The Expansion of Symphonic Space in Mahler's First Symphony

Abstract

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

Acknowledgements

The initial version of this article was presented as a paper to the Boston University Society of Fellows in April 2008. Subsequent versions were read to the Canadian University Music Society in Vancouver (June 2008), at Tufts University (October 2008) and at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Nashville, Tennessee (November 2008). I would like to thank Joseph Auner, Reinhold Brinkmann, James Johnson and Jeremy Yudkin for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Notes

¹‘Die Einleitung stellt das Erwachen der Natur aus langem Winterschlafe dar.’ This description appeared for the first time as part of the programme distributed at the symphony's second performance, which was conducted by Mahler in Hamburg on 27 October 1893.

²Concerning Mahler's career as a conductor of opera, see Franz Willnauer, Gustav Mahler und die Wiener Oper (Vienna, 1979; repr. 1993); Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler's American Years, 1907–11: A Documentary History (Stuyvesant, NY, 1989); idem, Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest, 1991); Bernd Schabbing, Gustav Mahler als Konzert- und Operndirigent in Hamburg (Berlin, 2002); and Gustav Mahler und die Oper, ed. Constantin Floros (Zurich, 2005). For an early exploration of how Mahler's experience in the opera house might be reflected in the fabric of his symphonies, see Dika Newlin, ‘Mahler the Opera Director: Mahler the Symphonist’, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York, 1947; rev. edn, New York, 1978), 136–205, esp. pp. 152–63 and 189–96. Although Newlin discusses each symphony in turn, her larger claim is made explicit only in connection with the Second and Eighth symphonies. More recently, Julian Johnson has made a compelling case for the presence of both theatrical and operatic ‘voices’ in Mahler's symphonic writing. Indeed, Johnson's observations serve as an invitation for a more detailed consideration of the topic. Julian Johnson, Mahler's Voices (Oxford, 2009), 171–85.

³The pioneering work of Zoltan Roman, Monika Tibbe and Donald Mitchell in particular has brought into focus the many conflicting strains of the song/symphony relationship. Zoltan Roman, ‘Mahler's Songs and their Influence on his Symphonic Thought’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1970); Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, ii: The Wunderhorn Years (London, 1975; rev. edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995); Monika Tibbe, Über die Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers (2nd edn, Munich, 1977). More recently, Raymond Knapp has revisited this relationship in terms of the programmatic dimension of these symphonies, in his Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-cycled Songs (Middletown, CT, 2003). Exerting a particularly powerful grip on recent writing concerning Mahler's works is the question of narrative. See especially Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), esp. pp. 119–55; Anthony Newcomb, ‘Narrative Archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 118–36; Vera Micznik, ‘The Farewell Story of Mahler's Ninth Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 144–66; and eadem, ‘Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126 (2001), 193–249.

⁴Julian Johnson refers in passing to the ‘offstage voice’ as a fundamentally operatic device found in the symphonies in his Mahler's Voices, 181. My interest in the present context is, more specifically, with the mobility of these distant utterances as well as the fashioning of both literal and imagined spaces that are ultimately devoid of any specific narrative or programmatic meaning.

⁵These conventions are outlined in some detail in James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford, 2006), 295–304.

⁶See Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 171 and 288 (note 16); and Walter Frisch, Brahms: The Four Symphonies (New Haven, CT, 2003), 87.

¹¹Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, ii, 217.

⁷Zoltan Roman, ‘Song and Symphony (I)’, The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge, 2007), 72–88 (p. 85).

⁸Zoltan Roman, ‘Song and Symphony (I)’, The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge, 2007), 72–88 (p. 85).

⁹‘l’assemblage di questi elementi in stato grezzo accresce l'impressione di non direzionalità della musica’. Gianmario Borio, ‘Le parole cancellate e le tracce: Sul primo movimento della Prima Sinfonia di Mahler’, Studi sul Novecento musicale in memoria di Ugo Duse, ed. Nino Albarosa and Roberto Calabretto (Udine, 2000), 15–28 (p. 23).

¹⁰Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, ii, 204.

¹²Zoltan Roman observes: ‘Although it is true that no programme notes were available at the concert, “explanations” of the “symphonic poem” were published in some newspapers prior to the concert.’ Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary, 209 (note 136). For a recent account of the symphony's early history, see idem, ‘“Vocal Music” in the Symphonic Context: From ‘Titan’, eine Tondichtung in Symphonieform to Das Lied von der Erde, or the Road “Less Traveled”’, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, 2005), 3–21. For a discussion of these issues within the broader context of Mahler's ambivalent attitude toward programme music, see Stephen E. Hefling, ‘Mahler's “Todtenfeier” and the Problem of Program Music’, 19th-Century Music, 12 (1988–9), 27–53 (pp. 43–4), and idem, ‘Miners Digging from Opposite Sides: Mahler, Strauss, and the Problem of Program Music’, Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC, 1992), 41–53.

¹³Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon and Jutta Wicker (Portland, OR, 1997), 31.

¹⁴In his review of the 1889 première, Kornél Abrányi described the introduction as ‘a country-idyll, with forest murmurs, the whistling of birds, cuckoo-calls and in order to complete the assembly of birds, even the crowing of roosters is not absent; the latter one is perhaps intended to wake up the hunters whose horn mingles merrily into the polyphony of sounds, mounted over an endless pedal point.’ Abrányi's review appeared in Pesti Hírlap on 21 November 1889. Quoted in Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary, 80.

¹⁵In all of the early manuscript sources, the marking ‘Wie ein Naturlaut’ appears only in the winds. For a comprehensive discussion of these early sources, see Stephen McClatchie, ‘The 1889 Version of Mahler's First Symphony: A New Manuscript Source’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 99–124, and Sander Wilkens, Editionspraxis und allgemeine Korrekturensystematik zu den Werken Gustav Mahlers: Kritischer Bericht und Revisionsbericht zum Autograph der Ersten Symphonie (Munich, 1996).

¹⁶The Stichvorlage is housed in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (L1 UE 375). For further discussion of this point, see Thomas Peattie, ‘In Search of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler's Broken Pastoral’, Mahler and his World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ, 2002), 185–98 (p. 187).

¹⁷At one bar after rehearsal 2 and at rehearsal 6.

¹⁸At six bars before 2. The marking ‘Der Ruf eines Kukuks nachzuahmen’ first appears in the copyist manuscript housed in the New York Public Library. Stephen McClatchie has observed that there are several layers of corrections in this manuscript and that they probably postdate the Weimar and possibly even the Berlin performances of the work. He proposes a date of 1893–4. McClatchie, ‘The 1889 Version of Mahler's First Symphony’, 102.

¹⁹Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL, 1992), 4.

²⁰See Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘Vom Pfeifen und von alten Dampfmaschinen: Zwei Hinweise auf Texte Theodor W. Adornos’, Beiträge zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1975), 113–20, esp. pp. 117–19; and Peter Franklin, ‘“… his fractures are the script of truth”: Adorno's Mahler’, Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (Cambridge, 1997), 271–94, esp. pp. 280–2.

²¹The Scherzo of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony is only one of many examples in which this topic is introduced in a prominent fashion. For a comprehensive account of the hunt as musical topic, see Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 35–110.

²²The calls were first assigned to the clarinets in the Stichvorlage (that is, in or just before 1898). Stephen McClatchie has cautioned that Mahler's indication in the work's earliest manuscript source to place the quartet offstage does not offer conclusive evidence that the horns were positioned in this manner at the première. McClatchie, ‘The 1889 Version of Mahler's First Symphony’, 112. At the same time the presence of a ppp dynamic marking in the horn parts suggest that the horns were on stage at the Budapest première and that the instruction regarding their offstage deployment was a later addition.

²³Adorno, Mahler, 4. Adorno refers to these figures as fanfares throughout his discussion of the work.

²⁴Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge, 1980), 160. Quoted in Adorno, Mahler, 15–16.

²⁵At five bars after 1.

²⁶For a discussion of parageneric spaces, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 281–305.

²⁷The most famous precedents are the offstage oboe in the ‘Scène aux champs’ from Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, op. 14, and the offstage viola in the finale of Harold en Italie, op. 16. In both cases, however, the offstage deployment of these instruments is both static and closely related to the programmatic meaning of these works.

²⁸Writing in slightly different terms about the introduction, Laura Dolp has observed how ‘in a phenomenological sense Mahler exploits the sonoristic properties of his orchestra to dramatize musical space’. Laura Dolp, ‘Sonoristic Space in Mahler's First Symphony’, Muzyka, 53 (2008), 119–30 (p. 120).

²⁹James Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition’, The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2002), 424–59 (p. 457).

³⁰Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1995), 2–4.

³¹Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford, 2007), 6.

³²Ernst Krenek, Music Here and Now, trans. Barthold Fles (New York, 1939), 134–5.

³³Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 167–8.

³⁴Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin, 1918), 61. Quoted in Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 167.

³⁵This question has been explored most recently in Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2005), 182–5 and 203–13. See also Paul Banks, ‘Mahler and Viennese Modernism’, On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Philip Reed (Woodbridge, 1995), 3–20, and Morten Solvik, ‘Mahler's Untimely Modernism’, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Barham, 153–71.

³⁶‘Du hast keinen Begriff davon, wie es unsereinem zu Mute ist, wenn er immer so einen Riesen (Beethoven) hinter sich marschiern hört.’ Quoted in Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1904), i, 171–2.

³⁷Robert Schumann, ‘[Review of Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony]’, trans. and repr. in Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ian Bent, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1994), ii, 166–94 (p. 171).

³⁸Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, 424 and 428.

³⁹Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York, 2003), 438–9.

⁴⁰Bonds goes on to draw a more explicit parallel between the Ninth and Mahler's Fourth Symphony, in his After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 176.

⁴¹Such criticism was often laden with anti-Semitic overtones. For a re-evaluation of the context surrounding Mahler's Beethoven performances, see K. M. Knittel, ‘“Polemik im Concertsaal”: Mahler, Beethoven, and the Viennese Critics’, 19th-Century Music, 29 (2005–6), 289–321.

⁴²For an excellent discussion of Mahler's Beethoven Retuschen, see Katarina Marković-Stokes, ‘To Interpret or to Follow? Mahler's Beethoven Retuschen and the Romantic Critical Tradition’, Beethoven Forum, 11 (2004), 1–40. See also David Pickett, ‘Arrangements and Retuschen: Mahler and Werktreue’, Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Barham, 178–99.

⁴³Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, ‘Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 7–8 (1920), 298–300 (p. 299); Bruno Walter, Thema und Variationen: Erinnerungen und Gedanken (Stockholm, 1947), 135: Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines Musikers, trans. Pavel Eisner (Prague, 1955), 386.

⁴⁴For a brief discussion of the interpretative challenges raised by this passage as well as Heinrich Schenker's striking avoidance of it in his otherwise detailed analysis of the movement, see Nicholas Cook, ‘Heinrich Schenker, Polemicist: A Reading of the Ninth Symphony Monograph’, Music Analysis, 14 (1995), 89–105 (p. 98). For a more sustained attempt to grapple with the march's ‘radical otherness’, see Lawrence Kramer, ‘The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”’, 19th-Century Music, 22 (1998–9), 78–90.

⁴⁵A summary of the reports offered by contemporary witnesses can be found in David Pickett, ‘Gustav Mahler as Interpreter’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Surrey, 1988), 448–50, and Schabbing, Gustav Mahler als Konzert- und Operndirigent, 89–94. See also Denis McCaldin, ‘Mahler and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 107 (1980), 101–10.

⁴⁶Maynard Solomon has observed two such moments in the symphony's third movement. ‘In the Adagio, the repeated fanfares (mm. 120–23, 130–33) are heard almost offstage, vainly striving to break a mood of deep contemplation; they seem to be an attempt at arousal, if not a call to action.’ Maynard Solomon, ‘Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order’, 19th-Century Music, 10 (1986–7), 3–23 (p. 5).

⁵¹Leonore: ‘Ach! Du bist gerettet! Großer Gott!’ Florestan: ‘Ach! Ich bin gerettet! Großer Gott!’ Pizarro: ‘Ha! Der Minister! Höll’ und Tod!’ Rocco: ‘O! Was ist das? Gerechter Gott!’

⁴⁷Mahler conducted 72 performances of Fidelio. By the time of the First Symphony's première, he had already led at least five performances of the opera. During his tenure in Hamburg, when he was also revising the First Symphony, Mahler conducted Fidelio a total of 43 times. For a complete summary of his activity as an opera conductor, see Knud Martner, ‘Mahler im Opernhaus: Eine Bilanz seiner Bühnentätigkeit 1880–1910’, Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiss (Berne, 1997), 163–73.

⁴⁸‘Der Tod sei dir geschworen! Durchbohren mußt du erst diese Brust!’ Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethovens Werke, 20/206 (Leipzig, 1865), 214–17.

⁴⁹‘Noch einen Laut – und du bist Tod!’

⁵⁰Luca Zoppelli, ‘“Stage Music” in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 2 (1990), 29–39 (p. 36).

⁵²Quoted in Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary, 240–1 (note 25). For a discussion of Mahler's staging practices in Budapest and Vienna, see Zoltan Roman, ‘Operatic Staging under Gustav Mahler in Budapest and Vienna’, Report of the Twelfth Congress Berkeley 1977, ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel, 1981), 484–92.

⁵³For a recent assessment of this relationship, see Franz Willnauer, ‘Gustav Mahler und Alfred Roller: Die Reform der Opernbühne aus dem Geist des Jugendstils’, Gustav Mahler und die Oper, ed. Floros, 81–128.

⁵⁴For a discussion of this question, see Ernst Krenek, ‘Gustav Mahler’, in Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler, trans. James Galston (New York, 1973), 157–220 (pp. 176–8).

⁵⁵The abandoned projects are Herzog Ernst von Schwaben (1875–9), Rübezahl (c.1879–83) and Die Argonauten (1880).

⁵⁶For a detailed overview of the music, see Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, i: The Early Years, (London, 1958; rev. edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1980), 141–96, and John Williamson, ‘The Earliest Completed Works: A Voyage Towards the First Symphony’, The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford, 1999), 39–61 (pp. 40–6). Regarding the work's complex compositional genesis, see Edward R. Reilly, ‘Das klagende Lied Reconsidered’, Mahler Studies, ed. Hefling, 25–52, and Jeremy Barham, ‘Juvenilia and Early Works: From the First Song Fragments to Das klagende Lied’, Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Barham, 62–71.

⁵⁷For a detailed overview of the music, see Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, i: The Early Years, (London, 1958; rev. edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1980), 141–96, and John Williamson, ‘The Earliest Completed Works: A Voyage Towards the First Symphony’, The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford, 1999), 39–61 (pp. 40–6). Regarding the work's complex compositional genesis, see Edward R. Reilly, ‘Das klagende Lied Reconsidered’, Mahler Studies, ed. Hefling, 25–52, and Jeremy Barham, ‘Juvenilia and Early Works: From the First Song Fragments to Das klagende Lied’, Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Barham, 70. This tendency has led several scholars to draw parallels between Mahler's music and film. In his discussion of the Third Symphony's opening movement Peter Franklin speculates: ‘Perhaps, nearly a century later, we are better able to deal with this extraordinary symphonic exposition because the juxtaposition of initially mysterious fragments of unconnected narratives, first tried in the equivalent introductory business of the Second Symphony's finale, has become a standard device of film-producers.’ Peter Franklin, Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Cambridge, 1991), 84. This is explored more deeply by Raymond Knapp, who uses the experiments of Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov and the theoretical writings of V. I. Pudovkin as a way of coming to terms with the frequent moments of discontinuity in the Third and Fourth Symphonies. Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 13–69. More recently Jeremy Barham has considered the broader connections that exist between Mahler's music and the moving image. Jeremy Barham, ‘Mahler, Music, and the Moving Image’, News about Mahler Research, 57 (2008), 28–48.

⁵⁸Review dated 1900, quoted in Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig (ed. and trans.), ‘Mahler's German-Language Critics’, Mahler and his World, ed. Painter, 267–378 (p. 287).

⁶¹Max Kalbeck, ‘Gustav Mahler und seine Symphonie’, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 December 1905, quoted in Painter and Varwig, ‘Mahler's German-Language Critics’, 308–9. Sandra McColl offers the following qualification: ‘Perhaps Kalbeck has forgotten Beethoven's introduction of operatic styles and instruments into his symphonies. Or perhaps he felt that the theatrical influences on Beethoven constituted a different case, coming from the age before the corruption of opera by the reforms of music drama.’ Sandra McColl, ‘Max Kalbeck and Gustav Mahler’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 167–84 (p. 173).

⁵⁹ Neue freie Presse (10 April 1899), 1. Henry Louis de La Grange believes this review, signed only ‘R.’, to be by Richard Heuberger. Henry Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, ii: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford, 1995), 152 (note 65).

⁶⁰Leopold Schmidt, ‘Mahler's “Sechste”’, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 June 1906.

⁶²Pierre Boulez, ‘Mahler: Our Contemporary?’, Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge, 1986), 295–303 (p. 300).

⁶³Williamson, ‘The Earliest Completed Works’, 59; Warren Darcy, ‘Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler's Sixth Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 25 (2001–2), 49–74 (pp. 66–7); Seth Monahan, ‘“Inescapable” Coherence and the Failure of the Novel-Symphony in the Finale of Mahler's Sixth’, 19th-Century Music, 31 (2007–8), 53–95 (p. 89).

⁶⁴Johnson, Mahler's Voices, 171–85.

⁶⁵Michael P. Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca, NY, 1990; repr. 2000), 214.

⁶⁶Adorno, Mahler, 71.

⁶⁷Among the best treatments of this topic is Hefling, ‘Miners Digging from Opposite Sides’. This issue has been explored most recently by Vera Micznik, who echoes Dahlhaus's cautionary observation that the question of whether Mahler's music is absolute or programmatic is part of a polemic that belongs to the history of its reception. See Vera Micznik, ‘Music and Aesthetics: The Programmatic Issue’, Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Barham, 35–49 (p. 38).

⁶⁸Martner, ‘Mahler im Opernhaus’, 170.

⁶⁹Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Cambridge, 1983), 39.

⁷⁰Although connections between Mahler and Wagner have often been drawn in the literature, there are relatively few studies dedicated to this important relationship. See, however, Horst Weber, ‘Mahler und Wagner’, Gustav Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Referate des Bonner Symposions 2000, ed. Bernd Sponheur and Wolfram Steinbeck (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 201–10.

⁷¹Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler, trans. Inge Goodwin (London, 1973; repr. New York, 1985), 250. For the importance of Berlioz as a point of comparison in this respect, see Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, ii, 333–43.

⁷²See in particular the account of the celebrated 1903 production at the Vienna Court Opera. La Grange, Gustav Mahler, ii, 571–85.

⁷³Martner, ‘Mahler im Opernhaus’, 170.

⁷⁴For a brief discussion of this passage, see Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘Mythos–Geschichte–Natur’, Richard Wagner: Von der Oper zum Musikdrama, ed. Stefan Kunze (Berne, 1978), 61–77 (p. 63).

⁷⁵‘Hörst du sie noch? Mir schwand schon fern der Klang.’ Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ed. Isolde Vetter and Egon Voss, Sämtliche Werke, 8/2 (Mainz, 1992).

⁷⁶‘Noch sind sie nah; deutlich tönt's daher.’

⁷⁷‘Sorgende Furcht beirrt dein Ohr.’

⁷⁸‘Dich täuscht des Laubes säuselnd Getön’, das lachend schüttelt der Wind.’

⁷⁹‘Dich täuscht des Wunsches Ungestüm, zu vernehmen was du wähnst.’

⁸⁰For a well-known discussion of the aural ambiguity that animates this passage, see Abbate, Unsung Voices, 131. The question of what is heard or not heard in a symphonic context is taken up by Raymond Knapp in his discussion of the Scherzo of Mahler's Third Symphony and what he describes as the ‘interactions between man and the forest creatures’. Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 138–44 (p. 138).

⁸²Adorno, Mahler, 4–5.

⁸¹In the first movement they reappear at 23, and six bars before 26 (the first of these statements being a muted and abbreviated anticipation of the second, which leads directly into the recapitulation). In the Finale they enter three bars after 38, five bars after 49, and at 52.

⁸³John J. Sheinbaum, ‘Adorno's Mahler and the Timbral Outsider’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131 (2006), 38–82 (p. 50).

⁸⁴Adorno's conception of breakthrough in connection with Mahler's music can be traced to Paul Bekker's discussion of the First Symphony. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin, 1921; repr. Tutzing, 1969), 37–64. John J. Sheinbaum has noted that although Bekker's primary example comes from the symphony's first movement, most commentators have focused their attention on the Finale. Sheinbaum, ‘Adorno's Mahler’, 48. See also Bernd Sponheur, Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing, 1978), 51–89; idem, ‘Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers’, Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers Instrumentalmusik, ed. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (Wilhelmshaven, 1980), 117–64; and James Buhler, ‘Breakthrough as Critique of Form: The Finale of Mahler's First Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 125–43.

⁸⁵Adorno, Mahler, 5–6. For an overview of the concept of the breakthrough as it relates to Adorno's material theory of form, see Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 149–83.

⁸⁶‘Se l'introduzione rappresenta l'apertura di un sipario e se esposizione e sviluppo corrispondono allo svolgimento della vicenda, l'esplosiva conclusione dello sviluppo è un po’ come uno “sfondamento” (Durchbruch) della scena stessa.’ Borio, ‘Le parole cancellate’, 26.

⁸⁷The second recollection of the first movement introduction (between 38 and 40) is of particular interest in that the initial horn calls are played for the first time by the ‘correct’ instrument.

⁸⁸Adorno, Mahler, 6.

⁸⁹The beginning of the coda has been placed variously by analysts at 54, 56 and 59.

⁹⁰Five bars after 59 and at 52.

⁹¹In an unpublished paper Katarina Marković-Stokes has argued that Mahler's ‘recomposition’ of the second act of Fidelio, in particular his placement of the third Leonore overture during the scene change before the opera's Finale, can be read as a creative manifesto that re-emphasizes the moment of Durchbruch. ‘From Imprisonment into Freedom: Mahler's “Re-composition” of Act II of Fidelio as a Creative Manifesto’, paper delivered at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington, DC, 2005.

⁹²Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, 434–47.