Shadows of doubt

Musical Times, Winter 2006 by Whittall, Arnold

Shadows of doubt Perspectives on GustavMahler Edited by Jeremy Barham Ashgate (Aldershot, 2005); xxxi, I95pp; £70. ISBN o 7746 0709 7.

Gustav Mahlier: a life in crisis Stuart Feder Yale University Press (New Haven & London, 2004); viii, }i3pp;£25. ISBN o joo 103409.

Gustav Mahler: letters to his wife Edited by Henry-Louis de la Grange & Giinter Weiss in collaboration with Knud Mariner; revised and translated by Antony Beaumont Faber & Faber (London, 2004); xxvii, 43ipp;£2f / £9.99 pbk. ISBN o f7i 21204 2 / o 571 21209 j.

The Mahler family letters Edited, translated and annotated by Stephen McClatchie Oxford University Press (New York & Oxford, ZCXDO); xiu,4i8pp; £29.99. ISBNO 19 514065 6.

WHERE SERIOUS MUSIC is concerned, the Mahler phenomenon is arguably the most substantial and successful result of the cultural pluralism that was the dominant mode of 20th-century late modernism, post 1960. It shows no signs of waning. Pierre Boulez's current recordings of the symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, perhaps his conducting swansong, boost an already gargantuan discography: and as for musicology what could be more attractive to fanatics and completists than the 52-page 'Appendix to Perspectives on Gustav Mahler in which Jeremy Barham sets out the 'markings and inscriptions in those books of the Alma Mahler-Werfel collection', of which his Chapter 3 provides an 86-page catalogue?

Barham is a shrewd, alert editor, noting of his 18author compilation in his introduction that 'if the collection is unified by a single theme then it is paradoxically one distinguished by those concepts of pluralism and heterogeneity so evident in Mahler's own creative practice'. Musicological pluralism inevitably dictates that this 'creative practice ' is not the only subject of serious enquiry, however: and it is the attempt to place that practice in a rully-detailed biographical context that invites some scepticism - if only from those already sceptical about the musical values which Mahler's compositions embody. It's fair to assume that, today, there will be general incredulity at a comment like Richard Perger's, director of the Vienna Conservatoire, writing in 1907 on Mahler's resignation as Hofoperndirektor: 'how sad that a man of such imagination, ambition, and ability [...] should lack the spirit of true creativity, of naive originality: for then he would rank among the foremost'. Perhaps only those dazzled by Mahler's gifts as a performer could have been so blind to his genius as a composer. Yet it seems ironic in the extreme that those qualities which have contributed to the success of Mahler's music over the last half-century or so can still be characterised in largely negative terms.

According to Morten Slovik, in Perspectives, Mahler

parted company with most of his contemporaries. Rather than plunge headlong into the expirements and new per-spectives of the self-proclaimed modernists, [he] refused to abandon the project of German idealism, a tradition to which he saw himself as a rightful heir. Examining the ties between spiritual and material existence, seeking out a higher logic in the seeming chaos that surrounds us, grappling with an explanation for the ways of the world - for all the hopelessness attached to these ambitions by those around him, Mahler steadfastly maintained his ground.

Yet the musical result, in Slovik's diagnosis, has the kind of parallels with the irreducible tensions of a quasi-Nietzschean modernism that helps to account for its late-modern appeal:

more than projecting a fervent belief in an ideal realm beyond mortal existence or a naive conviction in the mystical nature of being, Mahler's transcendental vision is rife with conflicts and unsettling questions. Thus, his idealism is an idealism hard won: just beyond the hope in a better world looms a formidable shadow of doubt.

Such a perspective fits well with the technical angle on the Third Symphony teased out by Vera Micznik in her Perspectives chapter, the latest addition to a series of articles on narrative:

through its reliance on 'known signs', on generic and other connotations of the thematic and gestural materials, Mahler's music, more than most other composers', allows the listeners/analysts to identify and interpret those signs according to their various levels of competence. Moreover, these signs never act on one level alone: they are so contradictory and multi-levelled that, instead of a monological, univalent, straightforward interpretation, they suggest polyvalent meanings which on the surface sometimes seem incomprehensible and irreconcilable.

Sceptics might want to suggest that all musical 'signs' are inherently ambiguous, even when apparently fitting neatly into topical categories of the kind explored by Leonard Ratner, Kofi Agawu, and others. All in all, nevertheless, there is no contradiction of Slovik's diagnosis when Julian Johnson, in 'Mahler and the idea of nature', speaks of him without qualification as 'a early modernist', his music 'founded on dualities'.