textual and contextual analysis mahler's fifth symphony and scientific thought

Textual and Contextual Analysis: Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Scientific ThoughtAuthor(s): Vera MicznikSource: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jun.,1996), pp. 13-29Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108369Accessed: 28/07/2010 15:08

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V. MICZNIK, MAHLER'S 5TH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, IRASM 27 (1996) 1,13-29 13

TEXTUAL AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS: MAHLER'S FIFTH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT*

VERA MICZNIK

The University of British Columbia, School of Music, 6361 Memorial Road, VANCOUVER, B. C. V6T 1Z2, Canada

UDC: 781.1

Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni &anak Received: February 18,1996 Primljeno: 18. veljaCe 1996. Accepted: February 26, 1996 Prihvadeno: 26. veljae 1996.

Abstract - R6sum6

In the still raging controversy over what determines the meaning of a musical work - the intrinsic, non-referential, >>textual<< musical relationships, or the extrinsic, referential, >>contextual< factors - critics who priviledge the latter, often reduce the context to a general concept of

>>Zeitgeist,<< which supposedly puts its imprint on the art created during a specific period. This essay uses Barthes's and Derrida's notions of

o>text<< which cancel the text/context dichotomy. I take Mahler's Fifth Symphony as a model to illustrate how >context<< (not as >>Zeitgeist,<< but as the composer's own interest in cosmology, particularly that of Hermann Lotze) gets translated into the musical >text,<< by providing intertextually a new structural paradigm which accomodates a simultaneity of order and disorder at different levels.

In a recent article about Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Taruskin reframes the old debate between absolutist and referential approaches to musical meaning into a distinction between those >>claiming for music the status of an inherently nonreferential medium, unattached to the wider world,<< and those >>who do not only acknowledge the immanence of a latent musical content, but seek, or presume, to define it, to fix it, to make it manifest.<< Both the concept of music as a

* This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Conference Border Crossings: Future Directions in Music Studies, March 8-11, 1995, at the University of Ottawa. Research for this article was undertaken as part of a large project supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

14 V. MICZNIK, MAHLER'S 5TH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, IRASM 27 (1996) 1, 13-29

purely musical, >nonreferential[ text, and that of music as displaying a manifest, >latento< content of ideas shared with its surrounding context, have been applied to Shostakovich's music with opposite ideological purposes, says Taruskin, but neither has done him justice. Both such extreme positions are impoverishing, he writes, for the >>value of the vessel is enhanced... where latent musical meaning is neither negated nor successfully administered,< in other words, when it is >>acknowledged, but contested< at the same time.'

Taruskin could not have been closer to a position which originated about 25 years ago with Roland Barthes's definition of >text<< and is still prevalent in present day poststructuralist criticism, in which the adversity between these two positions tends to be neutralized. In his article >>From Work to Text< of 1971, Barthes pro- posed that one can approach a work of art at one level as >a work,<< which he conceives as a >>fragment of substance<< in a world of things, with a closed, univocal meaning; and, at another level, as a >text,<< which is a dynamic concept to be >ex- perienced only in an activity of production,<< since itself constitutes a >methodo- logical field< which accomplishes an >>irreducible<< plurality of meaning.2 The >>work< becomes a >text< only when at all the stages of its existence - conception, perception, and reception - it involves >producing<< the text, that is, liberating all its integrally symbolic energy. This energy, in turn, comes from the fact that the >>citations, references, echoes, cultural languages<~ forming the text do not simply >coexist,< but form an intertextual >weave of signifiers,<< which needs to be ex- ploded, >>disseminated.< Through actively exploited associations, contiguities, overcrossings, the text becomes >>dilatory,< in that it >>practises the infinite defer- ment of the signified.< The text, then, is a production of a signifying chain, that cuts accross other texts, other networks, backgrounds and contexts.

Barthes's ideas couched in fresh reformulations today form the basis of poststructuralist criticism, which operates on the premise that text and context are not two distinct entities. In Jacques Derrida's view, what is usually thought of as the context extrinsic to the text (political, historical, social, cultural), in fact accom- panies the text, is >texted< or >>textualized,<< made part of the text, and in this respect, is intrinsic to the text.3 And, consequently, as Vincent Leitch puts it, by following the fundamental principle of infinite intertextuality from the >>model of the text. .. one is enabled to treat phenomena as texts linked with other surrounding intertexts and cultural archives.<' Such a position opens the text to an infinite number of confrontations, internal as well as external. More importantly, however, this position clashes with the extreme, reductive views that either assume the

' Richard TARUSKIN, >>Who Was Shostakovich,<< The Atlantic, (February, 1995): 64-65. 2Roland BARTHES, >>From Work to Text< in: Image, Music, Text, transl. by Stephen Heath (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1977). This paragraph paraphrases some of the main ideas contained in pp. 157-60.

3Jacques DERRIDA, >>Limited Inc. a b c...,<< Glyph 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 162-254, cited in Hugh J. SILVERMAN, Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85.

4Vincent B. LEITCH, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1992), pp. 4-5.


aesthetic value of a text to lie in the purely formalist relationships exhibited by structure, or subordinate it entirely to external, socio-ideological factors.

The reasons for the inadequacy of such reductive views are pointed out by Leitch: >>Any text may be more or less resistant<< to the socio-cultural context in which it originated: >>it may contradict, subvert, or refract the reigning culture, just as it... may confirm<< or reinforce it.5 Similarly, Barthes observes that in the text, >the generation of the perpetual signifier is realized not according to an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations< (158). In other words, many other factors besides societal ones, which may or may not be ultimately known, may enter into the constitution of a text. The mind of the author, for instance, although bound to the historical moment and to the creative conventions in the field, remains an individual mind informed by personal experi- ences, and not deterministically reflecting society. As such, it can act chaotically and irrationally, even purposelessly. In addition, society and history themselves are such complex texts to be deciphered, that assessing the relationship of a text with the factors that might have contributed to its creation and consumption, becomes in itself the infinite deciphering of a plurality of texts, which can never be exhausted. In Leitch's words, >The specimen text is part of a larger social text, partaking in numerous different discourses, having ties .. to science, technology, politics, aesthetics, manners and morals.<<o To articulate these pluralities requires a sensitive, discriminatory, non-totalizing critique, which can reconcile structures with their contexts in a looser relationship.

The enterprise of >>contextual analysis< thus understood emphasizes the com- plexity of such an inquiry into the modes of production, circulation and consumption of the various discourses present in society at a certain historical moment. It also implies that the text itself remains the central object of inquiry, thus keeping at the center of the critical enterprise what Peter Brooks calls >the poetics of the text,<< that is, the analysis of the production of meaning of the structures themselves specific to, and within the conventions of the given medium.7 For it is only by grasp- ing what is common, and what is unusual in the structure of a text, that we can attempt to trace the contextual aspects that became translated into those structures, and the mechanisms by which they got into the text.

My case study is Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony. The reason for this choice is threefold. First, although the Fifth Symphony contains some of the most popu- lar pages of Mahler's music (such as the famous Adagietto), it seems to be one of the most difficult symphonies to explain in terms of given concepts of comprehen- sive coherence, be it purely musical, narrative, or cultural. Second, because of that, it constitutes an ideal object for a poststructuralist critique, which is interested precisely in marginal, resistant texts, abounding in discontinuities and in-

5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7Peter BROOKS, ,Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?<, Critical Inquiry 20/3

(Spring 1994): 517 and 522.


congruities.8 And third, I hope to show that those incongruities do reflect something contextual, but something that originates not in the concept of >Zeitgeist< understood as a community of ideas and beliefs shared by all of Mahler's contem- poraries in the Viennese society, but, rather, as a more restricted concept, corresponding to one of Mahler's own, private, idiosyncratic interests.

The Fifth Symphony was most likely begun during the summer of 1901 and finished in August 1902, and it is the first of Mahler's symphonies which does not bear any known or suppressed programs.9 In its final form it has five movements, grouped by Mahler into three larger Parts (>Abteilungen<<): Part I consists of movements 1 and 2, Part II contains the middle movement - Scherzo - alone, and Part III consists of movements 4 (the famous Adagietto) and 5, a Rondo-Finale. The evidence documenting the chronology of composition is rather scarce and mud- dled, because the few comments that exist are slightly contradictory. A rough chronology would situate the conception of at least parts of movements 1, 2, 3, possibly 5, together, during the summer of 1901, while the addition of movement 4 and the completion of 5 between the fall of 1901 and the end of summer 1902.10

"See LEITCH, Cultural Criticism, p. 6.

9 The dating of the inception is based on Bauer-Lechner's recollections, and that of the completion of the first full draft the score comes from a letter to Nanna Spiegel on August 23, 1902: >At last, I have finished! The Fifth is with us!c< See, e.g., La GRANGE, Gustav Mahler-Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904) (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 539.

While no programmatic intentions can be traced to Mahler himself, a few attempts have been made to pin down possible programs. As early as 1905, Richard Specht quotes Goethe's poem An Schwager Chronos as a programmatic key to the Scherzo movement, an interpretation communicated to him by Bruno Walter, who supposedly would have received Mahler's approval for this information. See SPECHT, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Gose & Tetzlaff, 1905), p. 44-45. Constantin FLOROS also mentions Specht's remarks in his Gustav Mahler III: Die Symphonien (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & HArtel, 1985), pp. 147-148; English transl. by Vernon Wicker, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1993), pp. 153-154. Neither author cites the poem in its entirety, but an attempt to match the full meanings of the poem to the music shows that the connection is not necessarily farfetched. The blunt mixture of lyricism and grotesque in the music could well correspond to the up-and-downhill trip of the old man and his coachman Chronos to the >dismal gate of hell.(( Although one can also consider the ubiquitous presence of the horn in the music as a borrowing of topic from the poem (,Sound your horn, coachman<), and the occasionally coarse percussive sounds as mimetic musical renditions of the >chattering toothless jaws and the shaky skeleton<< of the poem (see, e.g., the sinister holzklapper rhythm in mm. 472-485), there is practically no documentation that Mahler's intention was as specific as that. Ernst Otto Nodnagel's detailed analysis of the symphony published the same year does not contain any programmatic readings, but he calls the Scherzo a ,true dithyramb... in the image of the Dionisian art.<(See Ernst Otto NODNAGEL, Gustav Mahlers Fiinfte Symphonie: Technische Analyse (Leipzig: C.F. Peters, 1905), p. 23. A programmatic connection was offerred by Barbara BARRY in her article >The Hidden Program in Mahler's Fifth Symphony,<< The Musical Quarterly 77/1 (Spring 1993): 47-65. Barry's >programmatic offerings< do not really provide an extramusical program, but, rather, point to structural connections among Mahler songs and this symphony, and, in particular, to >a compositional model as 'inner program'< that Mahler might have found in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

10 See recorded conversations that have taken place during the summer of 1901, in Natalie BAUER- LECHNER, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, transl. by Dika Newlin, edited by Peter Franklin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 172-173. At that point, Mahler was talking about a 4 movement symphony, in which each of the movements >exists for itself and is self contained, linked to the others solely by a related mood< (173). Although in Bauer-Lechner's recollections it is not always


One other opinion, expressed by Paul Bekker in his Mahlers Sinfonien is prob- lematic, yet intriguing: he contends that the Scherzo is the oldest composed movement, in light of the existence of a program for the Fourth Symphony written in 1895-96, which listed a Scherzo movement in D major entitled >>Die Welt ohne Schwere<<n (translatable alternatively as >the world without difficulties< or, possibly, more figuratively, as >the world without weight or gravity<<). The connection remains, however, tenuous, since neither Bekker nor anybody else has seen the unused music that would correspond to that title. Moreover, it would be difficult to explain Mahler's comment during the summer of 1901 that >the movement on which he is working is a Scherzo which differs entirely from anything that he has written up till now,<<12 if the ideas were already five years old. In any case, by the time the full draft of the symphony was completed on August 23, 1902, the symphony grew from four to five movements, and the originally >independent movements< became very tightly connected thematically, 1 and 2, and 4 and 5 in particular, but also 2 and 5.

Missing more detailed information about the genesis of the movements and the compositional history, prevents us from unveiling intentions which could have, in turn, served to build an argument as to the coherence of the overall meaning of the symphony. All Mahler's four previous symphonies either contained some texted music, or alluded to songs, which even in absence of a program, may have provided hints about the contents of ideas. The fact that this was Mahler's first symphony conceived completely independently of song, complicated matters. While traditional instrumental symphonies were held together by the accepted overall rhetoric of their more or less conventional setup - allegro, slow movement, scherzo, finale - and by conventional tonal relationships, Mahler's symhonies broke those traditions, and thus, begged for some alternative narrative thread to keep the movements together or explain their functioning.

In the Fifth, by replacing the first movement with a funeral march, Mahler postpones the only so-called allegro sonata form until the second movement, but

entirely clear to which movement the comments refer, it seems safe to assume that Mahler was referring at that stage to movements 1, 2, and 3, possibly even parts of 5, which were therefore at least partly conceived and written during the summer of 1901. If the Adagietto was written, as Mengelberg and Kaplan believe, as a declaration of love for Alma, and offered to her the next fall, then it was most likely written toward the end of November/beginning of December 1901. See, e.g., Gilbert KAPLAN, >>From Mahler with Love< in: Gustav Mahler, Adagietto: Facsimile, Documentation, Recording, edited by Gilbert E. Kaplan (New York: The Kaplan Foundation, 1992), pp. 11-12. Although evidence from Alma's diary that Mahler brought with him the next summer (1902) >>the sketches for the Fifth Symphony, two movements completed, and the rest in their earliest stages< seems to contradict, or at least to leave open to question how much work he had accomplished the previous year, it makes more sense, as Sander Wilkens suspects, that she was probably referring to >Parts I and II< (i.e.movements 1, 2, 3). It is, however, certain that he continued to work on the symphony throughout the summer of 1902. See Alma MAHLER, Gusta v Mahler: Memories and Letters, edited by Donald Mitchell (New York: Viking Preess, 1969; rev. and enlarged edition; first ed. 1946), p. 42.

" See Paul BEKKER, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969; reprint of original edition, Meisenheim/Glan: Anton Hain KG, 1921), p. 145.

12 BAUER-LECHNER, Recollections, p. 173.

18 V. MICZNIK, MAHLER'S 5TH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, IRASM 27 (1996) 1,13-29

even then, this sonata form is not an independent movement, because its second and third themes are re-workings of two of the themes already heard in the funeral march. While as Mahler indicated, the two movements together form Part one, they are complementary, yet so different in content that it is difficult to understand how they make sense together. The scherzo stands on its own; and the Adagietto can only be seen as an introduction to the last movement, a Rondo Fi- nale, with which it shares thematic materials, yet from which, again, it is very different in content and character. An additional tonal problem complicates things, as the first movement is in c# minor, and the last in D major, a key-scheme which led certain analysts to assign the symphony a symbolic >plot< reflecting >the el- evation of the hero from a prostrate position (the opening funeral march) to an upright one (the radiant finale).<<3

An even more puzzling aspect of the work has to do with the nature of Mahler's musical materials. As is the case with his other symphonies, most themes and motives rely on previously codified materials which are easily recognizable. No matter how >de-familiarized< the funeral marches, Lindlers or waltzes might become in the manipulations to which they are subject, the familiar meanings always linger in the background, and ask for interpretation, either to be rejected, to be embraced, or to be transformed into something else. One would think that, precisely since the wide variety of connotations can be pinned down relatively easily, it should not be difficult to couch the content of the Fifth Symphony into some open or closed narrative structure. But identifying the origins of some of Mahler's materials, their topical, generic and social affiliations, leads to more confusion than order. Funeral march, waltz, Lindler, the quotation from Tristan und Isolde in the Adagietto, the high style of the fugue in the last movement, culminating with a bombastic chorale that bothered even Alma, all these heterogeneous materials seem to belong to different realms. While it might be possible to understand why, in the first movement, the funeral march would fall into a melodramatic contrapuntal section reminding one of sections from Verdi's operatic scenes, it requires almost a leap of faith to plunge from this into the pseudo-cacophony of the second movement's opening, made out of erratically imbricated contrapuntal lines. The occa- sional interpolations within the second movement of thematic materials from the first movement - the funeral march - or part of the Verdian melodramatic gestures, do, indeed, provide motivic and perhaps even semantic unity between the two movements. But the addition of yet other intertextual references - a free >>recitative-like< interlude in the cello, and, just before the end, a triumphant Cho- rale of a Wagnerian type - further problematizes what all these materials are supposed to mean together. The fluctuant mixture of waltz and Landler and other types of dances in the Scherzo easily point to Mahler's background, and even to the socio-political associations of these dances. Yet these signifieds do not seem to be part of the same narrative as the fugal developmental passages, or the nostalgi- cally romantic episodes with which they alternate. The Adagietto - in itself a

13 See Jack DIETHER, >>The Expressive Content of Mahler's Ninth: an Interpretation,<< Chord and Dischord 2/10 (1963): 94-95.

V. MICZNIK, MAHLER'S 5TH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, IRASM 27 (1996) 1, 13-29 19

vignette for harp and strings, with its quotation from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde - suggests some kind of transcendental meditation, which can be read either as a love declaration or a serene preparation for death, depending on the speed at which the movement is played, and on whether we believe Gilbert Kaplan or Luchino Visconti.14 But neither reading would make the Adagietto suited as a preface to the most >down to earth<< movement of the symphony, the Giocoso Rondo Finale. The serious, idealistic world of the Adagietto is suddenly dispelled by the Finale's overstated exuberance, built on a virtuoso, but straight forward, almost naive, display of structural coherence and >crafty counterpoint,<( featuring quotations of several themes from previous movements, and culminating with a superimposi- tion of three themes in a jubilating, yet somewhat >tongue-in-cheek< ending.

In spite of this discrepancy among topics, more than in any other Mahler Sym- phony, thematic unification soundly integrates the five movements together, re- leasing a sense of order that did not fail to be recognized even by Mahler's harsh- est reviewers. One critic in Saint Petersburg in 1907, after identifying Mahler's style as being made of >echoes of opera and the concert hall,< and after accusing it of >clumsiness and ponderousness,<< as well as of >hysterical restlessness,o< recog- nizes that :<<In general terms one cannot deny the unity of the symphony, a unity which is achieved by thematic uniformity and a characteristic style. In this respect, it is definitely a symphony, and not a traditional album of four [sic!] pieces under the same opus number<.15

To summarize reductively the >latent< meaning of the symphony as an arche- typal plot of >initial mourning optimistically resolved in a jubilant chorale< would be to ignore all the intricacies of meanings the symphony alludes to. As Taruskin notes, )When fixed and paraphrased, the latent becomes blatant.<<16 We may say that this music blurrs the boundaries between >>manifesto and >latent<( meanings in Taruskin's sense. Or, in other words, that the musical materials have an associa- tive, intertextual nature that erases the differentiation between text and context. One way to deal with this situation analytically would be to recognize, after Barthes, at least two distinct levels of meaning in those materials: one similar to >denotation,< the term being adapted to mean the explicit, obvious, purely musical, mostly syntactic meanings of the musical formations; and one, more fluid level, corresponding to Barthes' >connotation,<( which rescues without pinning down the ?latent<( meanings, by tracing the infinite multitude of signifieds that might get at- tached to the purely musical signifier, by virtue of various conventions." But even this does not solve the problem of coherence.

14 I am referring here to Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice, where the Adagietto was used with the symbolic meaning of death, and to the opposite interpretation of the Adagietto as a ')Letter of love for Almaxe by Gilbert Kaplan (see note 10 above). Kaplan argues that a faster, more dynamic performing tempo for the movement is more appropriate than the slower, funereal tempo with which the movement is usually associated.

' Kurt BLAUKOPF, ed., Mahler: A Documentary Study (New York and Toronto: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1976), p. 250.

16 TARUSKIN, >>Who Was Shostakovich<: 66. '7 For Roland BARTHES's definitions of denotation and connotation see his Elements ofSemiology,

transl. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), pp. 89-94.


Clearly, it is very difficult to approach analytically a structure so blatantly unified at the large scale through many thematic connections, but whose unity, however, remains completely at odds with the connotations of its materials. This text belongs to the >>excentric, marginal, abnormal, 'nomadic,' resistant forms<< that poststructuralism favors, those >>fragmentations of misreadings<< which >>suit poststructuralism more than fictitious coherences of reading.<<18 For perhaps the innovative problem of the symphony is precisely that it ex- plodes the expectations of unity between structural and contextual meanings, or, to use Taruskin's terms, between non-referential meaning, and a too obviously stated latent or imminent meaning. Furthermore, because of this con- tradiction, this text displays, in Barthes' words, >>a paradoxical idea of structure: ...it is structured, but off-centered, without closure [; in other words, it is] a system with neither close nor centre<< (159).

What kind of mechanism of interpretation can be invoked to save the value of such a work? Cultural critique does not seem to help in this case. Even if we search further, with the hope to rescue some latent musical content paralleling some of the socio-ideological phenomena of Mahler's time, the attempt fails: since nobody else in Vienna at the time, not even the revolutionary Schoenberg, was breaking barriers in the same way as Mahler did, it would be difficult to argue that his methods are societally based. When such breaking of the syntactic discourse occurs, should a coherent overall narrative still be an intrinsic requirement for the appreciation of a symphony? It seems that in the symphonies following the Fifth this discrepancy between structure and contextual meaning tends to diminish, if not disappear. Should we, then, perhaps, see the Fifth as an experimental work, which although recognized both by Mahler himself and by others as representing a stepping stone for a new style, does not succeed yet in all respects? Or are we not equipped theoretically to deal with symphonies which display such unusual dis- crepancies, unless willing to admit that they do not abide by the classical laws of coherence, but, rather, by some other, different, laws? If so, is there any model in Mahler's background that could have fed such breakthroughs?

We are fortunate enough to have some comments made by Mahler to Natalie Bauer-Lechner about the composition of these movements. From the vocabulary Mahler uses one gets a sense that he was, in fact, attempting to achieve precisely the effects I have described. In Maiernigg, between 25 July and August 10, 1901, he is at work on the 5th Symphony. >>The [third] movement is enormously difficult to work out because of its structure, and because of the utmost artistic skill de- manded by the complex inter-relationships of all its details. The apparent confusion must, as in a Gothic Cathedral, be resolved into the highest order and har- mony.<<' Again on August 5, Mahler said of the same movement: >You can't im-

18 LEITCH, Cultural Criticism, p. 6. 19 BAUER-LECHNER, Recollections, p. 172. Although it is usually assumed that >>the third move-

ment( refers to the scherzo, this description fits much better to the last (fifth) movement. Both Alma Mahler and Bauer-Lechner in their references to this work refer alternatively either to the actual movements, or to the three >>Abteilungen(< in which Mahler conceived his symphony. I presume that in this case Bauer-Lechner referes to the >>third part(< (i.e. the fith movement), rather than to the >>third move


agine how hard I am finding it... Simplicity of themes, built solely on tonic and dominant... there should be no repetition, but only evolution.<

Finally, he is working on a Scherzo which differs entirely from anything he has written up until now. >>All the elements are kneaded through and through till not a grain or cell of the mixture remains unmixed and unchanged. Every note is of a radical vitality, and the whole thing whirls around in an apparent chaos, like in a hurricane dance, or like a comet's tail...<<20 And later, in a letter to Alma from Cologne, after the first rehearsal of the Fifth Symphony, on 16 October 1904, Mahler wrote: >>The Scherzo is the very devil of a movement. I see it is in for a peck of troubles! Conductors for the next fifty years will all take it too fast and make non- sense of it; and the public - Oh, Heavens, what are they to make of this chaos of which new worlds are for ever being engendered, only to crumble in ruin the moment after? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging see of sound, to these dancing stars, to these breath-taking, iridescent and flashing breakers?.. .<<21

Obviously, Mahler was creating a new style that, as he will write later, >>de- manded a new technique.<<22 Strikingly, in describing this new technique, he uses an unusual vocabulary, borrowing much of the terminology from science, especially from physics and cosmology.

That Mahler was interested in science, and physics in particular, has been witnessed by several of his closest friends. Bruno Walter saw him discussing with a physicist friend (probably Berliner), and heard him elaborating with the usual enthusiasm >>a theory of gravity based on the centrifugal force of the sun, a theory that he envisaged to develop and apply to the diverse phenomena of celestial music.<<23 And in a letter of 1907 to Richard Horn he writes: >>Further to our discussion a few evenings ago I am sending you the enclosed article (Kilnische Zeitung), on 'Matter, Ether, Electricity.' . .What do you think now of the immutability of scientifically based views? ... It is conceivable that ...even the laws of nature might change; that, for instance, the law of gravity may no longer hold - does not Helmholtz even now assume that the law of gravity does not apply to infinitely small distances?<<24

ment,,< which would also mean that he was working on the Fifth movement already during the sum-

mer of 1901. For further attempts to clarify the confusion about references to movements vs. >>Abteilungen<< see Sander WILKENS, Gustav Mahlers Fiinfte Symphonie: Quellen und Instrumenta- tionsprozel (Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1989), pp. 26-28.

2o Quotes and translations are, combined and emmended, from Natalie BAUER-LECHNER, Rec- ollections, pp. 172-73; Henry Louis De La GRANGE, Gustav Mahler: Chronique d'une vie, vol. II: L'age d'or de Vienne (1900-1907), (Paris: Fayard, 1983), pp. 1120-1121; and Knud MARTNER, ed., Gustav Mahler: Selected Letters, transl. by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser and Bill Hopkins (New York: Farrar- Straus-Giroux, 1979; first publ. Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1979), p. 300.

21 See Alma MAHLER, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, p. 243. Part of this letter is also reproduced in Constantin FLOROS, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, transl. by Vernon Wicker (Port- land, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1993), p. 139.

22 C. FLOROS, op. cit., p. 135. 23 La GRANGE, Gustav Mahler Chronique d'une vie, Vol. I: Vers la Gloire (Paris: Fayard, 1979), p. 160. 24 MARTNER, ed., Mahler Letters, p. 300.


Most importantly, Walter documents Mahler's affinity with the thoughts and writings of Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), a philosopher of science, religion and psychology: >Lotze's Microcosm occupied him for quite a long time, and especially his atomic theory grew to be a most stimulating subject of thought.<<25 The reference to Lotze is particularly interesting, as he advocated a philosophical synthesis of science, art, literature and religion, and elaborated a theory of the microcosm announcing that of the atom, for which he is often cited as a key transitional figure in the advent of atomic and thermodynamic theories.

Already in Mikrokosmus (1856-1864) Lotze formulated ideas that seem to have had a crucial influence on Mahler's thought. Especially important is his conception of atoms as containing both organic and spiritual elements, and the idea that while external movement might be ruled by laws of mechanics, internal action depends on more capricious individual consciousness.26 In his other major work, Metaphysic, Lotze further insisted that the operation of mechanical laws is not cancelled out in the organic and spiritual realms; he held a notion of the universe as a plurality of interconnected things governed by a system of laws, which bears a strong analogy to one's own mental life, and in which man is a microcosm of the macrocosm.27 In terms of pure science, his atomic theory challenged the

25 Bruno WALTER, Gustav Mahler, transl. by James Galston (New York: Vienna House, 1973; orig. ed.: New York: The Greystone Press, 1941), p. 135. The only other published works I have encoun- tered which devote some attention to Mahler's relationship with sciences-are: Morten Solvig OLSEN's dissertation >Culture and the Creative Imagination: the Genesis of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony(( (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992), esp. pp. 42-49; and Herta BLAUKOPF, >>Metaphysik und Physik bei Mahler,<( in: Eveline Nikkels and Robert Becque, eds., A 'Mass' for the Masses: Proceedings of the Mahler VIII Symposium, pp. 37--41. Both studies confirm the ideas of my present article. Olsen mentions the connection of Mahler with Lotze, while Blaukopf stresses the communality of ideas between Mahler and Boltzmann, and posits, as I do, the possibility that Mahler's interest in physics might have been crucial for his creativity.

26 See Mikrokosmus, Ideen zur Natra urgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit, Versuch einer Anthropologie (three volumes published in 1854, 1856, and 1864). Some of Lotze's >>mystical scientism< has also been summarized by Olsen, on p. 46.

27Metaphysik (first edition 1879, second 1884). For the purpose of this study I have used the English translation of Metaphysikl Hermann LOTZE, Metaphysic, transl. by Bernard Bosanquet, 2 vols. (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1887 [2nd ed.]). For a discussion and critique of Lotze's philosophy see also Eduard von HARTMANN, Lotze's Philosophie (Leipzig: Hermann Haacke, [1888]).

It is interesting that Mahler was also reading another German philosopher, Gustav Theodor FECHNER (1801-1887), whose work Zend-Avesta was held by Mahler's friend Siegfried Lipiner to be >>one of the most important books ever produced by mankind.<< (See La GRANGE, MahlerI, p. 159). He was a contemporary and friend of Lotze's, with whom he held many ideas in common. Both philoso- phers were interested in uniting science, philosophy and religion, and in reconciling the materiality of the world with the human mind and the aesthetic or psychological experience. In his Metaphysic Lotze acknowledges the similarity of his ideas with Fechner's: >First, let it be remembered that this hypothesis of a multitude of interconnected points admitting of changeable and precisely determinable relations and interactions is the only practical means for which an explanation is sought... To prove this would be only to repeat what has been so clearly and convincingly stated by Fechner (in his Doctrine of Atoms)... Again, I am entirely at one with Fechner... I believe with him that the atomic view of the physical world is peculiarly adapted to satisfy the aesthetic needs of the mind...<< (Lotze, Metaphysic, vol. II, p. 40). According to La Grange, Fechner also )>attributes a soul to stars and plants, and he influ- enced the pantheistic conception of [Mahler's] Third Symphony.< (See La GRANGE, Mahler I, p. 159).


determinism of Newtonian mechanics from several points of view. To Newton's view of the universe as a perfect mechanism whose motion from the smallest to the largest levels is uniform and predictable, Lotze opposed an idea of a changeable, irregular world: >The impression that we regarded the world like a picture having fixed outlines, within which every single point invariably occupies the same position and clings to it.. .is not in accordance to the facts. We have long known that the world is never at rest, and that the picture which it presents is for ever changing.<<28

Similarly, based on observations of other experimental physicists of his time that >>atomic units of matter behaved in random, uncontrollable ways< which determinis- tic Newtonian views could not account for," Lotze contests the continuity of matter:

It is no longer held certain and self evident that the final idea of space uniform and homogeneous in all directions ... is the only possible and consistent form of combination for simple perceptions of things beside one another... (232). ...[for] every part of the divisible space-image, must, ... be dependent on a real element which has an existence of its own and in its unspatial fashion is distinct, somehow, from all other points (244).30

In this and other such passages, Lotze foreshadows one of the main ideas of quantum physics, formulated by Max Plank around 1900, that the >>continuous view of the world must be replaced with a discrete one,<< even though the >dis- creteness [of the physical quantities] is not perceptible to our senses.< In other words, what from a distance might appear continuous, seen from close is made of tiny discrete grains.3 In conjunction to that, Lotze also alludes to the qualitative differentiation summarized later by the law of entropy, between the randomness and constant chaotic flux governing the movement of particles at the microcosmic level, and the more ordered, purposeful, and quantifiable physical reality at the level of the macrocosm, which can be made meaningful only by >averaging<< or >>washing out<< the details of the microcosmic information.2 Lotze writes:

28 LOTZE, Metaphysic, vol. II, book II: Cosmology, p. 26. 9 Heinz R. PAGELS, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature (New York:

Bantam Books, 1982), p. 8.

30 LOTZE, Metaphysic, vol. I, book II: Cosmology (pages indicated in the text). 3' PAGELS, The Cosmic Code, p. 11. Pagels gives the classical examples of the pile of wheat, and

the newspaper photograph, both of which appear continuous from a distance, yet made from myriads of little elements (grains, and dots, respectively), when seen from close.

3 Ibid., pp. 106-112. Pagels makes the interesting observation that the laws according to which particles at the microcosmic level move are >>time reversal invariant,<< or, in other words, the process of motion is not directed in time, it does not distinguish between past, present and future, whereas at the macroscopic level, our >>averaging of the microworld description ... introduces the arrow of time<< (pp. 107-108). While Lotze does not arrive at such subtle inferences, they are intrinsic in the theory in a subliminal way, brought out, again, by Pagels, who relates this view of the physical world with that of history and human consciousness in general. Pagels likens the two-layered levels of materiality with two levels at which a historical event can be perceived: >>Two people observing a social revolution might agree completely on the events at the individual level, but they may disagree completely as to the meaning of the historical event. They see different patterns and bring their own experience to bear on the interpretation<< (p. 109).


... [Q]ualitatively distinguished elements would assume the form of a scattered multitude of individual atoms. ..(62) ... the idea, which determines the qualitative nature of an element of matter, serves in the order of the universe as a point of intersection for the different tendencies which make that universe into a coherent whole; connected.. .not merely as a rigidly classi- fied system, but as an eternally progressive history (63).33

What must have particularly attracted Mahler to Lotze's theory is that Lotze did not see any discrepancy between this working of the world, and that of the mind. On the contrary, products of the mind (such as syntax) would be subject to the same principles:

... If this idea would be expressed in thought, it could only be so by means of a number of propositions which be towards one another in those extremely various modes of dependence in which the different parts of a scientific system are connected together ... propositions composed of words, of which the meanings while different and unchangeably fixed, are still not immeasurably different, but... they admit of being joined together in various syntactical combinations, to serve as vehicles by which the idea is articulated into its parts. With these words I compare the elementary materials of nature.. .But although thus involved from all eternity in a network of relations, they still remain different as regards each other, and incapable of being referred to mere division and re-combination of a uniform substratum (61)...

In his numerous references to >the opposition which has to be reconciled between living Beings and inanimate Matter,<< Lotze makes clear that the same laws apply to nature and to the world created by people:

Hence we saw that every action that takes place necessarily presupposes a permanent and universal relation of sympathy between things, which binds them together in constant union, and which itself is only conceivable on the supposition that what seems to us at first a number of independent centers of energy, is, in essence, one throughout (145).

Whether consciously or subliminally related with his scientific readings, all these ideas are recognizable both in Mahler's statements, but, and especially, in the structure of the Fifth Symphony. The discrepancy we have noticed at the level of the entire symphony between an almost mechanical overall order at the large, macrocosmic, level, and the capricious behavior of the multi-referential materials as >>individuals< resembles Lotze's view of the world which >seems to us at first [made of] a number of independent centers of energy,< but in fact there is a >universal relation of sympathy between things,< which binds them together in con-

3 Although it does not concern us here with regard to Mahler, Lotze also seems to have understood in a visionary way the relation between force and speed, and, implicitly, between mass and speed: >>Besides the degree of intensity a force would have corresponding to the distance. . .there would thus be a positive or negative increase of the force, depending on the rapidity with which the elements travel through the space which they at present occupy...The dependence of force upon velocity of motion, and upon successive accellerations, would apparently have to be regarded as a universal characteristic of physical action.<<(LOTZE, Meta physic, vol. II, p. 83).


stant union. Ernst Otto Nodnagel, the music critic, in some way invoked the same argument (not mentioning physics, however) when he defended Mahler's work from another critic's attack that >>regarding the range of ideas, the work is pretty incomprehensible, and from a stylistic point of view it seems to ask a riddle.<< By looking at the score, writes Nodnagel, one will find the series of ideas simple and clearly recognizable. In other words, the large scale >mechanical laws< serve to unify and justify the small scale variety.

The method of composition itself is most strikingly novel in movements 2 and 3. They both seem to fight order and normality. The second movement >Sftirmish bewegt, Mit gr6sster Vehemenz,<< starts with a unison outlining back and forth in fortissisimo the first three scale steps of the key, A minor, abruptly answered by a short, biting, diminished seventh chord howled in the brass sound of 4 trumpets, reiterated in alternation four times, with the brass interruption occurring every time a beat earlier. The main theme of the section thus introduced takes further the hint of the stepwise motion from the introduction, and displays scalar passages in A Minor in all directions, starting on various degrees of the scale, but usually ending on either 1 or 5, at times simultaneously upwards and downwards in counterpoint, and accompanied by parallel short fragments of scale in the brass, following a different rhythm. The entire section sounds as if the notes of the scales have lost their sense of direction, of gravity, and flounder aimless, forwards and backwards, filling a space but not necessarily progressing anywhere (see Musical Ex. 1; the numbers indicate the scale degrees).

In terms of musical >denotation,<c the passage can be easily decoded: a clear key of A minor, scalar motives, tonal functions mostly gravitating around I and V, rhythmic and metric irregularities. Connotatively the passage cannot be said to correspond to one particular signified. Several come to mind, however, not so much through musical intertextuality, because such passages are not often encoun- tered in the musical literature, but rather through analogy with signifieds from the outside world: ideas of a structure in disorder, in disarray, of chaos, are closest to concepts in physics or chemistry. Moreover, the scales running either backwards or forwards might explain Mahler's analogy with a >comet's tail<<: just as the tail either follows or preceds the head of a comet depending on whether it approaches or it moves away from the sun, so is the direction of these motives reversible, converging toward the tonic, or distancing themselves from it, due to the alternative attraction to another pole, the dominant.

After the connotations of chaotic, discontinuous movement of matter, the con- trasting section in f minor arriving at m. 79 seems incongruous at first: it has much more continuity, and its >human< connotations are doubly reinforced, once because it generally suggests a type of music associated with lyricism, or suffering, and, secondly, because in fact it resembles very closely materials of the first movement, the funeral march. Further alternations of those two types of materials ultimately lead into an apotheotic chorale, suggesting an easy way out in ecstatic rec- onciliation; but the coda brings back some of the scalar materials, which gradually give in, disintegrating into fragments that seem contaminated by the >humanness< of the funeral march section.


Unlike the second movement, the materials of the Scherzo can be identified according to generic patterns of triple meter dances. In fact, as Donald Mitchell points out, this is the first time that Mahler achieves in the Scherzo a mixture of dance allusions (waltz and Lindler), which will become even more intricate in later symphonies.34 But again, the recognition of the dance connotations does not solve the discrepancy of their structural treatment. Phrases follow false rhythmic patterns and metric cues, begin and end at the wrong places, or get interrupted and interpolated with various incidental materials. The opening motive in the horn, for example, does not indicate a clear meter until measure 4, when the Landler triple meter settles in, but then the regularity is discontinued by ending the ex- pected eight-measure phrase abruptly after its seventh measure (i.e. in measure 9; see Musical Ex. 2). Moreover, a 6/4 rather than a 3/4 overall meter is suggested, only to be cut short by a hemiola-like effect in mm. 14-15.

Later in the movement, materials enter into fugal contrapuntal combinations incongruous with their nature, and thus the music is in a constant indeterminacy of topics, touching fleetingly upon moods but not settling in any. In short, the sense of irregularity at the detailed structural level continues, in spite of the fact that the overall general outlines, as in the previous movement, can easily be identified.

If the ideas of chaos, discontinuity, directionless movement, independent centers of energy, even lack of center and gravity, rule the most daring, advanced syntactic gestures and intertextual references in the Fifth Symphony, this paradoxical constellation is based on an extremely sound structural skeleton which struggles to keep the movements together in spite of their apparent surface incom- patibility. As mentioned above, movements one and two, four and five, and three and five, share, respectively, several thematic materials. It is not difficult to recognize in the discontinuous details the microcosm to which Mahler's comments referred. At the same time, the large scale macrocosmic space resulting from the >>averaging of the details,<< both at the level of each movement, and at the level of the entire symphony, presents a recognizable thematic and structural unity, a ?one- ness,. but in which, however, as in the universe according to Lotze, )>there is no single centre and law of gravity holding it together.<<35 In this new context, Bekker's hypothesis that the Scherzo might have been called initially >Die Welt ohne Schwere (the world without gravity) gains more credibility.

Lotze's theories can be said to be representative of a time of transitional change between the scientific paradigms of Newtonian mechanics and modem physics. Mahler's knowledge and interest in Lotze's ideas provided him a new paradigm for the unique and novel processes he was seeking for his first >>purely musical< symphony, with no textual or programmatic crutches. Context has been translated intertextually into structure in a different medium, through a process of ho- mology at the connotative level of signification: the signifieds of order/disorder

34 See Paul BANKS and Donald MITCHELL, Gustav Mahler in: Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove: Turn of the Century Masters (New York, 1985), p. 139.

3 LOTZE, Metaphysic, vol. II, p. 153.

V. MICZNIK, MAHLER'S 5TH SYMPHONY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, IRASM 27 (1996) 1, 13-29 27

and their relationship in connection with the universe have been obtained in music through purely musical behaviors of the musical fragments. And just as the new paradigms in physics helped people like Lotze and others to accept and explain the world as an imbalanced, imperfect mechanism, they helped Mahler to conceive his symphonies in new ways, defeating the laws of unity and coherence.

Having unveiled similarities between Mahler's processes and those observed in physics during his time does not mean that we have >>pinned down< or >>fixed< the latent meaning of the symphony, but that we found a way of explaining its inconsistencies according to a possible contextual system of which we were not aware before. Yet, we have only located one of the intersections of Mahler's text with the larger social text, and its partaking in one of the numerous different contextual discourses of his time. For there is no such thing as a fixed textual or contextual signified for a musical text - the closer we think we are to it, the more elusive it becomes.

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Safetak

TEKSTUALNA I KONTEKSTUALNA ANALIZA: MAHLEROVA PETA SIMFONIJA I ZNANSTVENA MISAO

Polazedi od ponovnog ozivljavanja stare rasprave izmedu apsolutnih i referencijal- nih pristupa glazbenom znacenju, Sto ga je nedavno poduzeo Richard Taruskin, u elanku se raspravlja o vezi izmedu >>teksta< i >>konteksta< na primjeru Mahlerove Pete simfonije kao >case study<.

ProSirenje pojma >>teksta<( Rolanda Barthesa kao proizvoda oznaeavateljskog lanca koji prolazi kroz druge tekstove, mre2e i pozadine dovelo je kasnije do preoblikovanja od strane Derride i drugih poststrukturalistiCkih kriti!ara. Slijede6 model >>teksta(( temeljenog na na!elu beskona!ne intertekstualnosti pojave se mogu smatrati tekstovima povezanim s drugim okru2uju6im intertekstovima kao dijelom druStvenog teksta koji sudjeluje u brojnim drugim diskursima. Takvi nazori odbacuju dihotomiju tekst/kontekst, dok s druge strane trate tekstualizaciju konteksta kako se o6ituje u sadaSnjim strukturalnim karakteristikama djela.

Mahlerova Peta simfonija (1901.-1902.) bila je njegova prva simfonija napisana bez ikakva izriCita izvanglazbenog objasnjenja i bez uklju6ivanja bilo kakvih pjesama koje bi mogle usmjeravati na moguce interpretacije njezina idejnog sadr2aja. Istodobno, pet stavaka simfonije pokazuju mnoge paradokse koje je tegko objasniti tradicionalnim terminima. Dok je s nereferencijalnog, tj. 6isto glazbenog, strukturalistiekog stajalista simfonija vrlo odito ujedinjena na girokoj razini (1. i 2., 4. i 5., 2 i 5. stavak imaju isti tematski materijal), s referencijalnog, ekstrinsickog, konotacijskog motriSta izolirani glazbeni materijali i procesi oeituju puno manje koherentnu, !ak nekoherentnu sliku. Pogrebni mars u prvom stavku, kaotiani ljestvieni pasa2i koji zavrSavaju apoteoznim koralom u drugom stavku, generiCke mjeSavine Liindlera i valcera, !eznutljivo romantini zovovi roga u tredem stavku, sublimna adagietto himna ijubavi (ili smrti) u !etvrtom, te prozaieno, prizemno izlaganje jednostavnih tema u kontrapunktu u posljednjem stavku 6ini se da ne podupiru istu ujedinjenu viziju svijeta koju posti2e integrirana struktura.

Ovaj elanak utvrduje da je Mahlerov idiosinkreticki interes za znanost, osobito za kozmologiju Hermana Lotzea, mogao posluziti kao otponac za tu inovativnu konstrukciju i predla2e kao njezin model novi pogled na svemir oko 1900. kao diskontinuiran i kaotiRan na mikrokozmiCkoj, atomskoj razini, a shvaden kao kontinuiran i ujedinjuju6i na opcoj, makrokozmickoj razini. Kontekst je intertekstualno preveden u strukturu u drukeijem mediju s pomocu procesa homologije na konotativnoj razini. Pritom se odnos izmedu oznaditeljskog reda/nereda u svemiru primijenio kao paradigma za ponasanja samo glazbenih materijala.

textual and contextual analysis mahler's fifth symphony and scientific thought

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