Mahler as a kvetch

It is perhaps surprising that the week in which 'subjectivity in Gustav Mahler's symphonies' was the topic of discussion I failed to find anything interesting to write about. Issues of anti-Semitism around Mahler's career and reception have been studied in depth elsewhere (I now have a copy of Knittel's 'Seeing Mahler' and intend to read it over the winter vacation; Adorno's writings on Mahler are also on my list). 

My thought when a tutor remarked that Mahler's annotation of the word weh 'pain' at key points of his manuscripts showed a rupture of self-aware narrative in the music, however? Weh = Vey = Mahler is a serial kvetch.

Bibliography:

Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung voices : Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century (Princeton studies in opera). Princeton: Princeton University Press.


Barham, Jeremy. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (The Cambridge companions complete collection). Cambridge University Press.


Greene, D. (1984). Mahler, consciousness and temporality. New York ; London: Gordon and Breach.


Knapp, R. (2003). Symphonic metamorphoses : Subjectivity and alienation in Mahler's re-cycled songs. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pealing back the meaning

Sitting alone in my bedroom, suffering with COVID-19, I was pleased to receive a knock on my door from a neighbour. He was delivering a marginally belated birthday gift to ease the isolation of isolation. The gift in question was a collection of translated poems by Yehuda Amichai, a man I'd not heard of before. I like a lot of the poems: they're witty, down-to-earth, sometimes almost prosaic in their bluntness; many strongly objectivise women, however, in a sickeningly explicit way. Reading one poem, The Figure of a Jewish Father , I was struck by this line: '...And at evening // he hears church bells rejoicing the plight of Jews.' (p. 97) The idea of church bells as an instrument of Christian hegemony is not something I had considered before. This may seem odd from someone who has lived for the past couple of years in central Oxford, a city where every 15 minutes one is reminded where the nearest church is.  But the pealing of bells is most often a call to prayer, not
Read more

Choral Composition Condescension

Last year, being a budding composer, I was excited to see an advert for a competition to set a psalm (or an excerpt/collection) for choir and organ. What persuaded me most to enter was the option to use original Hebrew text. I chose Psalm 118 ('Hodu l'adonai ki tov, ki l'olam khasdo', which forms the end part of Hallel) due to its regular rhyme scheme, call-and-response like lines, clear sections, and broadly cyclical structure. The music was composed sympathetically, I believe, and ended up sounding quite post-minimalist, with outbursts of Gustav Mahler-inspired expression and some lovely quartal harmonies. All finished, the piece was sent off to be judged; the results email that returned exposed a deep problem and misunderstanding of Jewish music within the English choral tradition. Three things stood out.  Firstly, the gist was that the composition would have won, but that due to the complexity of the Hebrew, the choir would not be able to learn it in time for the co
Read more

Rubinstein v Russia

A book with the title 'Russian Music and Nationalism' is always going to be ambitious; a book with that title and only 400-odd pages is always going to leave some things out. Marina Frolova-Walker's book of that name, however, makes a notable emission which I could not leave unmentioned. Of course, Frolova-Walker's exploration of the music of Glinka and the Kuchka is fascinating and extremely well-researched, but there is a plain ignorance of Jews throughout. Not only is there no index entry for 'Jews' - as might be expected given the millions-strong population in Russia during the nineteenth century - or 'Jewish (folk) music' - as might be expected given the strong influence on generations of non-Jewish Russian composers - but there is a clear avoidance of Jewish matters when dealing with Jewish composers. In a rare passage on Anton Rubinstein, a successful performer and composer from Podolia in the Pale of Settlement, Frolova-Walker writes: 'For th
Read more