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Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue by Charles Youmans

2018; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aus.2018.0000

2222-4262

Andrew Barker,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Reviews 289 (Mahler for instance) also figure in a way that sometimes marginalizes their compositions. This being said, Music in Vienna remains a compelling and important publication. It is lucidly written, outstanding in the depth and quality of its research, and remarkable for the novelty of its contribution to such welltrodden musicological territory. It will surely become indispensable for a diverse readership. Julian Horton Durham University Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue. By Charles Youmans. Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press. 2016. 283 pp. $42. ISBN 978–0-25302159–5. Scholars and critics love pairings: Goethe and Schiller, Nestroy and Raimund, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Haydn and Mozart. By the 1950s, Gustav Mahler’s name was almost umbilically linked with that of fellow Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner. Yet as Charles Youmans argues in this pioneering account, written very much with non-musicians in mind, if Mahler must be linked with anyone, then Richard Strauss best fits the bill. That this is not already the case stems largely from a stand-off between competing musicological camps, for whom ‘the greatest composers of their time’ (p. 36), each intimately associated with Vienna, represent irreconcilable opposites despite their mutual admiration and friendly rivalry. Citing Schopenhauer, Mahler, the sensitive Moravian Jew, concluded that he and Strauss, the sensible bourgeois Bavarian, were akin to ‘two miners digging a tunnel from opposite sides and then meeting underground’ (p. 70). For his part, Strauss considered himself the ‘first Mahlerian’, and by 1897, with their acquaintance already a decade old, Mahler considered Strauss an ‘old friend’ (p. 109). The relationship was cemented by a shared devotion to ‘programme music’, evident in Mahler’s First Symphony, the ‘Titan’, named after Jean Paul’s novel, and Strauss’s orchestral tone poems, stimulated by literature, landscape, family and philosophy. Attempting to conceal his work’s resiliently autobiographical roots, Mahler would ostensibly move away from this illustrative style, inspired by Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. Unlike Strauss, he gravitated towards the conservative ‘absolute music’ of the Viennese classical tradition from Haydn through to Brahms. Nevertheless, when comparing the two young firebrands, the elderly Brahms still considered Mahler the real revolutionary. For Schönberg, however, it was Strauss. Yet as Youmans argues, given that both worshipped Mozart and Wagner in equal measure, it is facile to reduce a complex and enriching relationship to such crude antitheses as ‘absolute’ or ‘programme’ music. Both grappled with the impact of Nietzsche, obvious examples being Mahler in his Third Symphony, Strauss in Also sprach Zarathustra; T. W. Adorno remarked that Der Rosenkavalier would be unthinkable without the example of Mahler’s resort to Haydnesque neoclassicism in the Fourth Symphony. Similarly, Mahler might not have Reviews 290 gone down the road towards orientalism in Das Lied von der Erde without the example of Strauss’s Salome, while the despairing Kindertotenlieder can feasibly be read as a response to the occasionally crass Symphonia domestica. Strauss the Nietzschean atheist, at work on his final tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie when hearing of Mahler’s death in Vienna in May 1911, immediately related the work to his late friend’s anguished search for metaphysical solace. He noted in his diary how, like Wagner before him, the ‘Jew Mahler could still find exaltation in Christianity’, a reference to the Eighth Symphony, the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, which had recently enjoyed its triumphant premiere in Munich. Strauss, in a defiant nod to Nietzsche, renamed his new piece Der Antichrist — a decision later rescinded — remarking that ‘the German nation can only attain new vigour by freeing itself from Christianity’. According to Youmans, Strauss ‘touched here on the heart of their relationship, in a furious indictment of a cultural force that had overwhelmed his greatest predecessor and now his finest contemporary’ (p. 10). Mahler’s dualism, his ‘tendency to look at life through the lens of German idealism’ (p. 53), is constantly contrasted with Strauss’s battle against metaphysics, which ‘would be one of the principal goals of [his] creative life’ (p. 57). Literary scholars will easily locate these oppositions within the Naturalism/Modernism/Neo-romanticism debates taking place around 1900. The unbridgeable philosophical divide between two composers with so much else in common is a recurring issue throughout...