auch über den Mangel an geistigem Frei- und Frischsein
beklagte, sagte er mir doch wieder: „Wer weiß, wozu es gut ist! Vielleicht ist das
gerade die der Starrheit des ersten Satzes angemessene Stimmung. Wenn es
nach mir gegangen wäre, hätte ich jetzt gleich einen ganzen blühenden und
leben[s]strotzenden Sommer geschaffen, der hier offenbar gar nicht in der
Intention des Werkes liegt und mir alle folgenden Sätze um ihre Wirkung
gebracht und den Aufbau des Ganzen gestört hätte. So wollen wir die
Widerwärtigkeiten schon ertragen und uns einer geheimnisvollen Schickung
und Fügung überlassen, deren Macht mir immer deutlicher wird in meinem
Leben, je weiter ich es überblicke“.

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 But when Mahler also complained about the absence of intellectual freedom and vitality, he said
to me yet again: “Who knows, what it’s good for! Perhaps that is precisely the mood appropriate
to the rigidity of the first movement. If it had been up to me, I would have just created the entire
summer, blooming and full of life, which apparently does not lie at all in the intention of the
work; it would have robbed all subsequent movements of their effect and destroyed the structure of
the whole. So let us put up with the intractable and surrender ourselves to a mysterious stroke of
fate, whose power in my life becomes ever clearer to me, the longer I ponder it.

Date: [14–20?] June 1896

Comment: Contrary to her habit, Bauer-Lechner did not indicate the date of this
conversation. The range given here is determined by her arrival in
Steinbach (14 June) and the first dated entry of that summer (21 June).
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 54.

B.5. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Auch die Einleitung zum ersten Satz der Dritten entwarf er und erzählte mir
davon: „Das ist schon beinahe keine Musik mehr, das sind fast nur Naturlaute.
Und schaurig ist, wie sich aus der unbeseelten, starren Materie heraus - ich hätte
den Satz auch nennen können: ‚Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt’ - allmählich das
Leben losringt . . . Über der Einleitung zu diesem Satz liegt wieder jene
Stimmung der brütenden Sommermittagsglut, in der kein Hauch sich regt, alles
Leben angehalten ist, die sonngetränkten Lüfte zittern und flimmern. Ich hör’ es
im geistigen Ohr tönen, aber wie die leiblichen Töne dafür finden? Dazwischen
jammert, um Erlösung ringend, der Jüngling, das gefesselte Leben, aus dem
Abgrund der noch leblos-starren Natur (wie in Hölderlins ‚Rhein’), bis er zum
Durchbruch und Siege kommt – im ersten Satz, der attacca auf die Einleitung
folgt.
Der Titel: ‚Der Sommer marschiert ein’, paßt nicht mehr nach dieser
Gestaltung der Dinge im Vorspiel; eher vielleicht ‚Pans Zug’ – nicht Dionysos-
zug! Es ist keine dionysische Stimmung, vielmehr treiben sich Satyren und derlei
derbe Naturgesellen herum“.
Ein andermal sagte mir Mahler im Gespräch über die Symphonie: „Aus
den großen Zusammenhängen zwischen den einzelnen Sätzen, von denen mir
anfangs träumte, ist nichts geworden; jeder steht als ein abgeschlossenes und
eigentümliches Ganzes für sich da: keine Wiederholungen und Reminiszenzen.
Nur auf den Schluß der ‚Thiere’ fällt noch einmal der schwere Schatten der
leblosen Natur, der noch unkristallisierten, unorganischen Materie. Doch
bedeutet er hier mehr einen Rückfall in die tieferen tierischen Formen der
Wesenheit, ehe sie den gewaltigen Sprung zum Geiste in dem höchsten
Erdenwesen, dem Menschen, tut. Ein anderer Zusammenhang, der aber von den
Hörern kaum bemerkt werden wird, ist zwischen dem ersten und dem letzten
Satze, was dort dumpf und starr, ist hier zum höchsten Bewußstsein [sic]
gediehen, die unartikulierten Laute zur höchsten Artikulation geworden“.

He also sketched the introduction to the first movement of the Third and told me about it: “It
almost ceases to be music, but only sounds of nature. It is eerie how life gradually wrests itself free
from the inanimate, rigid matter—I could have named the movement ‘What the Craggy
Mountains Tell Me’—life gradually wrestles free … Again, the atmosphere of a stifling heat on

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 a summer midday hangs over the introduction to this movement. Not a breath stirs. All life is
suspended. The sun-soaked air shimmers and flickers. I hear it in my mental ear, but how to find
the physical tones? In between, the youth, life in chains, cries out, wrestles for redemption from the
abyss of nature, still lifeless and rigid (as in Hölderlins “Rhein”), until he reaches a breakthrough
and victory—in the first movement, which follows the introduction attaca.
The title ‘Summer Marches In,’ is no longer appropriate after this arrangement of
things in the prelude; rather perhaps ‘Pan’s Procession’—not Dionysus’s Procession! It is not a
Dionysian mood; instead, satyrs and such coarse wayfarers of nature mill about.”
On another occasion, Mahler said to me in a conversation about the symphony: “Nothing
came of the prominent connections between the individual movements, of which I initially dreamt.
Each stands there on its own, an enclosed and peculiar whole: no repetitions or reminiscences.
Only lifeless nature—matter as yet uncrystallized, inorganic—casts its heavy shadow once more
on the close of the ‘Animals.’ Yet here it means more a relapse to the lower, animal forms of life,
before they make the huge leap to the intellect in the highest earthly being, man. Another
connection, which can hardly be noticed by the listeners, is between the first and the last
movements; what is dull and rigid in the former has progressed in the latter to the highest
consciousness, turning unarticulated sounds into the highest articulation.”

Date: 22[–27?] June 1896

Comment: The entry is dated 22 June, but because Bauer-Lechner refers to
conversations that took place on different occasions, it is possible that
the entry summarizes exchanges spread over many days. One day
before the next dated entry, 28 June, is the terminus ante quem.
Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 56; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 59.

B.6. Letter to Anna Mildenburg.

Eben bin ich daran fertig zu stellen:
I. Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt
II. Der Sommer marschiert ein!
Merk Dir das – die Welt wird sich es auch noch merken müssen. Dies sind die
beiden ersten Sätze meines Werkes.

I am just about ready to complete:

I. What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me
II. Summer Marches In!
Take note of that—the world will have to take note of it, too. These are the two opening
movements of my work.

Date: [21 or 28?] June 1896

Comment: See comment to appendix A.14.
Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 188.

B.7. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Nun habe ich auch den Titel für die Einleitung gefunden: „Pans Erwachen“,
worauf folgt: ‚Der Sommer marschiert ein’. Nein, was daraus noch werden wird?
Es ist das Tollste, was ich je geschrieben habe!

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 Now I have also found the title for the introduction: “Pan’s Awakening,” after which comes
“Summer Marches In.” Now, what will become of it? It is the wildest thing that I have ever
written!

Date: 28 June 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 57; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 60.

B.8. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Über die Schwierigkeit, ohne den Inhalt von Worten zu komponieren, von der
Richard Wagner spricht, wo es heißt, sich gewissermaßen ‚alles aus dem Finger
saugen’, sagte Mahler im Hinblick auf seine Dritte: „Ich kann mir alles das, was
an dem Text fehlt, nur durch eine ungeheuer intensive, mit der ganzen
Phantasie erfaßte innere Anschauung des Gegenstandes einigermaßen ersetzten.
Beim ‚Sommer’ erfüllte mich dermaßen lebendig sein Blühen und Duften, seine
Laute und Farben und sein ganzes Leben, daß ich es wie persönlich empfand und
sein Haupt und sein Antlitz zu sehen meinte“.

About the difficulty of composing without verbal content, which Richard Wagner likened to
“sucking everything out of one’s finger,” Mahler said, with reference to his Third: “The only way
that I can even partially compensate for the absence of a text is through a tremendously intense,
inner contemplation of the object, which I seize with the entire imagination. With ‘Summer,’ its
blossoming and fragrance, its sounds and colors and its entire life absorbed me so completely, that
I experienced it as a person and thought I saw its head and visage.”

Date: 1 July 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 58.

B.9. Letter to Bruno Walter.

Ich glaube, die Herren Rezensenten engagierter und nicht engagierter Art
werden wieder einige Anwandlungen von Drehkrankheit bekommen, dagegen
werden Freunde eines gesunden Spaßes die Spaziergänge, die ich ihnen da
bereite, sehr amüsant finden. Das Ganze ist leider wieder von dem schon so übel
beleumdeten Geiste meines Humors angekränkelt, und finden sich auch oft
Gelegenheiten, meiner Neigung zu wüstem Lärm nachzugehen. Manchmal
spielen die Musikanten auch, ohne einer auf den andern die geringste Rücksicht
zu nehmen und zeigt sich da meine ganze wüste und brutale Natur in ihrer
nackten Gestalt. Daß es bei mir nicht ohne Trivialitäten abgehen kann, ist zur
Genüge bekannt. Diesmal übersteigt es allerdings alle erlaubten Grenzen. Man
glaubt manchmal, sich in einer Schänke oder in einem Stall zu befinden. . . . Die
Titel der ersten beiden Sätze, die allerdings eng verbunden sind, lauten I. Pan
erwacht attacca 2. der Sommer marschiert ein!

I believe that the Messieurs Reviewers, the committed sort as well as the uncommitted, will again
get a few fits of the staggers. On the other hand, friends of some good old fun will find the strolls
that I prepare for them very amusing. The whole piece is unfortunately afflicted again by the
spirit of my humor, which already has such a bad reputation, and opportunities often arise for me

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 to indulge my penchant for chaotic noise. Sometimes the street musicians play, too, without the one
showing the slightest consideration for the others. My entirely chaotic and brutal nature appears
in their unvarnished form. That I can’t do without trivialities is only too well known. This time,
however, it exceeds all permitted limits. One thinks sometimes that one is in a tavern or soldier’s
quarters. . . . The titles of the first two movements, which are, by the way, closely connected, are I.
Pan Awakes attacca 2. Summer Marches In!

Date: 2 July 1896

Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 191; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
189. For more on this passage, see ch. 5, pp. 229, fn. 53.

B.10. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Es ist furchtbar, wie dieser Satz mir über alles, was ich je gemacht habe,
hinauswächst, daß mir die Zweite als ein Kind dagegen erscheint. Das ist weit,
weit über Lebensgröße, und alles Menschliche schrumpft wie ein Pygmäenreich
dagegen zusammen. Wahres Entsetzen faßt mich an, wenn ich sehe, wohin das
führt, welcher Weg der Musik vorbehalten ist, und daß mir das schreckliche
Amt geworden, Träger dieses Riesenwerkes zu sein. . . . Denn wirklich, zu weit
von allem Gewesenen entfernt sich dies, das kaum mehr Musik zu nennen,
sondern nur ein mystischer, ungeheuerer Naturlaut ist. . . . Ich werde den ersten
Satz als erste Abteilung bringen und darnach eine lange Pause machen. Das
ganze will ich aber nun doch „Pan, Symphonische Dichtungen“ nennen. . . .
Rasend wälzt sich’s im ersten Satz heran gleich dem Südsturm, der in diesen
Tagen hier fegt und der – ich bin des sicher – alle Fruchtbarkeit in seinem
Schoße trägt, da er aus fernen fruchtbar-heißen Ländern kommt – anders als der
uns Menschen erwünschte Ostwind-Fächler. In einem fortreißenden Marsch-
tempo braust es immer näher und näher, lauter und lauter, lawinengleich
anschwellend, bis sich das ganze Getöse und der ganze Jubel über dich ergießt.

It is frightful, how this movement outgrows everything that I have ever made, such that the
Second [Symphony] appears to me by comparison as a child. It is far, far beyond life-size and all
things human are dwarfed like a pygmy realm in comparison. Genuine horror seizes me when I
see where this is leading, which path is reserved for the music, and that the terrifying duty of
bearing this gigantic work falls to me. . . . Truly, it distinguishes itself so much from all that has
ever been created that it can hardly be called music, but is only a mystical, tremendous sound of
nature. . . . I will make the first movement the first part and then have a long pause. Now I really
do want to call the whole piece “Pan, Symphonic Poems.” . . . In the first movement it tosses
about violently like the southerly storm that is currently sweeping through here and which—of
this I am certain—carries all fertility in its lap, because it comes from the distant, fertile, warm
lands—in contrast to the fanning, easterly wind that humans prefer. In a tumultuous march
tempo it roars ever closer, ever louder, growing louder like an avalanche until the full din and all
the jubilation pours over you.

Date: 4 July 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 59–60; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 63–64.

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B.11. Letter to Anna Mildenburg.
Der Sommer marschiert ein; da klingt es und singt es, wie Du Dir es nicht
vorstellen kannst! Von allen Seiten sprießt es auf. Und dazwischen wieder so
unendlich geheimnisvoll und schmerzvoll – wie die leblose Natur, die in dumpfer
Regungslosigkeit dem kommenden Leben entgegenharrt. – Es läßt sich das
nicht in Worten ausdrücken!

Summer marches in, ringing and singing like you cannot even imagine! It springs up from all
sides. Then in between it is again so endlessly secretive and painful—like lifeless Nature
awaiting the approach of life in utter stillness. It just cannot be put into words!

Date: 6 July 1896

Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 192; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
189.

B.12. Letter to Anna Mildenburg.

Als Dein Brief ankam, hatte ich einen seltsamen Spaß. Ich sah, wie gewöhnlich
auf den Poststempel und bemerkte diesmal statt, wie sonst, Malborghet nur
P.A.N. (dahinter stand noch 30, was ich aber nicht sah.[)] – Nun such ich schon
seit Wochen nach einem Gesamttitel für mein Werk und bin endlich auf: „Pan“
verfallen, welcher wie Du ja wissen wirst eine altgriechische Gottheit, die später
zum Inbegriff des „Alls“ geworden (Pan – griechisch alles). Nun kannst Du dir
denken, welche Überraschung mir diese 3 zunächst unverständlichen
Buchstaben bereitet, die ich nachträglich endlich als Post Amt Numero 30
entzifferte. – Ist das nicht eigen?

I had a strange delight when your letter arrived. I looked as always at the postmark and saw,
instead of Malborghet as usual, only P.A.N. (after which came 30, which I did not see). For
weeks now I have been searching for a title for my work and finally hit upon “Pan,” which, as
you certainly know, was an ancient Greek divinity that later became the epitome of the “universe”
(Pan = Greek for “everything”). You can imagine my surprise at these 3, initially
incomprehensible letters, which I deciphered only later as Post Office [Amt] Number 30. Isn’t
that strange?

Date: 9 July 1896

Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 192–93 Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
189–90.

B.13. Letter to Hermann Behn.

Über den [ersten] Satz selbst unterlasse ich es, etwas zu sagen; Du kennst
meine Abneigung, Musik zu beschreiben, und ich hoffe, daß Du ihn, und seine
Geschwister [Dir] im nächsten Winter zu Gemüthe führen wirst. Er führt den
Titel: Der Sommer marschirt ein, und dauert ungefähr 45 Minuten! Darnach
kannst Du urtheilen, welchen Inhalt er hat und ist [sic] so ziemlich das Keckste,
was ich bis jetzt concipirt.

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 I refrain from saying anything about the [first] movement itself; you know my aversion to
describing music, and I hope that you will treat yourself to it and its siblings next winter. It has
the title “Summer Marches In” and lasts about 45 minutes! After that, you can judge what it is
about and [it] is pretty much the cheekiest, that I ever conceived.

Date: 11 July 1896

Source: Blaukopf, ed., Unbekannte Briefe, 28.

B.14. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Mahler hatte nur noch 16 Takte, dann war er fertig!
Im Plaudern darüber sagte er: „Zu meiner Verwunderung und Freude
zugleich sehe ich nun: es ist in diesem Satz, wie in dem Ganzen Werk, doch
wieder dasselbe Gerüst, der gleiche Grundbau – ohne daß ich es gewollt oder
daran gedacht hätte –, wie sie bei Mozart und, nur erweitert und erhöht, bei
Beethoven sich finden, vom alten Haydn aber eigentlich geschaffen worden sind.
Es müssen ihnen doch tiefe, ewige Gesetze innewohnen, an denen Beethoven
festhielt und die ich bei mir als eine Art Bestätigung wiederfinde: Adagio,
Rondo, Menuett, Allegro und innerhalb dessen der alte Bau, die bekannten
Perioden. Nur daß in meinem Werk die Reihenfolge der Sätze eine andere, die
Mannigfaltigkeit und Komplikation innerhalb der Sätze eine größere ist“.
Und Nachmittag erzählte er mir wieder über seinen ersten Satz: „Die
Beweglichkeit und Wechselhaftigkeit der Motive darin ist dem spielenden
Wasser einer Stromschnelle vergleichbar, wo in jedem Augenblick die Millionen
Tropfen andere sind. Das rast in einem ununterbrochenen Wirbel dahin, kaum
die Erde berührend, immer höher sich erhebend und zum Himmel
aufschäumend, nur durch den Widerstand, den die starre Materie in Stein und
Felsgeröll des Strombettes entgegensetzt, hie und da plötzlich auf- und
angehalten. . . . Wenn mir nur heute nicht noch etwas zustößt“, sagte er: „denn
die 16 Takte, den Riesentusch, den ich dem Pan in meinem Bacchuszug von dem
ganzen wilden Gesindel ausbringen lasse, könnte kein Mensch statt meiner zu
Ende führen“.

Mahler had only 16 measures left. Then he was done!

While chatting about it, Mahler said: “I now see, with a mixture of astonishment and
joy, that this movement, like the entire symphony, has the same scaffolding and construction—
without my intending or even thinking about it—as found in Mozart and, expanded and
exalted, in Beethoven, but which were actually created by the venerable Haydn. Deep, eternal
laws must abide in them, to which Beethoven held fast and which I discover in my work as a kind
of confirmation: Adagio, Rondo, Minuet, Allegro and within these the long-standing structure,
the familiar periods. But in my work the sequence of the movements is different, and the diversity
and complexity within the movements greater.”
That afternoon he told me again about his first movement: “The agility and mutability
of its motives can be likened to the effortless motions of water in a brisk current: in each moment
the millions of drops are replenished anew. It surges forward in a continuous whirl, hardly
touching the earth, lifting itself ever higher, its foam reaching toward heaven. It is opposed only
by the resistance of the rigid matter in the stones and rocks of the riverbed, which hold it up
suddenly here and there. . . . Would that nothing further happens to me today,” he said, “because

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 no one but I could complete the 16 bars, the giant fanfare that I let Pan bring forth in my bacchic
procession of the rowdy rabble.”

Date: 27 July 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 65; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 66.

B.15. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Indessen war es Mahler gelungen, heute den Anfang des ersten Satzes so zu
verändern, wie er ihn an der Spitze dieses monumentalen Eingangs brauchte.
„Und zwar mußte ich da einfach wie ein Baumeister vorgehen, der die Formen
seines Gebäudes in die richtigen Verhältnisse zueinander setzt. Indem ich
nämlich die Zahl der Anfangstakte verdoppelte (das heißt durch ein Adagio-
Tempo um die Hälfte verlangsamte), hat dieser Teil nun die Schwere und Länge,
die unerläßlich war“.

Meanwhile, Mahler managed today to alter the beginning of the first movement to match what
he needed at the head of this monumental opening. “Indeed, I had to proceed like a master builder
who places the elements of his building in the proper relationships to one another. By doubling the
number of opening measures (that is, using an adagio tempo to make it twice as slow), I conferred
on this passage the gravity and length that it must absolutely have.”

Date: 30 July 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 66; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 67.

B.16. Conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner.

Die Art, wie er seinen Schöpfungen nachträglich auf die Spur zu kommen suchte,
gab ihm bald dieses, bald jenes Bild dafür ein. „Es ist Zeus, der den Kronos
stürzt, die höhere Form, welche die niedrigere überwindet, was in diesem Satz
zum Ausdruck kommt“, sagte er mir diesmal darüber. „Immer mehr sehe ich, wie
sehr die ungeheure Naturauffassung der Griechen ihm zugrunde liegt“.

The way that he tried to understand his creations after the fact inspired different ideas at
different times. “This movement gives expression to Zeus, who toppled Cronus, the higher form,
which overcomes the lower,” he said about it this time. “I see ever more clearly to what extent the
Greeks’ vast conception of nature underlies it.”

Date: September/October 1896

Source: Killian, ed., Erinnerungen, 76; Franklin, ed., Recollections, 76.

B.17. Conversation with Josef Bohuslav Foerster.

Nach dem zu ungewöhnlicher Breite ausgesponnenen [1.] Satz wollte der
Komponist erzählen, wie alles Erschaffene auf ihn einwirkt. „Zuerst sprechen die
Steine, dann die Blumen, die Tiere, der Mensch, die Engel und zuletzt Gott der
Schöpfer“.

284
 After the [first] movement, which developed to unusual breadth, the composer wanted to explain
how all of creation has an effect on him. “The rocks speak at first, then the flowers, the animals,
man, the angels, and finally god the creator.”

Date: [September – November 1896?]

Comment: Foerster implies that this conversation took place before the summer
vacation of 1895. His memory is certainly faulty. Apart from a few
sketches, Mahler composed the first movement in the summer of 1896.
Since the conversation took place in Hamburg, it was most likely during
the fall of 1896, as Mahler was preparing the fair copies of mvts. 1 and
6.
Source: Foerster, Pilger, 457.

B.18. Letter to Ludwig Schiedermair

Sie haben da ziemlich fehlgegriffen, soweit ich aus Ihren kurzen Bemerkungen
schließen kann. Die III. hat mit dem Ringen einer Individualität nichts zu tun.
Eher könnte man sagen: es ist der Entwicklungsweg der Natur (von der starren
Materie bis zur höchsten Artikulation!, aber vor allem Naturleben!).
Dionysos – die treibende, schaffende Kraft. – Bezeichnend sind die Titel,
die ich ursprünglich dem Werke beigegeben habe, die aber so unzulänglich sind
und so sehr mißverstanden worden sind, daß ich sie wieder weggelassen habe.

You pretty much missed the point, insofar as I can conclude from your short observations. The
Third has nothing to do with the wrestling of an individuality. One could rather say: it is
nature’s course of development (from rigid matter to the highest articulation!, but above all the
life of nature!).
Dionysus—the driving, creative force. The titles that I originally gave the work are
characteristic but are so inadequate and were so misunderstood that I omitted them again.

Date: [1900 or early 1901?]

Source: Mathias Hansen, Gustav Mahler Briefe, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985),
246.

B.19. Letter to Josef Krug-Waldsee

Diese Titel, die Nodnagel angegeben hat (sie sind richtig bis auf den ersten der
so lautet: Einleitung zum I. Satz: Pan erwacht, der Sommer marschiert ein
[Bacchuszug]) werden Ihnen nach Kenntnis der Partitur gewiß manches zu
sagen wissen. Sie werden auch aus ihnen eine Andeutung schöpfen, wie ich mir
die stetig sich steigernde Artikulation der Empfindung vorgestellt habe, vom
dumpfen starren, bloß elementaren Sein (der Naturgewalten) bis zum zarten
Gebilde des menschlichen Herzens, welches wiederum über dieses hinaus (zu
Gott) weist und reicht.

These titles, which Nodnagel passed along (they are correct except for the first one, which is:
Introduction to Movement I: Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In [Bacchic Procession]), will
certainly be revealing to you after studying the score. You [may] create from them an
interpretation akin to my idea of the continually heightening articulation of feeling, from the dull,

285
rigid, merely elemental Being (of the forces of nature) to the tender objects of the human heart,
which in turn points and extends beyond this (to god).

Date: summer 1902

Source: Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler Briefe, 297–98; Martner, ed., Selected Letters,
266–67.

286
 APPENDIX C
Operettas conducted by Mahler6
I. II. III. IV.
Brandl, Johann Des Löwen Erwachen (1872) Bad Hall 1 130 (#66)
Genée, Richard Der Seekadett (1876) Laibach 2 191 (#55)
Lecocq, Charles La Fille de Madame Angot (1873) Laibach 1 263 (#47)
Lecocq, Charles Giroflé-Girofla (1874) Laibach 2 411 (#34)
Millöcker, Carl Der Bettelstudent (1882) Hamburg 11 4,940 (#4)
Offenbach, Jacques Barbe-bleue (1866) Laibach 1 148 (#64)
Offenbach, Jacques La Belle Hélène (1864) Laibach 1 1,474 (#15)
Offenbach, Jacques Le Mariage aux lanternes (1857) Bad Hall 2; Kassel 2 524 (#28)
Offenbach, Jacques La Vie parisienne (1866) Laibach 2 252 (#49)
Planquette, Robert Les Cloches de Corneville (1877) Laibach 3 1,025 (#20)
Strauss, Jr., Johann Cagliostro in Wien (1875) Laibach 2 [no data]
Strauss, Jr., Johann Die Fledermaus (1874) Laibach 2, Hamburg 21, Vienna 1 11,962 (#1)
Strauss, Jr., Johann Der lustige Krieg (1881) Laibach 11 563 (#27)
Suppé, Franz von Boccaccio (1879) Laibach 5; Iglau 1 2,133 (#9)
Suppé, Franz von Donna Juanita (1880) Laibach 7 156 (#61)
Suppé, Franz von Fatinitza (1876) Laibach 2 1,215 (#18)
Suppé, Franz von Flotte Bursche (1863) Laibach 1 522 (#29)

I. Composer
II. Title (in original language) and year of premiere
III. Location and number of performances Mahler conducted
IV. Number of performances on German-language stages in 1896–1921 and ranking
compared to other operettas with premieres between 1855 and 1900.

6 Excluded from the table is one operetta, Karl Kuntze’s Das Kaffeekränzchen or Der Kaffeeklatsch,

which Mahler rehearsed in Iglau (La Grange, Mahler, 1:107). Kuntze’s “operetta” was written for small
vocal ensemble and piano accompaniment and was intended for performance at Liedertafel. Hence, it does
not fit into the tradition of staged works with orchestral accompaniment represented by the operettas
listed above. Since no comprehensive account of the repertoire at Bad Hall survives, the only pieces that
Mahler is known to have conducted there are those for which advertising posters survive (Katharina
Ulbrich, Mathilde Kubizek, and Erich Wolfgang Partsch, “Mahler in Bad Hall: Eine Dokumentation,”
Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung 50 [spring 2004]: 48–49). Four operettas by Offenbach fell under
Mahler’s responsibility in Kassel, but no evidence confirms that he actually conducted them (Hans
Joachim Schaeffer, ed., Kassel trifft sich – Kassel erinnert sich: Gustav Mahler [Kassel: Stadtsparkasse Kassel,
1990], 38–39, 112–13). The remaining sources for columns 1–3 are: Primro Kuret, Mahler in Laibach:
Ljubljana, 1881–1882 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 99; La Grange, Mahler, 1:87; Bernd Schabbing,
Gustav Mahler als Konzert- und Operndirigent in Hamburg (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 2002), 309; La
Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:942. The data for column 4 is drawn from Otto Keller, Die Operette in ihrer
geschichtlichen Entwicklung: Musik, Libretto, Darstellung (Leipzig: Stein Verlag, 1926), 294, 420–22. The
absolute number of performances was actually significantly higher; only relatively few theaters reported
their repertoire to the Deutsche Bühnen-Spielplan, Keller’s source for the figures. The relative ranking of
the operettas, however, should be accurate. Keller’s omission of Cagliostro in Wien seems to have been an
oversight.

287
 APPENDIX D
Musical Examples for Chapter 2

Example 2.1. Mahler, Symphony no. 1, mvt. 3

288
Example 2.2. Johann Strauss, Jr., Der Zigeunerbaron, overture

a. mm. 54–79

b. mm. 98–106

289
Example 2.3. Johann Strauss, Jr., Der Zigeunerbaron, no. 4, Mirabella’s couplets

Example 2.4. Franz von Suppé, Fatinitza, no. 14, melodrama

290
Example 2.5. Jacques Offenbach, Barbe-bleue, no. 8, Legend of Bluebeard

291
Example 2.6. Johann Strauss, Jr., Die Fledermaus, no. 4, trio

292
 APPENDIX E
Tables and Musical Examples for Chapter 3

Table 3.1. Melodic similarities to folksongs7

Measure numbers in Mahler’s score and

Folksong corresponding motive from folksong
Alle Vögel sind schon da 285–88
Es kann mich nichts Schöneres erfreuen a: 259–61; b: 270–71, 285–88; c: 266–67
Es ritten drei Reiter zum Thore hinaus 269–71
Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein 264–67, 292–94, 322–27, 487–93, 497–99
Freut euch des Lebens a: 265–67, 292–96, 323–27, 487–93, 497–501; b: 270–71
Hulán [a Bohemian folk dance] 285–88
Ich ging durch einen grasgrünen Wald 257–59
Wie lieblich schallt durch Busch und Wald 269–71

Example 3.1. Melodic similarities to folksongs

“Alle Vögel sind schon da”8

7 References to these folksongs can be found in Heinrich Schmidt, Formprobleme und

Entwicklungslinien in Gustav Mahlers Symphonien (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 1929), 151; Rudolf Stephan,
“Betrachtungen zu Form und Thematik in Mahlers Vierter Symphonie,“ Neue Wege der musikalischen
Analyse, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung Darmstadt, vol. 6 (Berlin:
Merseburger, 1967), 23; Tibbe, Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen, 89–92; Vladimir Karbusicky,
Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt. Impulse der Forschung, vol. 28 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1978), 46–48; and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich:
Piper, 1982), 182–87.
8 Unsere Lieder, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Rauhes Haus, 1844), 60.

293
 “Es kann mich nichts Schöneres erfreuen”9

“Es ritten drei Reiter zum Thore hinaus”10

“Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein”11

“Freut euch des Lebens”12

Hulán13

9 Ludwig Erk, ed., Deutsche Liederhort: Auswahl der vorzüglichern deutschen Volkslieder aus der
Vorzeit und Gegenwart mit ihren eigenthümlichen Melodien (Berlin: Enslin, 1856), 27. The version printed
here is the first melody with optional ending, and has been transposed from D major.
10 Erk, ed., Deutsche Liederhort, 209.

Max Friedlaender, Volksliederbuch für die Jugend (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1930), no. 58; quoted in
11

Tibbe, Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen, 98.

12 Friedrich Silcher and Friedrich Erk, Schauenburgs allgemeines deutsches Kommersbuch (Lahr:

Moritz Schauenburg, 1888), 351–52.

13 Karbusicky, Gustav Mahlers musikalische Umgebung, 45–48.

294
 “Ich ging durch einen grasgrünen Wald”14

“Wie lieblich schallt durch Busch und Wald”15

Example 3.2. Quotation of Abblasen

“Abblasen”16

Mahler, Symphony no. 3, mvt. 3 (mm. 345–47)

Example 3.3. Melodic Similarities to Glinka and Liszt

Glinka, Capriccio Brillante

14 Erk, ed., Deutsche Liederhort, 247.

15 Franz Magnus Böhme, Volkstümliche Lieder der Deutschen (Leipzig, 1895); quoted in Tibbe,

Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen, 90.

16 Emil Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik—von ihren Anfängen bis 1918, rev. ed., ed. Eugen

Brixel in Alta Musica 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 183.

295
 Liszt, Rhapsodie espagnole, mvt. 3, arr. Busoni

Mahler, Symphony no. 3, mvt. 3

Example 3.4. Johann Beer, Concerto à 4, mvt. 1, posthorn

Example 3.5. Mozart, Posthorn Serenade, K. 320, mvt. 6, posthorn

Example 3.6. Schubert, Die Winterreise, “Die Post,” piano

296
Example 3.7. Adolf Müller, Sr., “Der Postillion,” posthorn

a. Mixture of signals and lyrical phrases

b. Tune at the Cemetery

Example 3.8. Viktor Nessler, Trompeter von Säkkingen, “Behüt Dich Gott”

Example 3.9. Mahler, Blumine, main theme

297
Example 3.10. Heinrich Schäffer, “Die Post im Walde,” flügelhorn17

17 This example is based on an arrangement by the Austrian military band conductor Franz

Joseph Wagner (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Mus.Hs.20771). The arrangement was made in 1877
and represents a version of the song that Mahler could have plausibly heard. The lack of performance
instructions is typical for such military band scores. The metrical deviations in the closing measures are
transcribed directly from the manuscript. The repetition in m. 48 is ambiguous. It can be read as referring
to either the first half of the measure, or only to the alternating sixteenths. In the following bar, the solo
is notated as if in 7/8. All other voices remain in 6/8.

298
Example 3.11. Viktor Nessler, Trompeter von Säkkingen, no. 13, trumpet18

18 This example is based on the piano-vocal score (Leipzig 1884). Orchestrational cues are based
on the printed orchestral score (Leipzig 1884; Österreichische Nationalbibliothek OA.1295). The text has
been omitted to conserve space.

299
Example 3.12. Mahler, Symphony no. 3. mvt. 3. posthorn

300
Example 3.13. Selected posthorn signals of the Deutsche Reichpost19

No. 1. Für Estaffeten

No. 2, Für Kuriere

No. 3, Für Extraposten

No. 5, Für Güterposten

19 Hiller, Das große Buch vom Posthorn, 80–81.

301
 APPENDIX F
Tables and Musical Examples for Chapter 4

Table 4.1. Repertoire of operettas and operas at Iglau’s theater, 1866–7520

# of Acts

1866–67

1867–68

1868–69

1869–70

1870–71

1871–72

1872–73

1873–74

1874–75

Total
Composer Work
Adam, Adolphe Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (1836) 3 2 2
Auber, Daniel-François- Fra Diavolo (1829)
3 3 3
Esprit
Auber, Daniel-François- Le Muette de Portici (1828)
5 2 2
Esprit
Balfe, Michael William The Bohemian Girl (1839) 3 2 2
Bellini, Vincenzo Norma (1831) 2 3 1 4
Bellini, Vincenzo I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830) 2 2 2
Boïeldieu, François- Jean de Paris (1812)
2 1 1
Adrien
Boïeldieu, François- La dame blanche (1825)
3 4 1 5
Adrien
Brandl, Johann Des Löwen Erwachen (1872) 1 1 1 2
Conradi, August Beckers Geschichte (1861?) 1 2 2 1 5
Donizetti, Gaetano Belisario (1836) 3 3 1 4
Donizetti, Gaetano Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) 3 2 2
Donizetti, Gaetano Lucrezia Borgia (1833) 2 3 2 1 6
Flotow, Friedrich von Alessandro Stradella (1844) 3 2 2 4
Flotow, Friedrich von Martha (1847) 4 5 3 1 9
Halévy, Fromental La Juive (1835) 5 1 1
Hérold, Louis Zampa (1831) 3 2 2
Hopp, Julius Morilla (1868) 3 4 2 1 7
Jonas, Émile Javotte (1871) 3 1 2 3
Klerr, Johann Baptist Die böse Nachbarin (1861?) 1 1 1 2
Konradin, Karl Der Drachenstein (1861?) 2 1 1
Kreutzer, Conradin Das Nachtlager von Granada
2 3 3
(1834)
Lecocq, Charles La Fille de Madame Angot (1873) 3 5 5
Lortzing, Albert Zar und Zimmermann (1837) 3 2 2
Méhul, Etienne-Nicolas Joseph (1807) 3 1 1
Meyerbeer, Giacomo Robert le diable (1831) 5 3 3
Mozart, Wolfgang Don Giovanni (1787)
2 3 3
Amadeus
Mozart, Wolfgang Der Schauspieldirektor (1786)
1 1 1
Amadeus
Mozart, Wolfgang Die Zauberflöte (1791)
2 1 1
Amadeus

20 These figures were culled from the German-language newspaper in Iglau. Although good

estimates, the figures undoubtedly contain minor errors due to last-minute changes in the theater’s
repertoire and occasional lapses in newspaper coverage. All works were sung in German, but original
titles are used here because of the inconsistency and occasional idiosyncrasy of the theater’s translated
titles. During Mahler’s stay in Prague in 1871–72, the theater performed five operas that were not
repeated after his return to Iglau: Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Halévy’s La
Juive, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and Verdi’s Ernani.

302
 # of Acts

1866–67

1867–68

1868–69

1869–70

1870–71

1871–72

1872–73

1873–74

1874–75

Total
Composer Work
Müller, Sr., Adolf Der Liebeszauber (1856?) 1 2 1 1 4
Offenbach, Jacques Le “66” (1856) 1 1 1 2
Offenbach, Jacques Barbe-bleue (1866) 3 4 2 1 2 1 10
Offenbach, Jacques Les Bavards (1863) 2 2 2
Offenbach, Jacques La Belle Hélène (1864) 3 3 3 4 3 2 1 1 17
Offenbach, Jacques Coscoletto ou Le Lazzarone (1865) 2 2 2
Offenbach, Jacques La Chanson de Fortunio (1861) 1 1 2 3
Offenbach, Jacques Daphnis et Chloé (1860) 1 2 1 1 1 5
Offenbach, Jacques Le Fifre enchanté ou Le Soldat
1 2 2
magicien (1868)
Offenbach, Jacques Les Géorgiennes (1864) 3 2 4 6
Offenbach, Jacques La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein
3 5 3 3 2 2 2 17
(1867)
Offenbach, Jacques L’Île de Tulipatan (1868) 1 2 1 3
Offenbach, Jacques Jacqueline (1862) 1 1 1
Offenbach, Jacques Jeanne qui pleure et Jean qui rit
1 2 1 1 4
(1864)
Offenbach, Jacques Un Mari à la porte (1859) 1 1 1 1 1 4
Offenbach, Jacques Le Mariage aux lanternes (1857) 1 1 2 1 2 1 7
Offenbach, Jacques M. Choufleuri restera chez lui le...
1 1 1 1 3
(1861)
Offenbach, Jacques Monsieur et Madame Denis (1862) 1 1 1
Offenbach, Jacques Orphée aux enfers (1858) 2 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 9
Offenbach, Jacques Pépito (1853) 1 1 1
Offenbach, Jacques La Périchole (1868) 2 3 3
Offenbach, Jacques La Princesse de Trébizonde (1869) 2 4 2 1 7
Offenbach, Jacques Vert-Vert (1869) 3 2 2
Offenbach, Jacques La Vie parisienne (1866) 5 2 2 1 5
Offenbach, Jacques Le Violoneux (1855) 1 1 1 1 1 1 5
Rossini, Gioachino Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) 2 3 3
Rossini, Gioachino La Cenerentola (1817) 2 1 1
Suppé, Franz von Canngebas (1872) 1 2 2
Suppé, Franz von Flotte Bursche (1863) 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 8
Suppé, Franz von Franz Schubert (1864) 1 2 2
Suppé, Franz von Die Frau Meisterin (1868) 3 5 2 7
Suppé, Franz von Freigeister (1866) 2 3 3
Suppé, Franz von Leichte Kavallerie (1866) 2 1 1 1 1 1 5
Suppé, Franz von Das Pensionat (1860) 1 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 10
Suppé, Franz von Die schöne Galathée (1865) 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 2 12
Suppé, Franz von Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann
1 4 2 1 2 1 1 11
(1862)
Verdi, Giuseppe Ernani (1844) 4 4 4
Verdi, Giuseppe Rigoletto (1851) 3 2 2
Verdi, Giuseppe Il trovatore (1853) 4 2 1 3
Weber, Carl Maria von Der Freischütz (1821) 3 3 1 1 5
Zaytz, Giovanni von Die Kunstreiterin (?)
? 1 1
[Ivan Zajc]
Zaytz, Giovanni von Mannschaft an Bord (1863)
1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 10
[Ivan Zajc]

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Table 4.2. Musical productions at Iglau’s theater, 1866–7521

1866– 1867– 1868– 1869– 1870– 1871– 1872– 1873– 1874–

67 68 69 70 71 72 73* 74 75
Operettas 19 19 28 36 3 30 8 52 27
Opera 0 0 0 3 43 19 16 0 0
Total 19 19 28 39 46 49 24 52 27

* Figures for this season are artificially low on account of missing newspapers.

21 These figures were culled from the German-language newspaper in Iglau. Although good
estimates, the figures undoubtedly contain minor errors due to last-minute changes in the theater’s
repertoire and occasional lapses in newspaper coverage. Furthermore, it is not always clear what should
count as an opera or operetta; generic distinctions were highly variable in the late nineteenth century.
Hence some works included here as operettas were sometimes called Liederspiel or Posse mit Gesang; and
some works not included here were occasionally called operettas.
The only seasons that Iglau had an opera cast were 1870–1873. Why there were so few operettas
in 1870–71 is not immediately clear. It was the first time that the city council had hired Gottfried
Denemy and his theater troupe, which brought a cast of opera singers to Iglau. In Denemy’s second
season (1871–72), however, he presented a more balanced repertoire of operas and operettas. In 1872–73,
the opera cast resided in Iglau only from October until December. All major musical works during these
months were operas; all those thereafter were operettas. The drastic decline of musical stage works in
1874–75 was a result of the 1873 stock market crash.

304
Table 4.3. Typical Instruments of Military Bands and Operetta Orchestras22

The number of parts for each instrument, when greater than one, is given in
parentheses. Italics indicate instruments occasionally found in military bands.

Operetta Orchestra,
Austrian Military Wind Band,
ca. 1890s ca. 1870–80s
Flutes (2)
Flute in D-flat (1–2)
Piccolo in D-flat (1–2)
Oboes (2)
Clarinet in A-flat
Clarinet in E-flat (1–2)
Clarinets in B-flat (2–4) Clarinets in B-flat (2)
Bassoons (2) Bassoons (2)
French horns (4) French horns in F (4)
Cornet in E-flat
Trumpets in F (2)
Trumpet in B-flat
Trumpets in E-flat (4–6)
Bass trumpet
Flügelhorns in B-flat (2)
Bass flügelhorn
Euphonium Trombones (3)
Trombones (3)
Bass tubas (2)
Helicon
. Violins (2)
Viola
Cello
Bass
Triangle
Timpani
Snare drum Snare drum
Bass drum + Cymbals Bass drum + Cymbals

22 Kaiser, Historische Märsche, viii; see also Habla, Besetzung und Instrumentation, 1:32–34. I
extrapolated the instrumentation for operetta orchestras from the operettas that Mahler conducted. The
instrumentation of these pieces can be found in Volker Klotz, Operette: Porträt und Handbuch einer
unerhörten Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1991).

305
Table 4.4. Orchestration of Military Wind Band and its Direct Imitation in
Operetta

“Potpourri aus der Operette

Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent,
Bettelstudent von Ch. Millöcker,”
Finale I, Stadtkapelle stage
arr. for military band by J. F.
music
Wagner; Stadtkapelle stage music

Flute, Piccolo, Oboes (2), Flute, Piccolo, Clarinets in A, E-flat,

Clarinets in B-flat (2), Trumpet and B-flat (3), Flügelhorn, Bass
Melody
in F Flügelhorn, Euphonium, Cornet in E-
flat, Trumpet in E-flat
Horns (4), Trombones (2) play Horn (4), Tenor horn, Trumpets in
offbeats. E-flat (5), Bass trumpet, Trombones
(2 in second phrase) play offbeats.

Oboes (2), Clarinets in B-flat (2), Flügelhorn plays a simplified version

Accompaniment
Trumpet play a simplified of the melody.
version of the melody

Trumpet 2 harmonizes the Trombones (2 in first phrase) play

melody. long tones.
Bass Line Bassoons (2), Bass trombone Bass Trombone, Tuba
Percussion Snare, Bass Drum, Cymbals Snare, Bass Drum, Cymbals

306
Example 4.1. Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent, act 1 finale23

23 This example is based on the piano-vocal score (Leipzig: Aug. Cranz, 1935). The orchestral

excerpt is transcribed from the composer’s autograph score (Stadtarchiv Baden bei Wien MS 201 HS).

307
Full Score of Onstage Ensemble

308
Example 4.2. J. F. Wagner’s arrangement of stage music from Millöcker’s
Bettelstudent24

24 Transcribed from the manuscript score (Potpourri aus der Operette Bettelstudent von Ch.
Millöcker für Militärmusik von J. F. Wagner Kapellmeister, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Mus.Hs.20730).

309
Example 4.3. Carl Millöcker, Der Bettelstudent, act 1, spring fair march

310
Example 4.4. Carl Michael Ziehrer, Die Landstreicher, act 1, no. 8, march duet25

25 This example is based on the piano-vocal score (Vienna: Musikverlag Döblinger, n.d.). The
orchestrational cues are taken from the full score at the Österreichisches Rundfunk Studio Wien (CMZ
Bw. 11, Ouvertüre und 1. Akt, Partitur).

311
Example 4.5. Charles Lecocq, La Fille de Madame Angot, “Couplets de la dispute”

312
Example 4.6. Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, no. 20, act 3 finale

313
Example 4.7. Mahler, Symphony no. 2, mvt. 5

314
Example 4.8. Mahler, Das klagende Lied, “Der Spielmann”

a. Spielmann’s motive

b. Transformation of the Spielmann’s motive as light march

315
Example 4.9. Mahler, “Revelge”

316
Example 4.10. Franz Lehár, Wiener Frauen, no. 13, Nechledil-Marsch

317
Example 4.11. Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár I

Lehár, Die lustige Witwe, no. 15, Duet

Mahler, Symphony no. 7, mvt. 5

Example 4.12. Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár II

Lehár, Die lustige Witwe, no. 9, Trio

Mahler, Symphony no. 7, mvt. 5

318
Example 4.13. Melodic similarity between Mahler and Lehár III

Lehár, Die lustige Witwe, no. 9, Trio

Mahler, Symphony no. 9, mvt. 3

319
 APPENDIX G
Figures, Tables, and Musical Examples for Chapter 5

Figure 5.1. Major structural sections

Figure 5.2. Minor structural sections

320
Figure 5.3. Theme group, structural gesture, tonal center

Figure 5.4. Sonata form option 126

26 If one includes the “Pan sleeps” material as part of the first theme group, the exposition would

begin at m. 247 and development at m. 530.

321
Figure 5.5. Sonata form option 2

Figure 5.6. Rotational form

322
Figure 5.7. Moment-to-moment logic in first theme group
mm. 27–58

mm. 671–84

323
 Figure 5.8. Idiom, motive, key in the march episodes

March Episode I (Rotation 2)

March State: Deformed Normative Deformed Normative Def. Norm. Def. Norm.
Motive: b3.3, b4.1, b4.2, b4.3, x1, b1.4, b5 b4.3, b4.4, b4.1, x1, b6, b1.4 x2 x1 x1, b7
b4.4 b4.2
Key: a (F) a F a (F) a F D f♯ D
Measure: 247 273 298 315 325 331 341 347

March Episode II (Rotation 3)

March State: Deformed Normative Deformed
Heading: The Rabble The Battle Begins The Southerly Storm

324
Motive: b2, x2, b3.3, b5, x1, b1.4 b3.3, x1, b4.1, b2 b4.1, b4.2, x1, b3.2
Key: e♭ C D♭/b♭
Measure: 539 583 605

March Episode III (Rotation 4)

March State: Deformed Norm. Def. Norm. Deformed Norm. Def. Norm. Def. Norm.
Motive: Storm, x1, b4.1, b4.2 b1.4 b4.2 b1.4, b6 b4.3, b4.4, b1.4 x1 Battle b7
Key: Bb/a (F) a F a F a F F d F
Measure: 737 762 771 778 787 800 808 816 824 828
325
Table 5.1. Program to Ziehrer’s Traum eines österreichischen Reservisten and
topically related works by Mahler1

Original Program Translation Related Works

Es ist Abend. It is evening. M7/II, M7/IV
Man hört den Reservisten in der The reservist can be heard working in
Schmiede arbeiten. the smithy.
Eine wandernde Zigeunermusik Travelling Gypsy musicians play their M1/III
kommt vor die Schmiede und lässt melodies in front of the smithy.
ihre Weisen ertönen.
Die Zigeuner werden durch eine The Gypsies are interrupted by a M1/I
heimkehrende Jagdgesellschaft returning hunting party.
unterbrochen.
Man hört das Geklapper der sich in The clattering of the nearby mill can be
der Nähe befindlichen Mühle. heard.
Die Landpost fährt vorüber. The postal carriage rides by. M3/III
Kühe Kommen von der Weide zurück, The cows return from the meadows. M6/I, M6/IV,
[cow bells] M7/II
von der Klosterkirche hört man The evening bells can be heard tolling M3/V
Abendläuten. from the church.
Der Reservist macht Feierabend und The reservist calls it a day and joins a “Wenn mein Schatz
schliesst sich einem vorüberziehenden passing wedding procession and Hochzeit macht
Hochzeitszuge an, mit welchem er in accompanies them to a tavern. M3/I”
die Schenke zieht.
In der Schenke wird lustig gezecht They drink and dance merrily in the M1/II, M3/I
und getanzt. tavern. [waltz, ländler]
Ein herausbrechender Gewittersturm A thunderstorm interrupts the M3/I
unterbricht das fröhliche Fest, es festivities. It rains. All hurry home
regnet. Unter Donner und Blitz eilt amidst the thunder and lightning.
Alles nach Hause.
Im Hause des Reservisten wird das Evening prayer is said in the home of M3/I
Abendgebet verrichtet. Alles begibt the reservist. All is quiet. The reservist
sich zur Ruhe. Der Reservist fängt zu begins to dream.
träumen an.
Es träumt ihm, dass er zu seinem He dreams, that he has been called up to
Regimente einberufen ist und sich his regiment and takes the train to
mittelst Bahn nach Wien begibt. Vienna.
Der Reservist langt in der Kaserne an. The reservist arrives at the barracks. M3/I
[military signals, marches, call and [horns] M2/V,
response in horns, one of which is M7/II
placed in the distance]
Kampf. Sturm. „Hurrah!“ Battle. Charge. “Hurray!”
Die Truppen rücken ein. The troops march home.
Militär-Leiche. Corpses of fallen soldiers. [muted bass M1/III, M3/I
drum signal]
Abmarsch. Forward march. M3/I
Feldmesse und Parade. Beginn der Military pageant and parade. [signal for M3/I, M3/III
Defilierung. Infanterie. Ein polnisches falling out; extended snare drum signal]
Regiment. Ein steirisches Regiment. Beginning of the parade. Infantry. A
Ein ungarisches Regiment. Ein Polish regiment. A Styrian regiment. A
böhmisches Regiment. Die Hungarian regiment. A Bohemian

11Editorial comments on Ziehrer’s music appear in square brackets in the translation. The
abbreviations of Mahler’s symphonies use Arabic numerals for the symphony and Roman numerals for
the movement.

325
Deutschmeister. Reiterei u. Artillerie. regiment. The Deutschmeister. Cavalry
Retraite. and artillery. Fall out.
Der Reservist wird plötzlich von The reservist is suddenly awakened by “Frühlingsmorgen,”
seinem jüngsten Sprössling aus dem his youngest offspring. Dawn breaks. M1/I, M3/III
Schlafe geweckt. Der Morgen bricht Bird calls, etc.
an, Vogelgezwitscher, etc.
Die Glocke schlägt fünf Uhr. The bells toll five o’clock. M3/V
Der Reservist begibt sich zur Arbeit The reservist goes to work at the
in die Schmiede. smithy.
Er hämmert lustig drauf los, froh, He hammers cheerily away, happy that
dass Alles nur ein Traum war. it was all a dream.

Table 5.2. Chorale insertions in mvt. 52

Regular text = March in F major

Bold text = Chorale in D major/minor
[Bracketed text] = Neither march in F nor chorale in D. Most of this text sets
material borrowed from “Das himmlische Leben,” which Mahler originally
planned as the finale of the Third Symphony.

Knabenchor: Children’s Choir:

[Bimm bamm, bimm, bamm, . . .] [Ding dong, ding dong, . . . ]

Frauenchor: Women’s Chorus:

Es sungen drei Engel einen süßen Gesang, Three angels were singing a sweet song;
Mit Freuden es selig in den Himmel klang. With joy it resounded blissfully in heaven,
Sie jauchzten fröhlich auch dabei, They rejoiced also
Daß Petrus sei von Sünden frei. That Peter is free from sin,

Und als der Herr Jesus zu Tische saß, And when the Lord Jesus sat at table,
Mit seinen zwölf Jüngern das Abendmahl aß, With his twelve disciples ate the supper,
Da sprach der Herr Jesus: „Was stehst du den There spoke the Lord Jesus: “What are you
hier? doing?
Wenn ich dich anseh’, so weinest du mir“. Whenever I look at you, I find you weeping!”

Alt: Alto:
[Und sollt’ ich nicht weinen, du gütiger Gott.] [And should I not weep, you gracious God.]

Frauenchor: Women’s Chorus:

[Du sollst ja nicht weinen!] [You should truly not weep!]

Alt: Alto:
„Ich habe übertreten [die Zehn Gebot; “I have broken [the Ten Commandments.
Ich gehe und weine ja bitterlich,] I go and weep most bitterly.]
Ach komm und erbarme [dich über mich]“. Ah, come and have mercy [on me].”

2 Translation from the Dover edition of the symphony.

326
 Frauenchor: Women’s Chorus:
[Hast du denn übertreten die Zehen Gebot, [If you have broken the Ten Commandments,
So fall auf die Knie und bete zu Gott!] Then fall on your knees and pray to God!]3
Liebe nur Gott in alle Zeit, Only love God forever,
So wirst du erlangen die himmlische Freud! Thus will you attain heavenly Joy!

Die himmlische Freud, die Selige Stadt; Heavenly joy, the holy city;
Die himmlische Freud, die kein Ende mehr hat. Heavenly joy, which no longer ends.
Die himmlische Freude war Petro bereit’ Heavenly joy was prepared for Peter
Durch Jesum und allen zur Seligkeit. by Jesus and for all for their salvation.4

Example 5.1. Major structural gestures

Motto

Rupture

3 The passage is a march in B-flat.

4 The last line is stated twice: once as an F-major march, and then as the movement’s only F-

major chorale.

327
Example 5.2. Motives in the introduction
x1

x2

x3

x4

328
Example 5.3. Derivation of march themes from x3

mm. 132–43

mm. 225–32

329
Example 5.4. First theme group: motives
a1

a2

a3

a4

a5

a6

a7

a8

330
Example 5.5. First theme group: themes

A1.1

A1.2

331
A1.3

A1.4

332
A1.5

A1.6

A2

333
Example 5.6. Second theme group: motives
x1

b1.3

b1.4

b2

b3.1

b3.2

b3.3

334
b4.1

b4.2

b4.3

b4.4

b5

b6

b7

335
Example 5.7. Melodic allusion in x1

x1

“Ich hab’ mich ergeben mit Herz und mit Hand”

Brahms, Symphony no. 1, mvt. 4, main theme (transposed)

336
Example 5.8. Franz von Suppé, Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann, no. 1, Entrance of
the Girls

337
Example 5.9. Franz von Suppé, Fatinitza, no. 23

338
339
Example 5.10. Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, act 3 finale

340
341
Example 5.11. Johann Strauss, Jr., Der lustige Krieg, no. 14, Violetta’s march with
lyrical cello

342
Example 5.12. Franz von Suppé, Boccaccio, overture, mm. 353–403

343
Example 5.13. Comparison of a5 with “Habt Acht”
a5

“Habt Acht”1

Example 5.14. Allusion to Mahler, Symphony no. 2, mvt. 4

“Urlicht”

Telos

Example 5.15. New theme in first episode

1 Emil Rameis, Die österreichische Militärmusik—von ihren Anfängen bis 1918, rev. ed., ed. Eugen

Brixel in Alta Musica 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 182.

344
Example 5.16. Melodic allusions in main theme of mvt. 6

Mahler, Symphony no. 3, mvt. 6

Beethoven, String Quartet op. 135, mvt. 3

Wagner, Parsifal, Act I

Rott, Symphony in E, mvt. 2

Example 5.17. Quotation of Brahms

Mahler, Symphony no. 3, mvt. 6

Brahms, “Feldeinsamkeit”

345
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