Shadows of doubt

Musical Times, Winter 2006 by Whittall, Arnold

The treatment of these basic themes is a more successful aspect of the Perspectives volume than the rather routine considerations of form which, with Micznik's essay, comprise the 'Analytical approaches' section. Other subjects range from 'Sketches, editions and "performing versions" ', to 'Mahler in performance' and 'Reception: the Jewish and Eastern European questions'. With their dependence of documentary evidence (a CD to support the judgements in David Pickett's 'Mahler on record ' is sorely missed), such studies seek to draw the sting of accusations of positivistic contrivance by offering would-be incontrovertible interpretations-fact, not fantasy, truth, not speculation. As a practising psychoanalyst, Stuart Feder will be well aware of the impossiblity of definitively disintangling fact from fiction, or of establishing once and for all where the dividing line between them might be drawn. This awareness, you would expect, should bring special interest to his book-length study of the only composer to have consulted Freud - even though this consultation was restricted to a single conversation during a prolonged tramp through the streets of Leiden during which no notes were taken.

With such material, it's difficult for the scientist not to morph into the mythmaker, and the subject's surreal possibilities are enhanced by Feder's occasional verbal eccentricities - saying of Mahler's father that On more than one occasion he ran aground of the authorities', or of the premiere of the Eighth Symphony that it was 'an occasion hailed as a religious conclave for a generation'. There is also an odd lapse into modern demotic, referring to 'concerns that Mahler [in 1907] would not survive the strenuous transcontinental commute he was embarking on, or what may have seemed up front to be an arduous conducting schedule'. At the other extreme, there is the deadening effect of generalisation: 'like death and bereavement, exile would become a theme in his life and music'. Feder's text seems well researched (a typographical lapse like 'Der Meistersinger' can be excused), but reads rather like the testimony of an expert witness in a trial, as if he had talked to the people involved and could quote their words as a correct record: 'the wish to be rid of responsibilities was only a short step from the wish to be rid of the persons involved, in particular the two brothers who were the chief source of aggravation".

There are occasional striking musical judgements: the revision of Dos klagende lied 'became at the same time an innocent instrument of aggression - at once a prize, an object lesson in creativity, and a declaration of supremacy'. Yet the general effect of Feder's narrative is of informed but tendentious speculation, as in his confident claim that 'to say that Mahler simply feared death misses the complexity of his experience. More to the point, Mahler had a multifaceted psychological romance with death not only the fear but the fascination, and despite anxiety, an underlying wish to experience death'. This seems to say everything and nothing, as does this: 'autobiographical sources were symbolized in Mahler's music rather than blatantly represented in some literal fashion. Mahler was in this sense a master of sublimation, as deeply personal sources of musical content were divested of the particular and rendered universal'; whereas - allegedly - 'Strauss's confessional tendency could literally bubble over into his music'. But exactly how it is possible for 'tragic autobiography' to be 'encoded in the Tenth Symphony' while being 'divested of the particular' - despite the fact that Mahler's added texts in his sketches 'have all the earmarks of a suicide note'? Nor is it explained how the Eighth Symphony's setting of Goethe's 'das Ewig-Weiblich [sic] zieht uns hinan' becomes a 'purified and full sublimated musical idea'.