Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes - Thomas Peattie

Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes
In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler’s

symphonies by considering the composer’s reinvention of the genre
in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of
his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic
traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas
of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a rich
interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler’s
symphonic idiom and its radical attitude towards the presentation and
ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental
tension between the music’s episodic nature and its often-noted
narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler’s symphonic dramaturgy
can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.
thomas peattie is Assistant Professor of Music at Boston

University. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of
the Royal Musical Association, Acta Musicologica, Music and Letters,
and Naturlaut. His essay “In Search of Lost Time: Memory and
Mahler’s Broken Pastoral” appears in the collection Mahler and His
World (2002). His research interests include the Austro-German
symphony, Gustav Mahler, early modernism, sound reproduction,
auditory culture, aesthetics, and historiography.
Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic
Landscapes
thomas peattie
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© Thomas Peattie 2015
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First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Peattie, Thomas Allan, 1967–
Gustav Mahler’s symphonic landscapes / Thomas Peattie.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02708-4
1. Mahler, Gustav, 1860-1911. Symphonies. 2. Symphonies – Analysis, appreciation.
3. Mahler, Gustav, 1860-1911 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
ML410.M23P43 2015
784.2ʹ184092–dc23
2014043419
ISBN 978-1-107-02708-4 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For my parents
Contents
List of figures [page viii]

Acknowledgements [ix]
Introduction: Hearing Mahler [1]

1 The expansion of symphonic space [11]
2 “Distant music” [47]
3 Alpine journeys [81]
4 Symphonic panoramas [116]
5 Wanderers [152]
Bibliography [191]
Index [213]
vii
Figures
1 Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement, rehearsal 26.

Copyist’s manuscript. The Gustav Mahler – Alfred Rosé Collection.
Music Library, Western University, London, Canada. [page 61]
2 Alexander Robertson, Through the Dolomites. 2nd ed. London:
George Allen, 1903. Courtesy of Harvard College Library,
Imaging Services. [88]
3 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great
Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas. 91 × 121.8 cm. © National
Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. [120]
4 Adolf Menzel, Die Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn [The Berlin
Potsdam Railway], 1847. Oil on canvas. 42 × 52 cm. Photo Credit:
bpk, Berlin / Nationalgalerie / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource,
New York. [121]
5 Honoré Daumier, Le wagon de troisième classe [The Third-Class
Carriage], c. 1862–64. © Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. [123]
6 Unknown photographer, [Gustav Mahler]. 1904. Reproduced
from The Mahler Album, Gilbert Kaplan, Editor. [168]
7 Anton Kolm, [Gustav Mahler]. 1904. © Bildarchiv der
Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. [169]
viii
Acknowledgements
This book would never have seen the light of day without the generous support
and mentorship of my closest friends, colleagues, and advisors. I would like to
express particular thanks to Zoltan Roman, my master’s thesis advisor at the
University of Calgary. He was the first to teach me the value of source-critical
research and saw to it that I never left any stone unturned. My doctoral advisor
Reinhold Brinkmann provided me with a model of intellectual inquiry. During
our frequent meetings, he would often insist that we listen together to the
music we were discussing, not merely excerpts but entire movements. Even
more striking was his uncommon willingness to share his own research. On
more than one occasion, he presented me with a folder of notes on a topic we
had been discussing. It took me a while to understand that these folders were
gifts, presented to me not to copy or to borrow, but to keep.
To my fellow Mahlerians, I wish to express gratitude for your wisdom and
support, as well as for the hard questions you so often asked. I would
particularly like to thank Jeremy Barham, Stephen Downes, Susan Filler,
Peter Franklin, Timothy Freeze, Julian Johnson, Sherry Lee, Katarina
Markovic, Marilyn McCoy, Vera Micznik, Matthew Mugmon, Karen
Painter, Milijana Pavlović, Anna Stoll Knecht, Morten Solvik, and James
Zychowicz. Special thanks are also due to Federico Celestini, Daniel
Grimley, Richard Kramer, Marie Sumner Lott, Christopher Morris, and
Charles Youmans, all of whom provided valuable feedback on previously
published material that eventually made its way into some of the chapters
that follow. Joseph Auner was particularly generous with his time, not only
providing me with detailed feedback on several chapter drafts but also
reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. Jan Philipp Sprick,
Barbara Poeschl-Edrich, and Martin Wittenberg kindly offered help with
translations. For their support, encouragement, and advice along the way, I
also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Michael Beckerman, Jane Bernstein,
Walter Frisch, Ben Korstvedt, Thomas Forrest Kelly, John Kmetz, Lewis
Lockwood, Keith Polk, Alex Rehding, Michael P. Steinberg, James Webster,
and Christoph Wolff.
During my time at Boston University, I received continuous support and
encouragement from my colleagues in the Department of Musicology and ix
x Acknowledgements
Ethnomusicology, the School of Music, the College of Fine Arts, and the
College of Arts and Science, including Marié Abe, Richard Bunbury,
Steven Cornelius, Charles Dellheim, André de Quadros, Sean Gallagher,
Paul Harris, Brita Heimarck, James Johnson, David Kopp, Christopher
Martin, Christopher Ricks, Joshua Rifkin, James Schmidt, Andrew
Shenton, Joel Sheveloff, Jacquelyn Sholes, Roye Wates, James Winn,
Patrick Wood Uribe, and Jeremy Yudkin. I would like to express
particular gratitude to Victor Coelho for his remarkable guidance and
friendship spanning nearly three decades and two countries. A Junior
Fellowship from the Boston University Center for the Humanities
afforded me the luxury of concentrated work, as well as a rare chance to
engage with an extraordinary group of scholars. Charles Griswold, Peter
Hawkins, Walter Hopp, Jennifer Knust, Laura Korobkin, Maurice Lee,
Jeffrey Mehlman, Katherine O’Connor, and Rosanna Warren all
provided me with invaluable feedback on what became the first chapter
of this book.
My students deserve special thanks for enthusiastically accompanying
me on a long and often circuitous journey through the music of Mahler. I
am particularly indebted to Paula Bishop, whose seminar paper on spatial
deployment in Mahler’s symphonic writing provided me with a
stimulating point of reference for my own considerations of space in the
First and Third Symphonies. During the spring of 2005, I taught a Mahler
seminar at Harvard University, where I first explored many of the ideas in
this book. I would like to acknowledge in particular Peter McMurray with
whom I shared many fruitful exchanges on Luciano Berio’s relationship
with Mahler’s music.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to the librarians and to the staff of the
Music Library at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library. Particular
thanks go to Holly Mockovak, Sarah Hunter, Donald Denniston, and Olga
Khurgin. At Harvard’s Loeb Music Library and the Isham Memorial
Library, Virginia Danielson and Sarah Adams always went out of their
way to make my visits both productive and pleasant. I would like to extend
my appreciation to the staff in the music division of the Austrian National
Library, the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, and the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. In New York, I received
prompt and kind attention from the librarians at the Pierpont Morgan
Library, as well as at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
at Lincoln Center. The staff at the Beinecke Library at Yale University not
only welcomed me but also made me feel at home. A special note of thanks
is due to Lisa Rae Philpott and Monica Fazekas at the University of
Acknowledgements xi
Western Ontario, who graciously allowed unrestricted access to the

holdings of the Music Library’s Gustav Mahler – Alfred Rosé Collection.
An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as “The Expansion of
Symphonic Space in Mahler’s First Symphony,” Journal of the Royal
Musical Association 136 (2011): 73–96. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as
“Mahler’s Distance,” Naturlaut 8 (2010): 11–20. Chapter 3 appeared in an
earlier version as “Mahler’s Alpine Journey,” Acta Musicologica 83 (2011):
69–92. I would like to thank the editors of these journals for granting me
permission to reproduce portions of this material.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Cambridge University Press,
above all to my editor, Victoria Cooper, who shepherded the book through
the production process with patience and good humour. I must also
acknowledge the tireless work of Fleur Jones, Rebecca Taylor, Chloé
Harries, Flora Kenson, Linda Benson, and Sri Hari Kumar who
responded to endless queries with remarkable efficiency. Thanks are also
due to the anonymous readers for their many valuable comments and
suggestions.
To my brother and fellow musicologist, Matthew Peattie, I express
particular thanks for the countless hours we have spent together over the
years talking and singing, usually over a Manhattan or two. To my parents
Marlene and Roger Peattie, I offer my thanks for everything they have
given and continue to give. Their love and support know no bounds and
they have followed me every step of the way. Most importantly, I thank my
partner Alessandra Campana, who as my most careful and dedicated
reader continues to make everything possible.
Introduction: Hearing Mahler
[T]he different degrees of understanding, even the experience of “not quite

hearing” are to be regarded as essential to the nature of the musical process.
Luciano Berio – Sinfonia (author’s note)
In the hundred or so years since the death of Gustav Mahler, perhaps no

other musician has demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of the
composer’s songs and symphonies than Luciano Berio (1925–2003). From
his self-proclaimed “analysis” of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony
in the third movement of Sinfonia (1968–69) to his richly orchestrated
transcriptions of two groups of early songs in 5 frühe Lieder (1986) and
6 frühe Lieder (1987), Berio’s critical engagement with Mahler’s music offers
a significant contribution to our understanding of its latent theatricality, as
well as its deeply fractured teleology. But it is Berio’s uncanny knack to listen
anew to these works that is particularly deserving of further reflection. For as
we will see, it is a gift that emerges in the context of his “commentaries” on
Mahler’s works as a rather specific compositional strategy. By drawing our
attention to their cracks and fractures, theatrical excesses, and above all their
obsession with thresholds, Berio opens our jaded twenty-first-century ears to
Mahler’s bold reinvention of the symphony, a genre that by the end of the
nineteenth century had all but exhausted itself.
Using Berio’s attentive ears as a point of departure, this introduction
provides a brief exploration of the third movement of Sinfonia, the
composer’s most extensive reworking of Mahler’s music. For it is in the
context of this movement that the modern listener is invited to revisit some
of the most radical aspects of Mahler’s larger symphonic project. Whereas
the most common interpretive approaches in the existing literature on
Sinfonia focus on the virtuosic handling of the heterogeneous material that
is brought into dialogue with Mahler’s Scherzo, what has received less
attention is the crucial relationship between continuity and discontinuity
that Berio uncovers in his “analysis” of the movement. Indeed, Berio’s
elaborate commentary ultimately sheds new light on Mahler’s unique
attitude towards the presentation and ordering of musical events. And in
doing so, it also forces us to reconsider the way in which the presumed 1
2 Introduction: Hearing Mahler
narrative arc of Mahler’s symphonic works has shaped our own encounter
with this music.
During the course of these brief introductory remarks, I hope to empha-
size the particulars of Berio’s auditory imagination or, to put it more simply,
the way in which Berio listens to Mahler’s music. Of particular interest with
respect to the third movement of Sinfonia (“In ruhig fliessender Bewegung”)
is the way in which Berio draws attention to the cracks in the façade of
Mahler’s Scherzo, cracks that in the original movement have been largely
papered over by the seductive thread of its omnipresent perpetuum mobile.
Indeed, the third movement of Sinfonia ultimately reveals Berio’s profound
understanding of the inherent contradictions that haunt Mahler’s Scherzo:
between its relentless trajectory and its frequent breaks and fractures.
Nowhere does this emerge more clearly than when Berio foregrounds the
significant but rarely discussed moments of discontinuity that characterize
the original Scherzo. In what follows, I focus my attention on two aspects of
Berio’s commentary: his treatment of the brief transitional passage that
precedes the movement’s first Trio and its reprise, and the more elaborate
reworking of the Scherzo’s threefold reprise (focusing on its transformation
from a largely intact reframing of the original statement to a ghostly outline).
Finally, and by way of conclusion, I show that Berio’s attention to the
Scherzo’s fractured surface extends well beyond its most significant
structural divisions.
Before coming to a more detailed assessment of these passages, it is
worth considering what might have drawn Berio to Mahler’s music in the
first place. This obvious attraction can be attributed, at least in part, to
Berio’s sympathy for Mahler’s own engagement with the musical past, a
sentiment reflected in his admiring description of Brahms and Mahler who
made “metaphorical trips to the library, to take stock of its endless
shelves.”1 We know that as a consequence of such journeys, Mahler also
embarked on a series of more literal exercises: namely, the retouching,
transcription, and often wholesale re-imagining of the works of his pre-
decessors. Whereas it was the music of Weber, Schumann, Beethoven, and
Bach that most occupied Mahler’s attention, Berio by contrast was
attracted to a more eclectic range of composers: Mozart, Purcell,
Boccherini, Brahms, and Schubert. But it is from the perspective of this
shared heritage of literal and metaphorical excursions that Berio recog-
nized the extent to which Mahler’s music, like his own, is inhabited by
other music. Yet it is also important to bear in mind that for Berio the
1
Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9.
Copying and transcription 3
“embittered, jostling expressive ‘objects’ that populate Mahler’s world . . .

are significant examples of commentary and assimilation as an indirect
form of transcription.”2
Copying and transcription
Whereas the roots of this shared interest in the musical past lie in the act of
transcribing the works of others, around the time Berio was completing
Sinfonia he had also begun to explore the limits of transcription in relation
to his own compositions. As he observes in connection with his own series
of works that he titled Chemins, the incorporation of previously composed
solo lines from the Sequenzas was not to be considered transcription in the
strictest sense since these lines did not undergo any modification. Instead,
these works offered something more substantial: “an exposition and an
amplification of what is implicit, hidden so to speak, in that solo part.”3 In
Chemins I, based on his Sequenza II for solo harp, Berio draws attention to
the way in which the interaction of material gives rise to new ways of
hearing. Indeed, for Berio, there is “a differentiated repartee between the
soloist and the added instrumental forces (an orchestra and two additional
harps), and between the multiple perspectives of listening imposed by these
new forces on the original solo Sequenza.”4 This process is taken further
in Chemins IV where “a dialogue between a pre-existing musical text
and the otherness of an added text are . . . developed through multiple
forms of interaction, from the most unanimous to the most conflictual and
estranged.”5 In many respects, what Berio attempted in the third move-
ment of Sinfonia is rooted in these ongoing explorations of transcription in
its many forms.
Given that Berio’s attitude towards transcription was shaped by his own
compositional priorities it raises the question as to the value he saw in
transcribing the music of others. In Berio’s view, a transcription needed to
accomplish at least one of two things: produce an analysis of the work in
question or draw attention to what is latent in its musical fabric. With
respect to the latter, we have already seen that in his Chemins Berio had
elevated this rather specific analytical goal to a compositional principle. But
if this strategy is also evident in Berio’s later transcriptions of Mahler’s
early songs, there his motivation was also rather more straightforward:
namely, he wished to “bring to light the undercurrents of the original piano
2 3 4 5
Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 44
part: Wagner, Brahms, the mature Mahler, and the modes of orchestration
that came after him.”6
As for the notion that a transcription might be motivated by analytical
considerations, we know that Berio admired the transcriptions of Anton
Webern in part because he believed that in Webern’s conception
“transcription became a form of analysis.”7 Thus, it is not surprising to
learn that Berio regarded Sinfonia as the “best and deepest possible
analysis [he] could make” of Mahler’s Scherzo.8 Yet it is also worth
remembering that for Berio, this project was far more than an analytical
exercise. As is evident in Rendering (1988–90), a work he described late in
life as an “act of love for Schubert,” Berio’s engagement with the musical
past almost always emerges as a creative act that holds deeply personal
significance.9
Continuity
If the notion of transcription provides a useful point of entry for coming to

terms with Berio’s interest in Mahler, the most revealing perspective
remains the aforementioned tension between continuity and discontinuity
that characterizes so much of Mahler’s music. Yet most accounts of
Sinfonia have tended to emphasize the former, a quality widely presumed
to be inherent in the Scherzo on which it is based. Indeed, Berio himself
often referred to his treatment of Mahler’s Scherzo by drawing on
metaphors that emphasize the original movement’s perpetual motion
and apparent forward sweep. In the author’s note, for example, he
describes the movement as a “kind of voyage to Cythera made on board
the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony.”10 Yet as Berio knows, voyages
are almost always marked by detours and disruptions.11 Indeed, his use of
an entirely different group of metaphors elsewhere in his own accounts
of the movement suggests a reluctance to identify any straightforward
trajectory in the music. Take, for instance, the metaphor of the skeleton,
which according to Berio “often re-emerges fully fleshed out, then
6
Ibid., 41. 7 Ibid., 39. Emphasis added. 8 Ibid., 40. 9 Ibid.
10
Luciano Berio, Sinfonia, author’s note, accessed 26 February 2014, http://www.lucianoberio.
org/node/1494?1683069894=1. Emphasis in original
11
David Metzer has observed in connection with Berio’s reference to Cythera that this “mythical
island of pleasure seems well beyond the horizon.” David Metzer, “The Promise of the Past:
Rochberg, Berio, and Stockhausen,” in Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century
Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133.
Discontinuity 5
disappears, then comes back again.”12 Although this skeleton is “accom-

panied throughout by the ‘history of music,’” the metaphor itself is both
ahistorical and atemporal.13
With respect to the perceived continuity of Berio’s movement, an
additional element that bears consideration is the text of Samuel Beckett’s
novel The Unnamable, which runs in tandem with Mahler’s Scherzo: “two
equals that run side by side in their new musical environment.”14 Indeed,
Beckett’s text “offers another type of perpetuum mobile, though one in which
the ‘ceaseless flow’ of words goes nowhere.”15 When taken together, then,
the conflicting impulses of this double perpetuum mobile suggest how deeply
the apparent continuity of Mahler’s Scherzo has been compromised in
Berio’s reworking of the movement. From this perspective the significance
of Beckett’s text is undeniable. Indeed, it is partly in response to the “gradual
dissolution of traditional narration and character” in The Unnamable that
Mahler’s Scherzo disintegrates as the movement progresses.16 This in turn
raises the question as to whether there is something inherent in the original
Scherzo that points to the possibility of such disintegration. But if we are to
take seriously Berio’s claim that the third movement of his Sinfonia offers an
analysis of Mahler’s Scherzo, we are now compelled to ask what precisely his
analytical project tells us about this music.
Discontinuity
In Mahler’s original Scherzo, the imminent arrival of the passage that

has traditionally been designated Trio I is signalled by a sweeping
chromatic collapse (five before 32). The sudden move to F major is
jarring, an effect that is further amplified by a radical shift of texture and
timbre. Berio’s treatment of this passage also sets the stage for his
subsequent refashioning of the movement’s key structural articulations.
While he retains the original chromatic collapse – indeed, he shines a
spotlight on this gesture – the start of the Trio itself is largely obscured
(E to six after E). And by obscuring its arrival, Berio entirely neutralizes
the original movement’s sudden change of key. As for the reprise of
Trio I, Mahler’s Scherzo only intensifies the original chromatic collapse
12
Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, ed. Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Vargas (New York:
Marion Boyars, 1985), 107.
13
Ibid. Another prominent metaphor used by Berio that falls into this category is that of a
“container.” Berio, Sinfonia, author’s note.
14
Metzer, “The Promise of the Past,” 131. 15 Ibid., 132. 16 Ibid., 133.
(five before 47). At the analogous point in the third movement of

Sinfonia, Berio too retains this collapse while undercutting the expected
arrival of the Trio (V to six after V). Although he retains the first
measure of the timpani part, by stripping away the supporting double
basses all that remains is a distant echo of the Trio’s original starting
point. Whereas Berio’s “analysis” emphasizes the Trio’s status as a
distinct entity, by obscuring its start, he draws attention to a structural
seam that marks a moment of discontinuity in the original movement. It
is surely not coincidental that at precisely this point “Mahler’s text goes
underground asserting its existence only by occasional fragments.”17
While much remains to be said about how this “text” resurfaces, it is
the treatment of the initial Scherzo material that offers the most telling
evidence of Berio’s remarkable sensitivity to the original Scherzo’s deli-
cately fractured surface.
Whereas Berio treats Trio I and its reprise in rather similar ways, for the
three Scherzo reprises, the outline of the original Trio becomes increas-
ingly opaque as the movement progresses. In Mahler’s Second Symphony,
the first Scherzo reprise is preceded by a gentle disruption that is marked by
a sudden increase in dynamic level (at 34). Berio retains both the disruptive
gesture and the reprise proper, but he sharply alters the timbre of the
perpetuum mobile figure by assigning the running sixteenth-note pattern to
the eight singers, who intone the solfège syllables of the main melodic line
in a hushed whisper (eight before H). In the original Scherzo, the second
reprise is signalled by a violent one-measure chromatic descent (one
before 44). While Berio retains this disruptive gesture (one before S), the
reprise itself is reduced to a fragmentary outline that is almost entirely
overshadowed by the prominent quotation of the “drowning music” from
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Whereas Mahler’s third and final reprise is similar
to the second (one before 54), Berio treats it quite differently. In addition to
omitting entirely the short chromatic descent, he erases virtually every
trace of Mahler’s reprise (at FF).
If Berio’s subtle treatment of these crucial structural divisions opens
our ears to the Scherzo’s formal fractures, his exploration of Mahler’s
own self-borrowing draws attention to an entirely different kind of
discontinuity. The moment in question occurs at precisely the point in
the original Scherzo where Mahler ceases to draw on the song material on
which the movement is based (eleven before 34). At the parallel moment
17
David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (London: Royal
Musical Association, 1985), 60.
Theatricality 7
in the third movement of Sinfonia, Berio momentarily suspends the

music’s relentless forward drive, creating a barely audible tear in the
music’s sonic fabric. And by doing so, he accomplishes something
extraordinary: the highlighting of a seam that in the context of the
original movement is meant to be inaudible. Whereas Mahler necessarily
disguises the move from his orchestral elaboration of the original song to
a freely composed continuation derived from the same material, Berio
instead draws this shift to the listener’s attention. Through what we can
only assume was his careful study of “Des Antonius von Padua
Fischpredigt” – the Wunderhorn song on which the movement is
based – Berio thus reveals a hidden aspect of Mahler’s own compositional
process.
Writing about Berio’s remarkable engagement with Mahler’s Scherzo,
David Metzer has observed, “with its beams and hinges shattered,
the Scherzo falls apart, becoming a broken and sputtering perpetuum
mobile.”18 Yet we might also think of Berio’s “analysis” as providing us
with a new way to hear the fractures that are so deeply embedded in
Mahler’s original Scherzo. If Berio’s decades-old claim that this work
represents his “most experimental music” today seems overstated, what
remains clear is that his deep engagement with the musical fabric of
Mahler’s symphonic landscapes still has the potential to open our ears to
music that we thought we knew so well.19
Landscape/mobility/theatricality
Berio’s “analysis” of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony serves

as a useful point of departure for what follows: namely, an account
of Mahler’s symphonic writing that explores his provocative reinven-
tion of the genre at the turn of the twentieth century. Among other
things I aim to shed light on a seldom discussed aspect of Mahler’s
musical language: the unique and often radical approach to the
presentation and ordering of musical events. Through a sustained
engagement with several key works – including the First, Third,
Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies, as well as Das Lied von der Erde –
I identify a fundamental and largely unacknowledged tension between
the music’s episodic structure and its often-noted narrative impulse.
Over the course of the book, I elaborate a framework in which
18
Metzer, “The Promise of the Past,” 134. 19
Berio, Sinfonia, author’s note.
the origins of Mahler’s fractured teleology are considered in terms of the

composer’s ongoing dialogue with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century musical and aesthetic traditions. To this end, I appeal to an
explicitly interdisciplinary model that draws on three broad categories:
landscape, mobility, and theatricality. Each category serves as a flexible
thematic anchor around which Mahler’s decisive contribution to the
Austro-German symphony emerges in light of the immediate cultural
context of the Austrian fin de siècle.
Landscape
Whereas the importance of landscape has often been acknowledged in
connection with Mahler’s works, it remains underexplored as an interpre-
tive category. I argue that the established view of the composer’s deep
attachment to the Austrian countryside, for example, needs to be reformu-
lated in terms of the larger transformation that it underwent during his
lifetime. In this connection, I consider the ways in which this landscape
emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as one of the principal sites of
modernity. Drawing on representations of landscape in painting and early
film, I show the extent to which new modes of perception – shaped above
all by the railroad – transformed Mahler into a new kind of spectator of the
environments in which he lived and worked. Against the backdrop of
emerging notions of tourism and leisure culture, I also consider the extent
to which Mahler’s ambivalent relationship to this development is reflected
in the musical fabric of his symphonies.
Mobility
If the idea of landscape offers a familiar backdrop for a renewed engage-
ment with Mahler’s music, the category of mobility offers an entirely new
conceptual framework, one in which the place of these works within the
context of late-Habsburg culture can be more fully explored. Given
Mahler’s peripatetic existence, the very notion of mobility also offers an
attractive metaphor for coming to terms with the composer’s position as
an emblematic figure of both transatlantic and metropolitan modernism.
I also consider the broader implications of this idea with respect to the
works themselves, particularly in terms of Mahler’s frequent use of
mobile spatial deployment in which offstage instruments provocatively
map out imagined spaces that lie beyond the confines of the orchestral
platform.
Theatricality 9
Theatricality
Similarly, the notion of theatricality offers a new framework in which
Mahler’s works can be understood more clearly as products of the metro-
politan culture in which they were produced. My primary aim is to explore
the intersection between ideas of theatricality as embedded in the political
and cultural fabric of the Austrian fin de siècle, and my larger claim that
Mahler revitalizes the symphony as a genre by giving it a theatrical form.
Finally, I consider the ways in which the gradual refining of the spatial
dimension in Mahler’s symphonies can be tied to a broader move in his
symphonies from an overt to an interiorized theatricality.
Chapter 1, “The expansion of symphonic space,” explores the treatment
of space in Das klagende Lied and the First Symphony from the perspective
of Mahler’s experience as a conductor of opera. I consider the theatrically
located offstage utterances in these works in the light of passages from
Beethoven’s Fidelio (Act II, scene 2) and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (Act
II, scene 2), as well as against the backdrop of Mahler’s controversial
attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony to an offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the
relationship of Mahler’s treatment of offstage space to the larger formal
structure of the First Symphony as a whole – specifically as it relates to the
moment of “breakthrough” in the first and last movements – I suggest that
Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony at the inter-
section of the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic
convention.
Chapter 2, “Distant music,” considers Mahler’s more general interest in
the idea of distant sound and argues that the ongoing fascination with
Mahler’s use of offstage space has overshadowed a closely related and far
less commonly discussed manifestation of “music from afar.” As a careful
study of Mahler’s scores and sketches reveals, his earliest compositions
already embrace the possibility that distant music can emerge from the
stage itself. By establishing a category of music that sounds “as if” from the
distance (wie aus der Ferne), I argue that Mahler articulates a notion of
imagined distance that is closely tied to the numerous paratextual annota-
tions that emerge as a central feature of these early works. The implications
of Mahler’s carefully differentiated conceptions of distant music are parti-
cularly evident in the first and third movements of the Third Symphony
where the intersection of real and imagined distance results in the creation
of an entirely new kind of symphonic landscape.
In Chapter 3, “Alpine journeys,” I challenge the conventionally accepted

view that the celebrated cowbell episode in the Sixth Symphony evokes
qualities of solitude and contemplation. By considering the cowbells
themselves as a kind of aural disturbance within an already cluttered
and oppressive musical landscape, I suggest that they function not as
signifiers of “world-weary isolation” and the “solitude of nature high
above,” but rather as ironic souvenirs of the fin-de-siècle Austrian institu-
tion of the Sommerfrische. By reconstructing one of Mahler’s many solitary
excursions, in the Eastern Alps, I argue that the composer emerges not as
a promeneur solitaire in the Romantic mould, but rather as an active
inhabitant of a landscape that has been transformed into one of the most
important sites of urban culture.
In Chapter 4, “Symphonic panoramas,” I argue that Mahler’s relation-
ship to the Austrian countryside was determined as much by the tradi-
tional practices of walking and hiking as it was by the technologies that
afforded him such ready access to this rapidly changing landscape.
Specifically, I show how the peripatetic Mahler was transformed by the
railway into an entirely new kind of spectator of the landscapes through
which he so regularly travelled. I suggest that the breathtaking panoramas
he experienced from the perspective of the railway carriage offer a
powerful metaphor for coming to terms with the kaleidoscopic unfolding
of musical events that characterizes parts of the Seventh Symphony. In
this connection, I appeal to the early cinematic panoramas created by the
Lumière brothers as a way of providing new insight into notions of
continuity and discontinuity, as well as the tension between the idyllic
and the quotidian in what remains the composer’s most contested
symphonic conception.
Finally, Chapter 5, “The wanderer,” explores Mahler’s relationship to the
figure of the wanderer and considers the idea of walking as a mode of
resistance and affirmation. Drawing on the work of Massimo Cacciari, I
reveal the ways in which the composer’s preoccupation with the broader
themes of landscape and mobility are both refined and intensified in Das
Lied von der Erde. This takes on particular significance in the work’s
closing movement, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), where the movement’s
two grand tableaux interiorize the more overt theatricality of his earlier
symphonies. Here I also discuss the implications of Mahler’s practice of
walking as it relates to the concept of “late style” in the composer’s last
works.
1 The expansion of symphonic space
That Mahler, who spent his life in the opera and whose symphonic
impulse runs parallel to that of opera in so many ways, wrote no operas
may be explained by the transfiguration of the objective into the inner
world of images. His symphony is opera assoluta. Like the opera, Mahler’s
novelistic symphonies rise up from passion and flow back into it; pas-
sages of fulfillment such as are found in his works are better known to
opera and the novel than to otherwise absolute music.
Theodor W. Adorno – Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy
[T]here is often the suggestion of an imaginary theatre in Mahler’s works.

Pierre Boulez – “Das klagende Lied”
Midway through “Der Spielmann,” the second movement of Das kla-

gende Lied (1880), Gustav Mahler’s earliest large-scale composition, a
disconcerting ripple briefly runs through the movement’s fleeting
evocation of a forest landscape.1 In almost every respect, the small
instrumental group responsible for this unexpected sonic disturbance
sounds out of place. Composed of three trumpets, timpani, and cymbals,
the ensemble produces a succession of strained fanfares that inhabit a
different key; adhere to a different time signature; and, most crucially,
occupy a physical space far removed from the main orchestra. The
moment is significant in the context of Mahler’s oeuvre in that it
1
The passage in question lasts just nine measures (mm. 222–30). Unless otherwise noted, all
references are to the original three-movement version of 1880. The work was first performed in
its two-movement incarnation (omitting “Waldmärchen”) at the Singakademie in Vienna on 17
February 1901. The original three-movement version was never performed during the
composer’s lifetime. See Gustav Mahler, Das klagende Lied: Erstfassung in drei Sätzen (1880): für
Soli, Chor, grosses Orchester und Fernorchester, ed. Reinhold Kubik. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4., supplement (Mainz: Universal Edition, 1997). Most analysts have agreed
that the decision to delete “Waldmärchen” was the correct one. For a notable exception, see
Martin Zenk, “Mahlers Streichung des ‘Waldmärchens’ aus dem ‘Klagenden Lied’: Zum
Verhältnis von philologischer Erkentnis und Interpretation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 38
(1981): 179–93. More recently, Sherry Lee has recognized how the subtleties of the work’s
sophisticated narrative structure are lost in the two-movement version. See Sherry Lee, “‘Ein
seltsam Spielen’: Narrative, Performance, and Impossible Voice in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied,”
19th-Century Music 35 (2011): 72–89. 11
marks the composer’s first prominent use of such an explicitly theatrical

gesture. By placing this small group of instruments in the distance
(in der Ferne aufgestellt), Mahler draws on the conventions of operatic
stage music in the context of a work that while rich in operatic associa-
tions possesses only a tenuous link to the genre. Indeed, the intrusive
nature of these distant sounds raises a number of fundamental questions
about the intersection of theatrical and symphonic conventions, as
well as the way in which our experience of space is shaped through
the very act of performance. What is more, this passage reveals the
extent to which a clearly identifiable musical topic – the fanfare – also
has the potential to function simultaneously as a purely sonic gesture,
one that in the context of this movement possesses few obvious
connections to the work’s broader narrative. If such ambivalence offers
evidence of Mahler’s early struggles with questions of genre and
convention, it also provides a telling glimpse of what was to come. For
as I hope to show, Mahler’s music ultimately thrives on the tension
generated by its conflicting allegiances to a range of symphonic and
operatic models.
In what follows, I explore the roots of this tension in two of his earliest
compositions: Das klagende Lied and the First Symphony. I consider how
the spectacular collision of genre that animates these compositions and the
operatic models that inspire their theatrical treatment of space inform the
composer’s novel approach to the presentation and ordering of musical
events. Against this backdrop, I suggest that in different ways, and to very
different ends, Mahler’s single most radical gesture in these works is to
bury the dramatic stage deep within the orchestra. The concert platform,
and what lies beyond it, thus becomes a site for the staging of musical
utterances that do not always possess clear referential import. It is in
this sense, I argue, that Mahler establishes a highly original symphonic
dramaturgy, one that often remains detached from any obvious dramatic
or programmatic significance.
Genre trouble
Like so many of Mahler’s works, Das klagende Lied derives much of its
expressive force from the friction generated by the sheer variety of its
compositional models. Most often described as a cantata, Das klagende
Lied nevertheless inhabits a number of distinct generic identities. As Julian
Johnson has observed, its final movement “implies the visual component of
Genre trouble 13
opera” while drawing elsewhere “on the styles of fairy tale, epic poem,
ballad, tone poem, and symphony.”2 For Jeremy Barham, the work is
more like an expanded form of German ballad in the tradition of Zelter, Schubert
and Loewe . . . With its multi-movement, yet through-composed form, its highly
theatrical, scenic character and the predominance of the orchestra throughout, the
work found Mahler already experimenting with generic fluidity through blending
various instrumental, vocal and stage practices.3
That questions surrounding the work’s generic identity have not been put
to rest is hardly surprising. This state of affairs can be traced, at least in part,
to the frequently cited claim that Das klagende Lied was initially conceived
as a “fairy tale for the stage” (Märchenspiel für die Bühne). On the one hand,
most commentators have questioned the veracity of this particular turn of
phrase, which first appeared in print shortly after Mahler’s death.4 On the
other hand, this designation is revealing in that it offers an accurate
reflection of the work’s tendency towards the theatrical. Yet, despite this
tantalizing reference to the stage, analysts have tended to downplay claims
surrounding the work’s operatic provenance. Donald Mitchell, for
instance, acknowledges that while Mahler might have initially considered
the possibility of a stage setting, “this intention was never represented
at any creative level.”5 Based on an exhaustive reconsideration of the
surviving evidence, Edward Reilly makes clear that the work’s poetry and
music reflect, above all, the demands of the dramatic cantata. In this
connection, Reilly observes that “[t]he libretto for a true Märchenspiel by
Mahler, Rübezahl, does survive, and clearly demonstrates how differently
he conceived such a work for the stage at the very time he was composing
Das klagende Lied.”6 John Williamson has also cast doubt on the work’s
2
Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.
3
Jeremy Barham, “Juvenilia and Early Works: From the First Song Fragments to Das klagende
Lied,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 67.
4
See Ernst Decsey, “Stunden mit Mahler,” Die Musik 10 (June 1911): 355. In other contexts,
Mahler was slightly less specific, referring to the work both as a Märchenspiel (fairy play) and
later as a Märchen (fairy-tale). Mahler to Emil Freund, Vienna, 1 November 1880, in Selected
Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, and
Bill Hopkins (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 65. Mahler to Max Marschalk, Hamburg, [4]
December 1896, in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 200.
5
Donald Mitchell, The Early Years, vol. 1 of Gustav Mahler, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1980), 145.
6
Edward R. Reilly, “Das klagende Lied Reconsidered,” in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35.
operatic origins, noting, “nothing in the history of the text supports clearly
the assumption that the work began its life as a projected opera.”7
Nevertheless, many of the same analysts have been quick to acknowledge
the work’s obvious debt to the conventions of nineteenth-century German
Romantic opera. Whereas this engagement is reflected most clearly in its rich
harmonic palette – indebted above all to the music of Wagner – it is in the
treatment of offstage space that Mahler’s ambivalent relationship to opera
emerges most clearly.8 Given the absence of a dramatic stage, there is some-
thing doubly curious about the way these moments draw so openly on the
tradition of operatic “stage music.” While one might imagine such overtly
theatrical gestures losing their expressive force in the context of a concert
hall, if anything the opposite seems to be true. Indeed, it is ultimately the very
articulation of a “dramatic” space that emerges as the most powerful element
of Das klagende Lied. And since the musical events that occupy this space
remain hidden from view, listeners are in turn required to make sense of
what in one crucial instance is their ambiguous relationship to the unfolding
narrative in which they are embedded. As we will see shortly, this is taken
one step further in the introduction of the First Symphony, where in the
absence of any specific dramatic content, listeners are expected to participate
in a similar act of interpreting distant events that remain hidden from view.
Distant sounds
Before coming to a discussion of the First Symphony, it is necessary to

consider more closely the treatment of space in the original three-movement
version of Das klagende Lied.9 Given the prominent role of spatial disloca-
tion in the work’s closing movement, “Hochzeitsstück,” it comes as no
7
John Williamson, “The Earliest Completed Works: A Voyage towards the First Symphony,” in
The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford
8
As to the question of whether the work reflects the harmonic thinking of Richard Wagner, see
Williamson, “The Earliest Completed Works,” 42–43.
9
Despite Mahler’s consistently bold experiments in the 1880 version of the work, the most radical
elements of the score did not survive the lengthy revision process. In the first revision –
undertaken in 1893 during Mahler’s tenure at the Hamburg Opera – the composer deleted the
first movement, “Waldmärchen,” and dispensed entirely with the offstage orchestra in the two
remaining movements, “Der Spielmann” and “Hochzeitsstück.” He also excised most of the
markings with programmatic overtones. Although the offstage orchestra was restored in the
second revision of 1898–99, Mahler “normalized” these passages by eliminating the clashes of
key and metre. For a detailed overview of these revisions, as well as an account of the work’s
performance and publication history, see Barham, “Juvenilia and Early Works,” 62–71.
Distant sounds 15
surprise that this movement has received attention from analysts. Yet, what
distinguishes “Hochzeitsstück” is the extent to which the bold treatment of
dislocated sound emphasizes so explicitly the work’s theatrical orientation.
Indeed, it is precisely the incorporation of offstage utterances that offers such
profound resonances with the conventions of operatic stage music. Equally
compelling, however, is the breathtaking immediacy that characterizes the
movement as a whole. Whereas the two preceding movements largely
occupy the narrative past, “Hochzeitsstück” plunges us into the present. At
the outset, the orchestra strikes up a celebratory tone, setting the stage for the
wedding festivities to come. Yet the accompanying marking, mit höllischer
Wildheit (with infernal wildness), also suggests that something darker lies
below the movement’s exuberant surface. Here, the triadic fanfares,
supported only by a succession of violin trills and tremolos, and sharply
punctuated by repeated timpani strokes (using the wood of the stick), expose
the hollowness of the moment. And it is in this sense that the introduction as
a whole offers a stark preview of the work’s apocalyptic conclusion.
Nevertheless, the chorus soon joins in with enthusiastic inquiries as to the
cause of the excitement:
Vom hohen Felsen erglänzt das Schloß. The castle gleams from on high,
die Pauken erschallen und Zinken erschall’n. the drums and trumpets resound.
Dort sitzt der mutigen Ritter Troß, The courageous band of knights sit there,
die Frau’n mit goldenen Ketten. the ladies with their golden chains.
Was will woll der jubelnde, fröhliche Schall, What is the meaning of the jubilant,
happy sound,
was leuchtet und glänzet im Königssaal?! what shines and gleams in the King’s
hall?!
O Freude, Freude, heia, heiah Freude, Oh joy, joy! hurrah, hurrah joy, joy!
Freude!
This opening tableau culminates in a frenzied outburst that suddenly gives

way to the sound of a distant but no less boisterous instrumental ensemble
(mm. 89–102; 105–21; 140–41).10 The effect is jarring in that this unex-
pected spatial dislocation creates a rupture in the work’s sonic fabric.11
10
Measure numbers are used only in connection with the original version of Das klagende Lied.
All other music examples in this book employ rehearsal numbers.
11
At the same time, Mahler preserves a clear sense of continuity by bridging these two radically
different sound worlds with the simple gesture of an oscillating interval of a fourth in the
timpani (Dasselbe tempo. Sehr rhythmisch und exact).
In her recent exploration of narrative discourse in Das klagende Lied and

its role in thematizing the experience of sound, Sherry Lee considers the
implications of sonic spatialization in “Hochzeitsstück” and its contribu-
tion to the movement’s theatrical character:
This offstage orchestra, much commented upon in the literature, is the source of
Mahler’s earliest use of acousmatic sound (sound we hear without seeing its cause).
The estranged sound is a surprisingly modernist stroke, and a prescient one; and in
the present context its effect reaches beyond the dimension of space. For at the
same time that the sudden acousmatic event breaks open the space of the work, it
also ruptures the temporal framework of the narrative with an intrusion of the
dramatic. It is as though the exuberant description of the celebration by the chorus
had opened a rift in the narrative through which the sound of the band reaches our
ears, bringing it forth and making it present. In this paradoxical immediacy-in-
distance, the band mirrors the effect of the spectral flute song, which its clamor
does not drown out. The temporal oscillations and spatial shifts in orchestral sound
thus replicate and multiply those of the kaleidoscopic voices that variously tell,
witness, and enact the events of the tale.12
Two aspects of Lee’s account are worth pursuing further: her appeal to the
concept of acousmatic sound and her contention that an unseen musical
event can function as a dramatic intrusion. As Lee observes, the idea of
acousmatic sound was first introduced in the 1950s by Pierre Schaeffer to
describe the experience of listening to musique concrète, an experience
characterized by the visual separation of sound from its source.13 While
acknowledging that her use of the term is anachronistic, she also argues
that it “aptly characterizes the perceptual experience of Mahler’s offstage
music.”14 It is hard to disagree with such an assessment given that the
offstage band in “Hochzeitsstück” is indeed hidden from view: we hear it
“without seeing its cause.” As for the gesture’s “modernist provenance,”
however, it is also true that the autonomy of musical utterances that
intrude from without is a common operatic device that can be traced
back to the origins of the genre.
Regarding Lee’s characterization of such events in the context of
“Hochzeitsstück” as an “intrusion of the dramatic,” her assessment is
entirely on the mark. At the same time, a careful examination of the
work’s original second movement, “Der Spielman,” reveals a prominent
instance of such an intrusion that cannot be so obviously described in these
terms. Already described in passing at the beginning of this chapter, the
passage in question offers a seldom-discussed example of distant sound in
12
Lee, “‘Ein seltsam Spielen,’” 81. 13
Ibid., 81n38. 14
Ibid.
Distant sounds 17
which the reason for its source is not immediately apparent (mm. 222–30).
On the surface, this fleeting sonic disturbance bears a clear resemblance to
the analogous passages of spatial dislocation in “Hochzeitsstück.” Yet,
there are also a number of crucial differences. Of particular significance
is the fact that the disturbance in “Der Spielmann” emerges in the context
of a rather specific musical allusion to the natural world: namely, the
“Forest Murmurs” (Waldweben) from Richard Wagner’s Siegfried.
Already hinted at in “Waldmärchen” (mm. 56–57, 62–63, 307–8), this
“Wagnerian pastoral” is given its first full-fledged airing earlier in the
movement in a broad tableau (mm. 112–27) marked wie Gezwitscher
(like twittering).15 This passage also serves as a haunting transition to the
movement’s first vocal utterance: a plaintive voice that draws the listener
deep into the forest:
Beim Weidenbaum im kühlen Tann, By the willow in the cool pine forest,
da flattern die Eulen und Raben, where owls and ravens flutter,
da liegt ein blonder Rittersmann a fair-haired knight lies buried
unter Blättern und Blüten vergraben. beneath the leaves and blossoms.
Dort ist’s so lind und voll von Duft, It is so mild and fragrant there,
als ging ein Weinen durch die Luft. As if weeping filled the air.
O Leide, weh o Leide! O sorrow, alas, o sorrow!
The passage as a whole offers a chilling snapshot of the scene of the crime
and reveals to us the fate of the murdered brother whose body lies buried
beneath the forest floor. This prompts a retelling of the minstrel’s discovery
of a bone, as well as his tragic decision to fashion out of it a flute that “sings”
to us the tale that ultimately leads to the downfall of the kingdom:
Ein Spielmann zog einst des Weges A minstrel once passed by that way
vorbei,
da sah er ein Knöchlein blitzen. and saw there a small bone
gleaming.
Er hob es auf, es war nicht schwer, He picked it up, it wasn’t heavy,
wollt’ sich eine Flöte d’raus with the intent to make a flute
schnitzen! out of it!
15
The term “Wagnerian pastoral” is used by Robert Samuels in conjunction with the Andante of
the Sixth Symphony (pickup to 94 to 96), as well as the symphony’s first movement (22 to 25).
Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20, 154.
Here, the chorus addresses the wandering minstrel directly, imploring him
not to play:
O Spielmann, lieber Spielmann mein! O minstrel, my dear minstrel!
O ließest du das Flöten sein. O do not play the flute.
O Leide, weh o leide! O sorrow, alas o sorrow!
But before they can finish uttering their warning, fleeting strains of distant
music cast an ominous shadow over the movement.
Most accounts of this passage have emphasized its metrical complexity
(3/4 against the main orchestra’s 4/4), as well as its unusual harmonic
layering (C major against the main orchestra’s C-flat major). Often
described as polytonal, bitonal, or even “Ivesian,” such characterizations
while evocative are also in many respects misleading. John Williamson has
put this into perspective in terms of Mahler’s debt to Wagner:
Without the band, the passage evokes Tristan und Isolde . . . But the combination of
two different streams of music is also evocative of the fanfares of Act II of
Lohengrin, which cut across the orchestra’s chromatic F sharp minor with the
purest D major. But whereas Wagner juxtaposes elements, Mahler combines
them and accentuates the contrast by placing orchestra and band in different
meters (4/4 against 3/4), a feature which Donald Mitchell has compared to the
introduction of the off-stage band in the Finale of the Second Symphony . . . The
band’s C major is a fleeting effect, a chord rather than a fully-fledged tonality, and
hardly qualifies as polytonality in the sense that it is used in referring to music of
the 20th c.16
The distinction Williamson makes between combination and juxtaposition

is important in that it calls attention to Mahler’s unique strategy of drawing
on obviously operatic gestures and recasting them in a non-operatic con-
text. But what precisely is it that Mahler is attempting to combine here, and
to what ends? With respect to the gestures themselves, the answer appears
relatively straightforward: an evocation of the natural world – specifically
the fleeting return of the “Forest Murmurs” – and the sound of distant
fanfares. What makes the resulting combination so unsettling is that the
tranquility of the “Forest Murmurs” is undermined by the strikingly
discordant sound of this distant ensemble. At the same time, what amounts
to a layering of fragments does not produce a full-scale interruption.
Indeed, the sound of this offstage ensemble instead struggles to impose
itself, straining to break through the elaborate and richly scored orchestral
16
Williamson, “The Earliest Completed Works,” 44n19.
Distant sounds 19
texture. Here, then, the listener is offered a fleeting encounter with a

parallel event that occupies an entirely different time and place. But if
this sonic rupture functions as an “intrusion of the dramatic,” what
remains open to interpretation is the relationship of the musical events
that fill this space to the work’s narrative as a whole.
Unlike the third movement, “Hochzeitsstück,” where an equally bois-
terous offstage band is clearly meant to suggest the sound of wedding
festivities, the distant sounds that emerge here do not possess any obvious
connection to the movement’s unfolding narrative. Nor do they bring to
mind any of the symbolic associations frequently heard by analysts
in connection with Mahler’s “offstage” music.17 Although the possibility
that this gesture foreshadows the festivities to come cannot be dismissed
entirely, at the same time these fanfares bear no obvious motivic or gestural
relationship to the distant wedding music of “Hochzeitsstück.”18 On the
whole, then, their lack of any direct connection to the immediate musical
and dramatic context lends them an uncannily abstract quality.
That this passage represents Mahler’s only use of an offstage instru-
mental ensemble in the entire movement serves to heighten its expressive
force. Yet Mahler is far from finished with manipulating space for
dramatic effect. Indeed, he saves his most radical use of spatial dislocation
for a solo voice. In what follows, the minstrel fails to heed the chorus’s
warning and raises the flute to his lips. This leads in turn to an account of
the strangely mournful singing (seltsam traurig Singen) that issues from the
flute. And then, from the distance (von Ferne), the bone flute sings of the
elder brother’s crime:
Ach Spielmann lieber Spielmann mein, O minstrel, my dear minstrel,
das muß ich dir nun klagen. now I must lament to you.
Um ein schönfarbig Blumlein For the sake of a brightly coloured flower
hat mich mein Bruder erschlagen. my brother struck me dead.
The orchestral texture here is dominated by sustained tremolos in the
strings creating a sonority on which Mahler would later draw to signify
“moments of high tension or unearthliness.”19 Like other prominent
examples, including the posthorn episode in the Third Symphony and
17
John Williamson has observed that such “off-stage music seems variously to suggest the world
of ‘beyond’ (symbolized at times in horn calls or church bells), the indifference of the world of
normality or nature (symbolized in cowbells), or an ironic counterpoint of the two.” Ibid., 45.
18
Whether the presence of a metaphorically distant percussion ensemble here is meant to evoke
the sound of distant bells (wie fernes Glockengeläute) complicates matters even further.
19
Williamson, “The Earliest Completed Works,” 45.
the cowbell episode in the Sixth, the resulting tableau serves as a staging
ground for sound itself. In this case, what distinguishes this vocal utterance
from the perspective of sonority is that in the original version this seltsam
traurig Singen is assigned to a boy’s voice. This also marks the crucial
moment in which the lyric “I” is introduced for the first time. It is in part
for this reason that Julian Johnson hears the sonority in spatial terms even
if his account of the movement makes reference only to the work’s revised
version in which the original designations of distance and voice type have
been excised:
This new sonority thus intrudes from a different musical space and is quite distinct
from the narrative tone of the chorus and soloists and the representational topics of
the orchestra. Significantly, the voice of the bone flute constitutes the only moment
of direct speech in the entire piece – the only voice that speaks in the first person
with the lyrical “I” as opposed to the narrative third person. Paradoxically, it is the
voice of the one person who is not actually present (the murdered younger
brother), so that the only time the music speaks with the lyrical intensity of the
first person it is to “make present” an absent voice.20
As was the case with Mahler’s use of the Fernorchester earlier in the
movement, the spatial dislocation here emphasizes the already tenuous
relationship of this utterance to the context in which it emerges. In this
sense, the choice of a boy’s voice and the otherness of its vocal timbre are
particularly appropriate.21
Whereas the most obvious attempts to shape space coincide with those
moments in which Mahler exploits the expressive potential of dislocated
sound, the articulation of space in Das klagende Lied is also attained in a
more conventionally illustrative fashion. In “Waldmärchen,” the original
first movement, the horn calls that echo across the movement’s opening
tableau are clearly meant to evoke a forest landscape. As mentioned earlier,
fleeting references to the “Forest Murmurs” emerge at several points, most
notably at the moment in which the younger brother “passes through forest
and heath.” On the whole, the succession of highly differentiated tableaux
that characterizes this movement serve as a model for Mahler’s later
symphonic writing and point to the dramatic roots of his novel approach
to the presentation and ordering of musical events.22 This sense of spatial
20
Johnson, Mahler’s Voices, 10–12.
21
Given the challenges raised by placing a boy soprano offstage, it is hardly surprising that Mahler
deleted the marking von Ferne (from the distance) in his subsequent revisions of the work.
22
For Jeremy Barham the “abrupt shifts from one narrated ‘scene’ to another and its evocation of
spatial differentiation and varieties of temporal flux via bold manipulations of key, texture,
Thresholds 21
differentiation is particularly notable in that it establishes the possibility of

internalizing or making abstract the more obvious gestures of literal spatial
manipulation.
As we have seen so far, the technique of spatial dislocation is manifested
in three distinct ways in the context of Das klagende Lied: in the form of a
disembodied voice, as a distant instrumental ensemble that adheres to the
conventions of operatic stage music, and most significantly as a distant
ensemble that possesses an ambiguous relationship to the context in which
it emerges. When the principle of spatial dislocation is transferred to the
symphonic realm, it is adapted to very different ends. This is particularly
evident in the First Symphony, a work that while clearly indebted to the
dramatic symphonies of Berlioz also exploits space in a way that displays a
far less obvious connection to the work’s programmatic dimension.
Stripped of any particular dramatic or, arguably, programmatic signifi-
cance, Mahler’s entirely novel expansion of symphonic space thus takes on
a quality that can be best described as abstract.
Thresholds
It is significant that the revisions made to the First Symphony between the
work’s Budapest première in 1889 and its publication in 1898 coincided
almost exactly with the revisions to Das klagende Lied. Indeed, the
composer’s evolving ideas concerning the theatrical use of space are echoed
in the careful attention paid to refining the spatial conception of the First
Symphony’s introduction. Whereas the treatment of space in Das klagende
Lied, with one important exception, bears a close relationship to the work’s
dramatic core, the First Symphony presents a much less straightforward
scenario. Its opening measures unfold a complex sonic tableau in which a
small group of instruments sounds from the distance. In performance, this
establishes a space that is immediately grasped by the listener as lying
beyond the confines of the orchestral platform. In terms of their basic
tempo and figuration are continued and intensified in the next two movements, particularly
through the extraordinary use of the off-stage orchestra.” Barham, “Juvenilia and Early Works,”
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, for example, Peter Franklin
observes that “[p]erhaps, nearly a century later, we are better able to deal with this extraordinary
symphonic exposition because the juxtaposition of initially mysterious fragments of uncon-
nected 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: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84.
formal characteristics, instrumental assignment, and spatial deployment,

these distant utterances complicate both topical and generic expectations
in what stands as Mahler’s first fully symphonic work. The offstage figures
introduce clearly identifiable musical topics – the hunt and the military
fanfare – but are unusual for the dynamic manner in which they are
treated. Rather than emerging en masse from a single location, they
originate instead from multiple positions outside the auditorium. What
is more, the published score provides detailed performance instructions
indicating a number of subtle shifts in the relative distance of these figures
from the space traditionally defined by the concert stage. What remains
puzzling about this dynamic spatial deployment is that it bears no obvious
relationship either to the movement’s early programmatic title or to
the composer’s frequently cited claim that “the introduction depicts the
awakening of Nature from the long sleep of winter.”23
That Mahler began his first symphonic work by establishing so self-
consciously a space at the threshold of the audible, as well as the visible,
reveals the presence of three crucial elements that I suggest lie at the core of
his provocative reinvention of the symphony. Indeed, the composer’s early
fascination with the intertwined ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatri-
cality is, I believe, crucial for a more nuanced understanding of not only the
First Symphony but the later works as well. Given that Mahler’s treatment
of offstage space here has less to do with the work’s original programmatic
dimension or, indeed, the symphonic tradition as a whole, it is clear that
the unorthodox nature of the introduction demands to be interpreted in
different terms. To this end, I devote the bulk of my attention to the impact
of theatrical and operatic conventions on Mahler’s symphonic writing.
Whereas the biographical connection is well known – in recent years,
Mahler’s work as a conductor of opera has been increasingly scrutinized –
what has received less attention is the extent to which the composer’s
concern for dramaturgy is integrated into the very fabric of his
symphonies.24 If, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the
23
“Die Einleitung stellt das Erwachen der Natur aus langem Winterschlafe dar.” This description
appeared for the first time in the programme distributed at the symphony’s second perfor-
mance, which was conducted by Mahler in Hamburg on 27 October 1893.
24
Concerning Mahler’s career as a conductor of opera, see Franz Willnauer, Gustav Mahler und
die Wiener Oper (1979; repr., Vienna: Löcker, 1993); Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler’s American
Years, 1907–11: A Documentary History (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1989);
Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1991);
Bernd Schabbing, Gustav Mahler als Konzert– und Operndirigent in Hamburg (Berlin: Verlag
Ernst Kuhn, 2002); Constantin Floros, ed., Gustav Mahler und die Oper (Zurich: Arche, 2005).
For an early consideration of how Mahler’s experience in the opera house might be reflected in
Thresholds 23
position of the symphony as the most prestigious public genre was becom-
ing increasingly tenuous, Mahler’s mise en scène powerfully re-established
the vitality of the genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic
tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention. Indeed, by blurring
the boundary between opera house and concert hall, these works suggest a
far more complex engagement with the genre than has been previously
acknowledged.
In recent years, the interpretive perspectives afforded by song and
narrative have produced some of the finest critical accounts of Mahler’s
symphonic writing.25 Here, however, my concern is with a different
compositional logic – one that is governed by utterances that are
“theatrically” located and variously connoted as distant, mobile, and
abstract.26 I consider the specifics of Mahler’s expansion of symphonic
space in the First Symphony in terms of the widespread use of program-
matic markers and stage directions. Given Mahler’s decision to announce
the fabric of his symphonies, see Dika Newlin, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, rev. ed. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 136–206. 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 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. Johnson, Mahler’s Voices, 171–85.
25
The 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” (PhD diss.,
University of Toronto, 1970); Donald Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler
(1975; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Monika Tibbe,
Über die Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen
Gustav Mahlers, 2nd ed. (Munich: Musikverlag Katzbichler, 1977). More recently,
Raymond Knapp has revisited this relationship in terms of the programmatic dimension of
these symphonies, in Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-
Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Exerting a particularly
powerful grip on recent Mahler scholarship is the question of narrative. See especially
Anthony Newcomb, “Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and
Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
118–36; Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119–55; Vera Micznik, “The
Farewell Story of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 144–66;
Vera Micznik, “Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and
Mahler,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126 (2001): 193–249; Robert Samuels,
“Narrative Form and Mahler’s Musical Thinking,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 8 (2011):
237–54; and Seth Monahan, Mahler Symphonic Sonatas (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).
26
Julian Johnson has referred in passing to the “offstage voice” in Mahler’s symphonies as an
“essentially operatic device.” Johnson, 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.
his career as a symphonist in such a bold fashion, I explore these issues in

terms of the symphonic tradition in which he was so deeply invested as a
composer, and the operatic and theatrical conventions with which he was
rapidly becoming familiar. During the course of this discussion, I also offer
brief reflections on three works that were of central importance to Mahler
as a conductor: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (Act II, scene 1); Richard
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (Act II, scene 1); and Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony – specifically the so-called “Turkish March” in the Finale of
the Ninth, and Mahler’s attempt quite literally to set in motion part of its
orchestral apparatus. These reflections serve as invitations to hear the First
Symphony anew both in the light of the composer’s experience in the
theatre and, above all, as a conductor of opera. Finally, and by way of
conclusion, I consider the implications of Mahler’s treatment of offstage
space as it relates to the moment of breakthrough in the first movement, as
well as in the Finale.
Conventions
The First Symphony opens with a clear nod to symphonic tradition.

Indeed, the opening measures adhere closely to the established conven-
tions of the slow introduction.27 This introductory space also contains a
number of gestures, including the extended pedal point overlaid with a
series of descending figures, which have obvious precedents in several
nineteenth-century orchestral works. Raymond Knapp has suggested
several models, including the opening measures of Beethoven’s Sixth and
Ninth Symphonies, Haydn’s Creation, and Mendelssohn’s Die erste
Walpurgisnacht, while Walter Frisch has pointed to the Finale of
Brahms’s Second Symphony.28 One could just as easily propose the
openings of the Fourth Symphonies of Beethoven and Schumann, which
in many respects more closely resemble the introduction of Mahler’s First.
But the hunt for such resemblances can only be taken so far. By engaging
27
For an account of these conventions, see William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal
Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 203–8; and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata
Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 295–304.
28
See Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses, 171, 288n16; and Walter Frisch, Brahms: The Four
Symphonies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 87. Frisch is rather specific in his
proposal that Mahler may have had in mind the passage at measure 234.
Conventions 25
so openly with the symphonic tradition, Mahler was ultimately recasting

such gestures in an entirely new discursive context.
From the perspective of both form and genre, other scholars have seen
the introduction as anything but conventional. Zoltan Roman, for exam-
ple, has argued that, “the ‘exposition’ is underway from the first note of the
movement.”29 Roman’s assertion is based in part on his belief that “[o]n the
motivic level, the ‘introduction’ presents (and immediately manipulates)
the germinal unit of the entire Symphony: the interval of the fourth.”30
Gianmario Borio also recognizes the novelty of the introduction but at the
same time argues against a characterization of its material as thematic. As
Borio observes: “The assemblage of these elements in their raw form
enhances the music’s lack of directionality.”31 While acknowledging
its unusual construction, neither Roman nor Borio discusses the introduc-
tion’s most striking feature: the precise articulation of an offstage space. In
what remains the most detailed account of this introduction, Donald
Mitchell does draw attention to the “subtly differentiated acoustic experi-
ence” that Mahler was aiming to create.32 Following a detailed description
of Mahler’s manipulation of the offstage instruments, he summarizes the
significance of the introduction in a passage that is worth quoting in full:
It is only when Mahler’s elaborate performing directions are scrupulously observed
(which, alas, they rarely are) that the introduction at which he laboured so hard
over such a long period makes its full impact. What we ought always to hear in
performance is a brilliantly articulated instrumental analysis of the work’s motivic
components and a magical evocation of the sounds of Nature, in which the subtlest
shadings of dynamics and variation of orchestral colour, and a prophetic
manipulation of directional sound, are brought into a highly sophisticated and
elaborately organized relationship. No wonder that it took Mahler a very long time
to get this passage to sound exactly as he wanted it. Historically, it represents a
pioneer exploration of the potentialities of musical space.33
Although Mitchell offers an eloquent and, in its own way, pioneering

description of the introduction, what he does not consider is what might
29
Zoltan Roman, “Song and Symphony (I),” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed.
Barham, 85.
30
Ibid.
31
Gianmario Borio, “Le parole cancellate e le tracce. Sul primo movimento della Prima Sinfonia
di Mahler,” in Studi sul Novecento musicale in memoria di Ugo Duse, ed. Nino Albarosa and
Roberto Calabretto (Udine: Forum, 2000), 23 [“l’assemblage di questi elementi in stato grezzo
accresce l’impressione di non direzionalità della musica.”]. Emphasis in original. All transla-
tions are my own unless otherwise noted.
32
Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 204. 33 Ibid., 217.
have motivated Mahler to fashion such a complex musical tableau in the

first place and, more crucially, the implications of its constituent elements
for the work as whole.
Programmatic markers
Perhaps the most well-known aspect of the introduction is the presence of

several prominent textual annotations that preserve a trace of the work’s
original programmatic dimension, something that has remained a
constant focus of attention in the critical reception of the symphony. In
the work’s original guise as a symphonic poem, the individual move-
ments, with the exception of the funeral march (“A la pompes funebres”),
included no programmatic titles or references. At the work’s Budapest
première on 20 November 1889, the first movement simply bore the
title “Bevezetés és Allegro commodo” (Introduction and Allegro
commodo).34 Prior to the publication of the symphony in 1898, the
introduction underwent numerous revisions as a result of Mahler’s
struggle with the generic identity of the work and his own ambivalent
attitude towards programme music. Although most accounts of the 1889
Budapest première state correctly that Mahler did not initially provide
a written programme, it seems clear that the composer did speak to
journalists regarding the “meaning” of the individual movements.
Constantin Floros, for example, believes that the “hermeneutic indica-
tions” that appear in August Beer’s review of the work’s first performance
were likely based on oral explanations provided by the composer;35 these
include Beer’s description of the movement as a “poetically imagined
34
Zoltan Roman observes that while “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, 209n136. For an account of the symphony’s
early history, see Zoltan Roman, “‘Vocal Music’ in the Symphonic Context: From ‘Titan’, eine
Tondichtung in Symphonieform to Das Lied von der Erde, or the Road ‘Less Traveled,’” in
Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3–21. For a
discussion of these issues within the broader context of Mahler’s ambivalent attitude towards
programme music, see Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler’s ‘Todtenfeier’ and the Problem of Program
Music,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1988): 43–44; and Stephen E. Hefling, “Miners Digging from
Opposite Sides: Mahler, Strauss, and the Problem of Program Music,” in Richard Strauss: New
Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992), 41–53.
35
Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon and Jutta Wicker (Portland,
OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 31.
Programmatic markers 27
forest idyll” (poetisch gedachtes Waldidyll) that possesses a “true spring

atmosphere” (echte Frühlingsstimmung).36
Mahler’s habit of subjecting his works to continuous revision is well
known, but the extent of the changes he made to the First Symphony
between its première in 1889 and the appearance of the first printed
edition nearly a decade later is remarkable even by his own standards.
More than any other composer of his generation, Mahler obsessively
annotated his own scores. Sketches and autographs as well as published
scores and parts are filled with performance directions, programmatic
indicators, and even cryptic references to his personal life. Among the
most famous example is the unconventional indication wie ein
Naturlaut (like a sound of Nature) that appears at the opening of the
symphony. Continuing the interpretive tradition established by early
programmatic readings of the work, most scholars have treated this
marking as the basic interpretive key for its lengthy introduction.37
Yet, the surviving manuscript evidence suggests that this marking refers
not to the orchestra as a whole but rather to the interval of a descending
fourth in the winds.38 Of even greater consequence is the fact that the
Naturlaut indication was a relatively late addition, first appearing in the
Stichvorlage or engraver’s copy (c. 1898), which served as the basis for
the first published edition of the symphony.39 This chronology strongly
suggests that Mahler borrowed the marking from the fourth movement
of the Third Symphony (1896), where it appears in conjunction with the
plaintive gesture in the oboe of an ascending third (one after 2 and at 6).
The other prominent annotation that has contributed to the perception
of the introduction as a nature tableau – Der Ruf eines Kukuks
36
A[ugust] B[eer], “Philharmonisches Konzert,” Pester Lloyd (21 November 1889), 6.
37
For Kornél Abrányi, the first movement is “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.
38
In all 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): 99–124; and Sander Wilkens, Editionspraxis und allgemeine Korrekturensystematik zu
den Werken Gustav Mahlers: kritischer Bericht und Revisionsbericht zum Autograph der Ersten
Symphonie (Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1996).
39
The Stichvorlage (c. 1898) is housed in the Austrian National Library (L1 UE 375). For further
discussion of this point, see Thomas Peattie, “In Search of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler’s
Broken Pastoral,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
nachzuahmen (Imitating the voice of cuckoo) – was also a later addition,

although it predates the Naturlaut marking (six before 2).40 When taken
together, these examples suggest that a degree of caution must be
exercised when discussing these annotations in terms of their signifi-
cance as programmatic markers.
Not surprisingly, among the first to problematize the reception of this
passage as an untainted Naturbild was Theodor W. Adorno. In his mono-
graph on the composer, Adorno describes the introduction as follows:
The First Symphony opens with a long pedal point in the strings, all playing
harmonics except for the lowest of the three groups of double basses. Reaching
to the highest A of the violins, it is an unpleasant whistling sound like that emitted
by old-fashioned steam engines. A thin curtain, threadbare but densely woven, it
hangs from the sky like a pale gray cloud layer, similarly painful to sensitive eyes.41
With his typically opaque yet paradoxically seductive prose, Adorno com-
plicates the traditional understanding of this passage as a representation of
pure and untroubled nature by invoking technology as an unexpected
source of aural disturbance. Both Reinhold Brinkmann and Peter
Franklin have offered compelling interpretive glosses on Adorno’s text in
terms of its dialectical charge as well as, in the case of Brinkmann, a careful
analysis of Adorno’s use of language, but neither engages with the crucial
theatrical metaphor established by Adorno or indeed its crucial relation-
ship to the articulation of an offstage space.42
Stage directions
If the late inclusion of those textual annotations described earlier has occa-
sioned little comment, what has received even less attention is the extent to
which Mahler continued to refine the introduction’s numerous performance
directions during the ten-year period between the work’s première and its
40
The marking, Der Ruf eines Kukuks nachzuahmen, first appears in the copyist’s manuscript
(c. 1896) housed in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (JOB 85–2). Stephen
McClatchie has observed that the manuscript contains several layers of corrections and that
they probably postdate the Weimar and possibly even the Berlin performances of the work.
McClatchie, “The 1889 Version of Mahler’s First Symphony,” 102.
41
Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4.
42
See Reinhold Brinkmann, “Vom Pfeifen und von alten Dampfmaschinen: Zwei Hinweise auf
Texte Theodor W. Adornos,” in Beiträge zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed. Carl Dahlhaus
(Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1975), 113–20, esp. 117–19; and Peter Franklin, “‘. . . his fractures are
the script of truth.’ – Adorno’s Mahler,” in Mahler Studies, ed. Hefling, 271–94, esp. 280–82.
Stage directions 29
publication in 1898. Given that the bulk of these performing instructions are
related to the conception and deployment of the hunting calls and fanfare-
like figures that dominate the opening measures of the introduction, their
addition transforms the introduction in a way that pushes it far beyond
conventional bounds. It is through a more careful examination of these
changes that we can begin to come to terms with one of the most puzzling
features of this work: a theatrical conception of space that resists obvious
programmatic interpretation.
That Mahler’s use of hunting calls and fanfare-like figures throughout
the introduction has been more often described than interpreted is
surprising in light of the number of detailed analyses to which this
symphony has been subjected. While the introduction of a hunting topic
in the context of a nineteenth-century symphony is hardly unusual, what
stands out is that in the first published edition of the work, Mahler assigns
the opening hunting calls to the “wrong” group of instruments: three
clarinets that replaced the quartet of horns that performed this passage at
the work’s 1889 Budapest première (nine before 1 to three before 1).43
Adorno describes the effect of this timbral transference by introducing the
metaphor of a theatre curtain:
The tempo suddenly quickens with a pianissimo fanfare for two clarinets in their
pale, lower register, with the weak bass clarinet as the third voice, sounding faintly
as if from behind the curtain [Vorhang] that it vainly seeks to penetrate, its strength
failing.44
The decision to assign the clarinets to a weak register not only further
subverts topical expectations but also reveals Mahler’s penchant for
dramatizing sound through its deformation. As the composer is reported
to have said to his close friend and confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner:
43
The Scherzo of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony offers only one of many examples that
introduce this topic 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: Indiana University Press, 2006), 35–110. The calls were first assigned to the
clarinets in the Stichvorlage (i.e., 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 suggests that the horns were on stage at
the Budapest première and that the instruction regarding their offstage deployment was a later
addition.
44
Adorno, Mahler, 4. Adorno refers to these figures as fanfares throughout his discussion of the
work.
If I want to produce a soft, subdued sound, I don’t give it to an instrument which

produces it easily, but rather to one which can get it only with effort and under
pressure – often only by forcing itself and exceeding its natural range.45
Despite Adorno’s admiring quotation of this passage as an example of

“positive negation,” there is far more at stake here. Seven measures after the
disappearance of the clarinets’ ghostly utterances, the listener is confronted
with a second and even more unusual event: the sound of two distant
trumpets (five after 1). If the military fanfare-like figure here is short lived,
almost immediately a third trumpet enters with a fragment of the initial
horn call. Whereas the first and second trumpets are placed “in the very far
distance” (in sehr weiter Ferne aufgestellt), the third is marked simply, “in
the distance” (in der Ferne), thus occupying a position closer to the
orchestral platform. As the third trumpet falls silent, the two players who
were originally deployed “in the very far distance” take up positions “in the
far distance” (in weiter Entfernung).
Despite the unorthodox nature of these unseen events, their presenta-
tion is anything but casual. They are restricted entirely to the work’s
introduction, an extended passage that like most parageneric spaces is
“extra-territorial” in that it falls outside the main body of the movement’s
conventional sonata structure.46 What is so unusual about Mahler’s
treatment of this passage is that he literalizes its extra-territoriality, by
establishing a space that is actually traversed and in turn mapped by the
offstage instruments. While the use of offstage instruments is not without
precedent in nineteenth-century symphonic writing, Mahler’s decision to
locate a part of the orchestral apparatus within a space that is not just
“distant” but carefully articulated reveals a spatial conception that is far
more complex than those found in the symphonies of his predecessors.47
Indeed, one might argue that what Mahler is engaged in here is nothing
less than an attempt to stage the work’s opening measures.48 By
45
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 160. Quoted in Adorno, Mahler, 15–16.
46
For a discussion of parageneric spaces, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory,
281–305.
47
The most famous precedents include the offstage oboe in the “Scène aux champs” from Hector
Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, op. 14, and the offstage viola in the finale of his Harold en
Italie, op. 16. In both cases, however, the instruments remain stationary and are closely related
to the programmatic meaning of these works.
48
Writing in slightly different terms about the introduction, Laura Dolp has observed how “[i]n
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): 120.
Symphonic traditions 31
establishing a scenario in which a succession of variegated fragments

strain to be heard as they traverse the offstage space, the composer draws
attention to the way these figures inhabit the border between the concert
platform and what lies beyond its traditional confines. The introduction
thus becomes a contested space in which a conflict between the symph-
ony as genre and a range of other musical and discursive practices that lie
beyond “the symphonic” is played out. At the same time, the physical
space defined by the concert stage acquires a theatrical potency through
the breach of that same space.
Symphonic traditions
During the 1890s, when Mahler was revising his First Symphony, he was
simultaneously engaged in two rather different projects. As a composer,
he was attempting, through a complex dialogue with the symphonic
tradition, to reinvent the genre. At the same time, as a conductor he
was doing everything in his power to attain his ultimate goal of assuming
the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. If these two preoccupations
helped to shape his basic conception of the symphony, Mahler’s decisive
contribution to the genre cannot be understood without first taking
into account the broader historical context.
For many music historians, Mahler represents the end of the Austro-
German line of symphonic writing, a tradition that can be traced back to
the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Already by the 1890s, as
James Hepokoski has observed, “the Austro-Germanic symphony qua
genre, apparently now in tatters . . . was to be held together primarily, if
at all, by a force of desperate will.”49 Reinhold Brinkmann has suggested
that such a state of affairs created the potential for the symphony to acquire
a self-consciously historical dimension. For Brinkmann, the characteristic
“self doubt” and “skeptical questioning” of Johannes Brahms, for example,
enters into his conception of the symphony as a “late” genre, suggesting by
extension a composer who is openly taking his leave of this tradition.50
Brinkmann’s view has clear roots in a critical tradition that includes
49
James Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition,” in The Cambridge
History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 457. Emphasis in original.
50
Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2–4.
Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Krenek, and Paul Bekker – writers who in the
words of Margaret Notley “regarded the bürgerlich culture of tonal music
as having come to an end.”51 Such a view was given its most extreme
formulation by Ernst Krenek: “Music produced under the title of ‘symph-
ony’ since Mahler is either imitative or carries the title without justification.
Soon after Mahler was called away from his unfinished task, the Empire of
the Hapsburgs . . . met with its undeserved downfall; and this event also
marked the end of the symphonic form.”52 Of particular interest in the
present context is the strikingly utopian view of Paul Bekker. Margaret
Notley has argued that despite acknowledging the end of a tradition,
Bekker nevertheless “saw a reversal of the pattern of decline that had
informed much late nineteenth-century commentary on the symphony.”53
To this end, she uses as evidence the final sentence of Bekker’s study of the
nineteenth-century symphony: “to us Mahler’s total symphonic work, as
the final, highest product of the Romantic worldview, is at once guarantor
and foundation of a new idealism.”54
Whereas Mahler’s position as a key figure in the early history of musical
modernism is well established, this sustained engagement with the
nineteenth-century symphonic tradition has left open the question of
where precisely his music stands in relation to the competing claims of
Romanticism and Modernism.55 What is certain, however, is the signifi-
cant debt Mahler’s music owes to Beethoven’s symphonic writing. For
most nineteenth-century composers, the figure of Beethoven was a
constant and often overbearing presence. Johannes Brahms gave voice to
this general anxiety in his often-cited remark: “You have no idea of the
courage required of our kind when one always hears such a giant
(Beethoven) marching behind.”56 The Ninth Symphony in particular
51
Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese
Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6.
52
Ernst Krenek, Music Here and Now, trans. Barthold Fles (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1939), 134–35.
53
Quoted in Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 167–68.
54
Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), 61.
Quoted in Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 167.
55
This question has been explored most recently in Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music
and the Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 182–85 and 203–
13. See also Paul Banks, “Mahler and Viennese Modernism,” in On Mahler and Britten: Essays
in Honour of Donald Mitchell on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Philip Reed (Woodbridge, UK:
Boydell Press, 1995), 3–20; and Morten Solvik, “Mahler’s Untimely Modernism,” in
Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Barham, 153–71.
56
“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, vol. 1
(Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1904), 171–72.
Symphonic traditions 33
served as a yardstick by which all symphonic works were measured. Robert

Schumann, in his 1835 review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, went as
far as to claim that in the wake of the Ninth, “form and intention seemed to
have been exhausted.”57 This ambivalence has been referred to by James
Hepokoski as a “crisis of continuation,” something that also took place in
the early 1850s after the appearance of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony
and Schumann’s Third.58
Music historians have tended to view Beethoven’s Ninth as a work that
served to redefine the very idea of the symphony. In this respect, the
Ninth has been understood as inspiring a succession of increasingly
ambitious essays in the genre. For Lewis Lockwood: “The Ninth set a
precedent that enabled Mahler to build his immense symphonic struc-
tures, with their wide-ranging rhetoric and their exemplification of his
concept of the symphony as an art form.”59 Mark Evan Bonds has
suggested that the impact of the Ninth can be heard most clearly in
Mahler’s first three symphonies, although it would be easy enough to
demonstrate its impact on the later ones as well.60 Despite his well-
known reverence for Beethoven’s music, Mahler appears to have been
far less intimidated by the figure of Beethoven than composers of pre-
vious generations. That Mahler subjected all of Beethoven’s symphonies,
including the Ninth, to revision reveals that in many ways he was more
interested in reshaping and reinventing the past than in preserving it. He
paid a heavy price for this, and many of his contemporaries accused him
of betraying the spirit of Beethoven.61 But it is precisely the strength of
Mahler’s engagement with the legacy of Beethoven’s symphonic writing
and, as we will see, his provocative re-imagining of the “Turkish March”
in the Ninth’s Finale that suggest he may have drawn inspiration from
outside of the symphonic tradition even as he wrestled with such a
canonic work.
57
Robert Schumann, “[Review of Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony],” translated and reproduced in
Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2., ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge
58
Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception,” 424, 428.
59
Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2003), 438–39.
60
Bonds goes on to draw an explicit parallel between the Ninth and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.
Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 176.
61
Such criticism was often laden with anti-Semitic overtones. For a re-evaluation of Mahler’s
Beethoven performances, see K. M. Knittel, “‘Polemik im Concertsaal’: Mahler, Beethoven, and
the Viennese Critics,” 19th-Century Music 29 (2006): 289–321.
Retuschen
During the course of his lifetime, Mahler conducted and revised many of the
most important works in the symphonic literature. The bulk of Mahler’s
so-called Retuschen involve relatively minor changes in dynamics and
instrumentation, but on one occasion in particular, he re-imagined a part
of the work in question in a much more radical fashion.62 In the spring of
1895, Mahler conducted an unusual experiment during rehearsals for a
performance of Beethoven’s Ninth with the Hamburg Philharmonic
Orchestra. According to several reports, Mahler asked for the B-flat major
march in the Finale to be played by an offstage orchestra. What is more, he
requested that this distant instrumental ensemble should over the course of
the march gradually draw closer.63 In almost every respect, this was an
audacious idea. For by attempting to set in motion part of the orchestral
apparatus, Mahler clearly aimed to literalize the march’s implied mobility.
Most, including Bruno Walter, dismissed this experiment as being on the
“wrong track,” but what is notable about Mahler’s conception of the
“Turkish March” is that by placing it in the distance, he also draws attention
to what has long been considered its problematic relationship to the Finale as
a whole. If the general embarrassment with which this passage has been met
in the analytical literature stems in part from its perceived status as an
independent tableau, it is striking that Mahler wished to emphasize its
“extra-territoriality” in such an outwardly disruptive fashion.64
Although the details surrounding the precise execution of the offstage
march are difficult to establish, it is clear that this bold experiment bears
the mark of someone with extensive practical experience in the theatre.65
62
For a discussion of Mahler’s Beethoven Retuschen, see Katarina Markovic-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
Werktrue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Barham, 178–99.
63
Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, “Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 2
(1920): 299; Bruno Walter, Thema und Variationen: Erinnerungen und Gedanken (Stockholm:
Bermann-Fischer, 1947), 135–36; Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines
Musikers, trans. Pavel Eisner (Prague: Artia, 1955), 386.
64
For a brief discussion of the interpretive challenges raised by this passage – including 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): 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): 78–90.
65
A summary of the reports offered by contemporary witnesses can be found in Schabbing,
Gustav Mahler als Konzert– und Operndirigent, 89–94; and David Pickett, “Gustav Mahler as
Interpreter” (PhD diss., University of Surrey, 1988), 448–50. See also Denis McCaldin,
Fidelio’s fanfares 35
Indeed, the theatrical reinterpretation of the march offers a particularly

compelling example of the way in which Mahler’s long experience as an
opera conductor spilled over into the symphonic arena. Most importantly, it
offers a new and fundamental perspective from which his contribution to the
symphony as genre can be better understood. If Mahler’s radical new con-
ception of symphonic space and his closely related attempt to theatricalize
symphonic music stand as his most important contributions to the contin-
ued vitality of the late-nineteenth-century symphony, in this instance his
debt is perhaps less to the Ninth Symphony as such than to its latent
theatricality.
It is hardly surprising that Mahler’s preoccupation with the spatial and
temporal implications of Beethoven’s “Turkish March” during his
Hamburg years coincided precisely with the revisions to the First
Symphony discussed earlier, as well as with his growing reputation as a
serious conductor of opera. For in the scores of the works he prepared
and conducted, he would have encountered at every turn the distant
and mobile horn calls and fanfares that soon made their way into his
symphonic writing. By way of introduction to this world of orchestra pits,
curtains, and stage machinery, we must now turn our attention to a work
that, in Mahler’s view, represented one of Beethoven’s crowning
achievements.
Fidelio’s fanfares
With its unwieldy dramatic structure, Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814) has often
been viewed with ambivalence. Yet it is an opera that Mahler admired
greatly and one that he conducted frequently over the course of his
career.66 He was undoubtedly drawn to what is perhaps the work’s most
explicitly theatrical passage – the “dungeon quartet” in the first scene of Act
II. As Pizarro prepares to execute the imprisoned hero Florestan, Leonore
“Mahler and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association
107 (1980): 101–10.
66
Mahler conducted seventy-two 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, he conducted Fidelio a total of forty-
three times. For a complete summary of his activity as an opera conductor, see Knud Martner,
“Mahler im Opernhaus: Eine Bilanz seiner Bühnentätigkeit 1880–1910,” in Neue Mahleriana:
Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiss
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 163–73.
issues an ultimatum: “To you I have sworn death! You must first pierce this
heart!”67 After drawing her pistol, she warns the jailer: “Just one more
sound – and you are dead!”68 At this moment, a distant trumpet (auf dem
Theater) sounds, bringing the dramatic action to a sudden and unexpected
halt. The fanfare, which announces the arrival of the minister Don
Fernando, also represents the turning point in the dramatic action; it
signals that the hero Florestan will be spared and reunited with Leonore
and in doing so sets in motion the work’s denouement. This fanfare is a
textbook example of stage music, a type of musical utterance that is heard
by the characters. Stage music also has implications for the audience, which
in its presence “abandon[s] the omniscient composer’s point of view, and
enter[s], so to speak, into the theatrical action, seeing things exactly as the
characters onstage see [and hear] them.”69 At the conclusion of this short
fanfare, the music from the pit orchestra resumes, and we re-enter the
flexible world of dramatic time in which the audience encounters the
simultaneous reactions of the four characters on stage:
Leonore: Ah, you are saved! Praise to God Almighty!

Florestan: Ah, I am saved! Praise to God Almighty!
Pizarro: Ha! The Minister! Death and damnation!
Rocco: O! Righteous God. What is this I hear?70
And then, without warning, the trumpet sounds again. Pizarro and Rocco
are rendered momentarily speechless as the reunited Leonore and
Florestan embrace. As indicated in the score, the trumpet here should
be perceived as sounding louder (man hört die Trompete stärker),
suggesting that the instrument has moved closer. Thus, by appearing to
traverse the offstage space, this fanfare functions as more than an abstract
signal. Indeed, its perceived mobility implies a degree of agency that in
turn suggests a connection to a character that will soon more fully inhabit
the dramatic stage. Although Beethoven’s stage directions do not instruct
the player to move physically closer, the effect in the theatre of a space
traversed is unmistakable. By framing the reactions of the four characters
67
“Der Tod sei dir geschworen! Durchbohren mußt du erst diese Brust!” Ludwig van Beethoven,
Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethovens Werke ser. 20, no. 206 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1865),
214–17.
68
“Noch einen Laut – und du bist Tod!”
69
Luca Zoppelli, “‘Stage Music’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera,” Cambridge Opera
Journal 2 (1990): 36.
70
Leonore: “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!”
Mahler in the opera house 37
with this seemingly mobile utterance, Beethoven thus creates a scenario

that, like the introduction of Mahler’s First Symphony, is ultimately
characterized by the precisely controlled manipulation of a distant
space. In the case of Fidelio, this apparent manipulation of space is clearly
exploited for a specific dramatic purpose. By contrast, in the introduction
of the First Symphony, the reasons for the more literal manipulation of
distant sound are not so clearly evident. As we will see in the closing
section of this chapter, however, this can be accounted for in terms of the
crucial connection between the symphony’s opening tableau and the
work as a whole.
Mahler in the opera house
Mahler’s intimate familiarity with operatic conventions was acquired over

the course of a distinguished conducting career spent largely in the opera
houses of central Europe. After working during his student years in a
succession of small provincial theatres, Mahler received his first significant
appointment in 1883 as second conductor of the Court Opera in Kassel.
Two years later, he took up a post at the German Theatre in Prague before
moving on to Leipzig and then Budapest. Following his tenure at the City
Theatre in Hamburg (1891–97), he achieved his stated goal by accepting
the directorship of the prestigious Court Opera in Vienna, a position that
he held until 1907. Shortly after resigning his post in Vienna, he sailed for
the United States, where he ended his operatic career as a guest conductor
at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (1908–10).
During his early years in Kassel, Prague, and Leipzig, Mahler’s respon-
sibilities were restricted mainly to rehearsing and conducting the singers
and orchestra. By the time he arrived in Budapest, however, his activities
suggested greater ambitions. In a letter of recommendation addressed to
the management of the Vienna Court Opera, Count Albert Apponyi
emphasizes how Mahler’s involvement in the daily workings of the Royal
Hungarian Opera House during his tenure in Budapest went far beyond
what was then customary:
Mahler is not merely – like some famous conductors I could name – an orchestral
musician, but with all the works he produces he dominates the stage, the action,
the expressions and movements of actors and chorus, with supreme control, so
that a performance prepared and conducted by him attains artistic perfection in
every dimension. His eye ranges over the entire production, the decor, the
machinery, the lighting. I have never met such a well-balanced all-round artistic
personality.71
During the 1890s, Mahler’s involvement in the staging of opera would only
intensify, culminating in his celebrated productions of Wagner’s music
dramas at the Vienna Court Opera with the Austrian stage designer Alfred
Roller.72
Considering this lifelong preoccupation with opera, it is surprising that
Mahler chose never to write in the genre.73 During his student years, he
attempted several operatic projects, all of which remained incomplete.74
The only exception is his completion of Carl Maria von Weber’s three-act
comic opera Die drei Pintos, published in Leipzig in 1888, a year before
the première of the First Symphony. A far more intriguing case is
Mahler’s oblique engagement with operatic conventions in his first
major work, Das klagende Lied.75 For it soon became clear that despite
Mahler’s ambivalent attitude towards opera, his ongoing engagement
with the genre left a decisive mark on his symphonic writing. Indeed,
the numerous theatrical indications that fill his scores from Das klagende
Lied to the incomplete Tenth Symphony are derived less from the
symphonic tradition than from his extensive knowledge of the operas
of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, and above all Wagner. But if we dig
deeper, it soon becomes apparent that Mahler’s symphonic conception
is at its core theatrical. This aspect did not escape the attention of early
critics whose many reviews manifest an acute sensitivity to both the
theatrical nature of Mahler’s music, as well as its resonance with the
world of opera. Shortly after the Viennese première of the First
Symphony, for example, Max Graf offered the following critique in the
pages of the Wiener Rundschau:
71
Quoted in Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary, 240–41n25. For a discussion of Mahler’s
staging practices in Budapest and Vienna, see Zoltan Roman, “Operatic Staging under Gustav
Mahler in Budapest and Vienna,” in Report of the Twelfth Congress Berkeley 1977, ed.
Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981), 484–92.
72
For a recent assessment of this relationship, see Franz Willnauer, “Gustav Mahler und Alfred
Roller: Die Reform der Opernbühne aus dem Geist des Jugendstils,” in Gustav Mahler und die
Oper, ed. Floros, 81–128.
73
For a discussion of this question, see Ernst Krenek, “Gustav Mahler,” in Bruno Walter, Gustav
Mahler, trans. James Galston (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 176–78.
74
The abandoned projects are Herzog Ernst von Schwaben (1875–79), Rübezahl (c. 1879–83), and
Die Argonauten (1880).
75
For a detailed overview of the music, see Mitchell, The Early Years, 141–96; and Williamson, “The
Earliest Completed Works,” 40–46. Regarding the work’s complex compositional genesis, see
Reilly, “Das klagende Lied Reconsidered,” 25–52, and Barham, “Juvenilia and Early Works,” 62–71.
Mahler in the opera house 39
The structure of the symphony reminds one of a play (Theaterstück) in which the
catastrophe takes place during the interlude between the second and third acts. The
dramatic moment that causes the emotional denouement has been placed behind
the scenes (hinter die Scene). The artist thus appeals to the listeners’ imagination,
allowing them to construct the bridge between the second and third acts of his
tone-drama.76
Similarly, an anonymous review in the Neue Freie Presse referred to the

Second Symphony as an “imaginary stage play” (imaginäres Theaterstück).77
More than seven years later, in a review of the Sixth Symphony, Leopold
Schmidt offered a more pointed reference to the theatrical provenance
of Mahler’s symphonic writing by describing the Sixth as both “theatre
music” (Bühnenmusik) and “textless opera” (textlose Oper).78 And in
the previous year, Max Kalbeck’s review of the Fifth Symphony drew
attention to the influence of the theatre orchestra on Mahler’s earlier
symphonies:
In Mahler’s earlier works it was always the orchestra that decisively inspired his
imagination – however, not the orchestra of the concert hall, which inspired the
great masters of instrumental music, but rather that of the theater . . . Opera and
music drama not only colored Mahler’s orchestra but also led him to deploy the
human voice as a narrative instrument. So too did they invade the form of his
symphonies, tearing it to pieces. Opera reformers transplanted the overloaded
symphonic orchestra from the concert hall to the theater and turned it into
the docile instrument of their poetic revelations. Mahler in turn led this opera
orchestra from the theater to the concert hall, assigning it the mission of envoicing
his musical intentions with unprecedented clarity.79
Despite Kalbeck’s assertion that opera and music drama “invade the form
of [Mahler’s] symphonies, tearing it to pieces,” he offers few specifics as to
how this is manifested in the works themselves.
76
Max Graf, “Eine Erste Symphonie,” Wiener Rundschau (1 December 1900), 416. In “Mahler’s
German-Language Critics,” ed. and trans. Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, in Mahler and His
World, ed. Painter, 287.
77
R[ichard Heuberger], Neue Freie Presse (10 April 1899), 1. In Henry-Louis de La Grange,
Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904), vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 152n65.
78
Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzerten,” Berliner Tageblatt (2 June 1906), 1.
79
Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt (12 December 1905), 1. In Painter and Varwig, eds.,
“Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” 308–9. Sandra McColl offers the following qualification:
“Perhaps Kalbeck had 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): 173.
The tendency to refer in passing to the presence of an operatic element in

Mahler’s symphonic writing is also evident in more recent accounts of the
composer. Pierre Boulez, for example, has invoked the idea of Mahler’s
symphonies as
meeting-places of the imaginary theater, the imaginary novel and the imaginary
poem; musical expression asserts its claim to what it has been denied, decides
to assume complete responsibility for every possible mode of being, and really
becomes philosophy, while escaping the limitations of purely verbal
communication.80
John Williamson has made reference to the “final Wagnerian apocalypse”

in Das klagende Lied, while Warren Darcy and Seth Monahan have
identified numerous Wagnerian allusions in the Sixth Symphony.81 More
recently, Julian Johnson has considered the presence of what he terms
“operatic echoes” in the form of musical borrowing and has also pointed
out “the extent to which operatic drama as a way of telling, its rhetoric,
structure and tone, are absorbed into the symphonies.”82 In a discussion
of the Eighth Symphony, Michael P. Steinberg observes a fundamental
operatic impulse that remains well below the surface. He suggests that by
setting the final scene from Goethe’s Faust in the second part of his Eighth
Symphony, Mahler was responding directly to the inherent tension in
Goethe’s play between its dramatic thrust and its very unstageability:
Mahler was sensitive to the unstageability of this above all other scenes in the
drama, and composed this movement as a kind of unstageable metaopera. Mahler’s
work is, like Goethe’s, a testament to the limits (and in metaphysical terms –
impotence) of representation.83
If Mahler was drawn to this scene because of its very unstageability, this
suggests in turn that the work is not merely a receptacle of operatic gestures
or fragments but rather in its very essence tends towards the operatic.
Perhaps the most explicit reference to the operatic disposition of
Mahler’s symphonies can be found in Adorno’s monograph:
80
Pierre Boulez, “Mahler: Our Contemporary?” in Orientations, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans.
Martin Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 300.
81
Williamson, “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): 66–67; and Seth Monahan, “‘Inescapable’
Coherence and the Failure of the Novel-Symphony in the Finale of Mahler’s Sixth,” 19th-
Century Music 31 (2007): 89.
82
Johnson, Mahler’s Voices, 171–85 (p. 177).
83
Michael P. Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, rev.
ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 214.
Isolde’s hunting horns 41
That Mahler, who spent his life in the opera and whose symphonic impulse runs
parallel to that of opera in so many ways, wrote no operas may be explained by the
transfiguration of the objective into the inner world of images. His symphony is
opera assoluta. Like the opera, Mahler’s novelistic symphonies rise up from passion
and flow back into it; passages of fulfillment such as are found in his works are
better known to opera and the novel than to otherwise absolute music.84
Under the rubric of opera assoluta, Mahler’s symphonies not only represent
the transfiguration of opera into absolute Musik; they can also be understood
as the “ultimate” form of opera. His symphonies are works that tend towards
opera, but opera that has been, so to speak, purified of any outer action.
Although Adorno’s formulation must be understood in the context of his
complex attitude towards Wagner, it also offers further support for Mahler’s
modernist credentials. Finally, Adorno’s observation also offers another way
of looking beyond the debate in which Mahler’s symphonies are understood
to occupy an ambiguous position between programme and absolute music.85
Isolde’s hunting horns
Once we sense in Mahler’s symphonies an operatic impulse, it is tempting

to qualify this impulse as fundamentally Wagnerian. It was in large part
because of Mahler that Wagner’s music was so often performed in the
opera houses in which he worked. Over the course of his career, Mahler
conducted a total of 514 performances of Wagner’s operas including
seventy-one of Tristan und Isolde.86 Carl Dahlhaus has famously observed
that if we were to consider the years around 1900 from the perspective of
reception history, they “would be noted less for having witnessed the
appearance of Mahler’s symphonies than for being the high-water mark
of Wagner’s music dramas.”87 Yet it seems that from our current vantage
point, it is precisely the link between Wagner’s music dramas and Mahler’s
symphonies that offers a new way of assessing his approach to symphonic
84
Adorno, Mahler, 71.
85
Among the best treatments of this topic is Hefling, “Miners Digging from Opposite Sides,”
41–53. 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 program-
matic is part of a polemic that belongs to the history of its reception. See Vera Micznik, “Music
and Aesthetics: The Programmatic Issue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed.
Barham, 38.
86
Martner, “Mahler im Opernhaus,” 170.
87
Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39.
writing in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.88 As Kurt

Blaukopf has suggested with respect to Mahler’s treatment of space, it is
Wagner who stands as the primary influence in the use of “concealed
sound” and “sound from afar.”89 Indeed, the extent to which Mahler’s
symphonies are in dialogue with the operas of Wagner on both a musical
and dramatic level demands more careful scrutiny.
Among his many successes as a conductor of opera, it was undoubtedly
with Tristan und Isolde that Mahler experienced his greatest critical
triumphs.90 Although he did not conduct the opera until 1891, during his
tenure in Hamburg, which lasted from 1891 to 1897, he conducted the work
on twenty-three occasions.91 At a time during which Mahler was so
preoccupied with refining the spatial dimension of his own symphonies,
the complex treatment of the conventions of stage music in Tristan und
Isolde could not have failed to impress him. For throughout the opera,
Wagner demonstrates a clear interest in the effects of distant sound.
Nowhere is this exploited to greater effect than at the beginning of Act II,
where Isolde, accompanied by her maidservant Brangäne, awaits the arrival
of Tristan. As the curtain rises on the first scene, a chorus of distant hunting
horns fills the night air. Wagner is explicit about the mobility of these distant
utterances; over the course of the opening scene, the horns are instructed to
recede gradually into the distance.92 As an instance of stage music, these calls
are meant to be audible by the onstage characters. Yet despite her deliberate
attentiveness, Isolde tells Brangäne that she is unable to hear anything at all
(“Do you still hear them? To me the sound has already faded into the
distance”).93 Brangäne, of course, acknowledges their presence (“They are
still near; hence they sound clearly”).94 But after Isolde claims that
Brangäne’s ears have been deceived (“Anxious fear leads your ear astray”),
88
While connections between Mahler and Wagner have often been drawn in the literature,
relatively few studies are dedicated to this important relationship. See, however, Horst Weber,
“Mahler und Wagner,” in Gustav Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Referate des
Bonner Symposions 2000, ed. Bernd Sponheur and Wolfram Steinbeck (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2001), 201–10.
89
Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler, trans. Inge Goodwin (1973; repr. London: Futura Publications
Limited, 1975), 250. Regarding the equally important influence of Berlioz, see Mitchell, The
Wunderhorn Years, 333–43.
90
See, in particular, the account of the celebrated 1903 production at the Vienna Court Opera in
La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 571–85.
91
Martner, “Mahler im Opernhaus,” 170.
92
For a brief discussion of this passage, see Reinhold Brinkmann, “Mythos-Geschichte-Natur,” in
Richard Wagner: Von der Oper zum Musikdrama, ed. Stefan Kunze (Bern: Francke, 1978), 63.
93
“Hörst du sie noch? Mir schwand schon fern der Klang.” Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde,
ed. Isolde Vetter and Egon Voss, Sämtliche Werke vol. 8, no. 2 (Mainz: Schott, 1992).
94
“Noch sind sie nah; deutlich tönt’s daher.”
Durchbruch 43
something remarkable happens: for a fleeting moment the horn calls migrate
from stage to pit.95 And as the horns die away, Isolde again suggests that it is
Brangäne who has been deceived (“You are deceived by the sound of rustling
branches, which shake laughingly in the wind”).96 As the horns grow
increasingly remote (immer entfernter), Brangäne finally accuses Isolde of
only hearing what she chooses (“You are deceived by impetuous desire, to
hear what you imagine”).97
Durchbruch
There is little doubt that during rehearsals and performances of Tristan

und Isolde and Fidelio, Mahler would have been attentive to the treatment
of offstage space in these works. Whereas his experiments with mobile
spatial deployment in the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were
doomed to failure, his concurrent application of a similar principle in
the First Symphony led to one of the most audacious symphonic
introductions in the history of the genre. Given Mahler’s efforts to create
such a meticulously crafted spatial conception, it is perhaps surprising
that the expansion of symphonic space is restricted to the introduction of
the first movement. Yet, the fact that the initial hunting calls and fanfares
continue to sound from the orchestral platform (twice in the develop-
ment section of the first movement and three times in the Finale) suggests
that these recurring figures are also part of a larger formal strategy.98 In
part because they now sound from the stage, their presence is in many
respects even more unsettling than when they sounded from afar at the
beginning of the work. As for their role in the context of the work as a
whole, this has been accounted for in the literature largely in terms
of form and timbre. And more often than not, lurking in the background
is Adorno’s famous description of the moment of breakthrough
(Durchbruch) just prior to the recapitulation of the first movement:
95
“Sorgende Furcht beirrt dein Ohr.”
96
“Dich täuscht des Laubes säuselnd Getön, das lachend schüttelt der Wind.”
97
“Dich täuscht des Wunsches Ungestüm, zu vernehmen was du wähnst.” For a discussion of the
aural ambiguity that characterizes this passage, see Abbate, Unsung Voices, 131. In his discus-
sion of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Raymond Knapp takes up the question of
hearing as it relates to the “interactions between man and the forest creatures.” Knapp,
Symphonic Metamorphoses, 138–45.
98
In the first movement, they reappear at 23, and six measures before 26 (the first of these
statements is a muted and abbreviated anticipation of the second, which leads directly into the
recapitulation). In the Finale, they enter three measures after 38, five measures after 49, and at 52.
Then, at the height of the movement, six measures before the return of the tonic D,
the fanfare explodes in the trumpets, horns and high woodwinds, quite out of scale
with the orchestra’s previous sound or even the preceding crescendo. It is not so
much that this crescendo has reached a climax as that the music has expanded with
a physical jolt. The rupture originates from beyond the music’s intrinsic move-
ment, intervening from outside.99
John J. Sheinbaum has underscored the crucial role played by timbre at this
moment in a way that makes clear the link between the opening of the
symphony and the conclusion of the first movement: “only at the moment of
breakthrough does colour – unmuted massed trumpets and horns, fortissimo
and in a comfortable register – allow the fanfare gesture to realize its
rhetorical promise.”100 In spite of this long-overdue emphasis on timbre,
the function of the breakthrough has, predictably, received the most atten-
tion from the perspective of form.101 For Adorno: “[t]he breakthrough in the
First Symphony affects the entire form. The recapitulation to which it leads
cannot restore the balance demanded by sonata form. It shrinks to a hasty
epilogue.”102 If the distant events so central to the introduction literalize the
idea that a musical event might have its origin “outside” the work itself, it is
in this sense that the breakthrough fully exploits the theatrical potential of a
gesture that initially sounded from beyond the orchestral platform. And if
the rupture that defines the moment of breakthrough “intervenes from
outside,” this also allows us to interpret the movement as a whole in terms
of this theatrical metaphor. Gianmario Borio, for instance, has recently
proposed a reading of the first movement that literalizes its meta-theatrical
possibilities: “If the introduction represents the opening of a theatre curtain
and the exposition and development correspond to the unfolding of stage
99
Adorno, Mahler, 4–5.
100
John J. Sheinbaum, “Adorno’s Mahler and the Timbral Outsider,” Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 131 (2006): 50.
101
Adorno’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 (1921;
repr., Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 37–64. John J. Sheinbaum has noted that although
Bekker’s primary example of breakthrough comes from the symphony’s first movement, most
commentators have focused their attention on the Finale. Sheinbaum, “Adorno’s Mahler,” 48.
See also Bernd Sponheuer, Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den
Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978), 51–89; Bernd Sponheuer, “Der
Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers,” in Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers
Instrumentalmusik, ed. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1980), 117–
64; and James Buhler, “Breakthrough as Critique of Form: The Finale of Mahler’s First
Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 125–43.
102
Adorno, 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: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 149–83.
Epilogue 45
events, the explosive conclusion of the development is a little like breaking

through that same set.”103
It is not until the work’s sprawling Finale that the hunting calls and
fanfares, which initially set the symphony in motion, reappear. In addition
to the two recollections of the work’s introduction, the composer also
brings back the theatrical fanfare-like figures that mark the moment
of breakthrough in the first movement.104 In particular, it is the return
of the fanfares at the close of the work that allows us to consider
the symphony as whole in terms of the charged relationship between
symphonic tradition and opera.
In the first movement, the fanfare-like figures initiated the shortened
recapitulation, which, as Adorno puts it, functions as nothing more than
a “hasty epilogue.”105 In the Finale, their appearance signals the onset of
the movement’s coda.106 As was the case in the first movement, the
fanfare-like figure is heard twice – first in muted and barely contained
anticipation and second at the movement’s explosive climax (five after 59
and at 52). Of course, one of the main functions of the return of these
figures is to act as a unifying device, thus satisfying a basic formal
requirement of the late-nineteenth-century symphony. If considered in
terms of the work’s temporal framework, however, the way in which
Mahler treats this moment of breakthrough as a dramaturgical device
instead suggests a parallel with the use of the fanfare in Beethoven’s
Fidelio, where this gesture sets in motion the work’s denouement. By
re-inscribing the moment of breakthrough at the close of the symphony,
Mahler acknowledges the central importance of a theatrical gesture that
in addition to setting the work in motion now brings it to a close. To
extend Borio’s metaphor, the fanfares here “break through” the set once
and for all.
Epilogue
In most accounts of the late-nineteenth-century symphony, the theatrical

treatment of space has seldom merited more than a cursory mention. In his
103
Borio, “Le parole cancellate,” 26. [“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.”]
104
The second recollection of the movement’s 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.
105
Adorno, Mahler, 6.
106
Analysts have variously identified the coda as beginning at 54, 56, and 59.
otherwise superb discussion of the symphony after Beethoven, James

Hepokoski has surprisingly little to say about the potential relationship
between symphony and opera. Hepokoski convincingly exposes the false
dichotomy between so-called programme and absolute music and in
its place proposes the following “hermeneutic genres” in which the
multiplicity of approaches to symphonic writing in the wake of
Beethoven might be discussed:
(1) the purely abstract symphony; (2a) dialogues with the musical tradition;
(2b) ‘nationalistic’ symphonies; (2c) tacit, implicit or suspected programmes
throughout or for substantial sections; (3) programme symphony/suite, sym-
phonic poem and overture.107
While it is tempting to add to this list the impact of operatic and theatrical
conventions, there is perhaps another way of articulating Mahler’s remark-
able contribution to the symphony at the end of the nineteenth century. As
we have seen, both in Das klagende Lied and the First Symphony, the
complex layering of programmatic markers and performance directions in
conjunction with the innovative use of spatial dislocation reveals the extent
to which the young Mahler was struggling to define his own position in the
history of symphonic writing. Indeed, his radical treatment of space offers
particularly compelling evidence of a composer who appeared increasingly
determined to re-establish the vitality of the Austro-German symphony at
the turn of the twentieth century. By infusing his earliest compositions
with a fundamentally theatrical sensibility, Mahler sets the stage for a
compelling and often explosive meeting of the symphonic and the operatic.
Of equal importance is the way in which these audacious débuts reflect a
number of other preoccupations worthy of further exploration. If Mahler’s
dynamic spatial deployment in the First Symphony and Das klagende Lied
suggests a deep attraction to a kind of music that exists at the threshold of
the audible and the visible, this in turn suggests the existence of a musical
discourse that is predicated on the migration of musical events from the
work’s periphery to its very core. Whereas the notion of the peripheral
offers an additional frame of reference for coming to terms with these
works, it also underscores the way in which the idea of mobility might also
serve as a guiding metaphor for a new understanding of Mahler’s sym-
phonic writing.
107
Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception,” 434–47.
2 “Distant music”
The sweep of his symphonic movement derives not from the pent-up,
onward driving force of Beethoven, but from the amplitude of a hearing
encompassing the far distance, to which the most remote analogies and
consequences are virtually present as to the narrative that is master of
itself.
Theodor W. Adorno – Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy
I seemed to hear, at a certain moment, a distant music. I stopped, the

better to listen.
Samuel Beckett – Molloy
As I suggested in the opening chapter, the bold treatment of offstage

space in Mahler’s two earliest large-scale works offers a new perspective
from which to consider the composer’s response to the challenge of
symphonic writing at the end of the nineteenth century. By recasting
operatic stage music as Musik aus der Ferne, first in a “dramatic cantata”
and then with far more radical consequences in the context of a full-
blown symphony, Mahler demonstrates the extent to which an overtly
theatrical sensibility informs his reinvention of the genre. By expanding
the concert stage to include musical events that originate from beyond
its conventional borders, these two works articulate a conception of
symphonic space in which the staging of distant sound emerges as a
central guiding principle. This penchant for theatricalizing sound is also
reflected in the active mapping of the very space from which these sonic
events emerge. The expansion of symphonic space in Das klagende Lied
and the First Symphony thus gives rise to a mise en scène in which the
musical events in question, while hidden from view, nevertheless convey
a potent theatrical charge. In this chapter, I argue that the ongoing
fascination with these complex sonic utterances has overshadowed a
closely related but far less commonly discussed manifestation of distant
sound, one that is related to Mahler’s careful deployment of offstage
instruments but encompasses a more abstract conception of distance.
For as a careful study of the scores and sketches reveals, the composer’s
earliest works already invite the listener to embrace the possibility that 47
distant music might originate from the stage itself. Whereas the presence
of such moments is often apparent to the attentive listener, of greater
interest in the present context are those passages in which the illusion of
distant sound is supplemented by a prominent and seldom discussed
layer of annotations that occupy the border between performance
direction and extra-musical reference. In what follows, I focus particular
attention on the cryptic marking wie aus der Ferne (as if from the
distance) as well as on the broader question of what constitutes distant
sound in Mahler’s earliest works.
It turns out that the illusion of distant sound that permeates these
compositions is deeply intertwined with the composer’s more familiar
practice of mapping space through the deployment of offstage instruments.
As a way of clarifying the importance of this relationship, I begin this
chapter with an extended exploration the Finale of the Second Symphony, a
movement in which the provocative intersection of these two rather dis-
tinct kinds of distant music plays an important role in the work’s overall
trajectory. Against this backdrop, I then turn my attention to Mahler’s
engagement with the trope of Romantic distance, including his use of the
marking wie aus der Ferne in “Waldmärchen” – the original first movement
of Das klagende Lied (1880), the early song “Maitanz im Grünen” (1880), as
well as in the earliest surviving manuscript source of the First Symphony
(1889). This leads in turn to a consideration of the musical and literary
precedents that might have informed Mahler’s use of this marking and its
widespread adoption by analysts in recent accounts of nineteenth-century
music. Finally, I examine the central role of imagined distance in the first
and third movements of the Third Symphony (1893–96). In the context of
the Third’s first movement, I argue that the frequent references to music
heard “as if from a distance” compel us to explore the implied mobility of
the movement’s multiple marches. With respect to the celebrated posthorn
episodes in the third movement, I turn my attention to the careful distinc-
tion made in the score between music that is meant to sound quite literally
in the far distance (in weiter Entfernung) and that which instead emerges
“as if” from a far distance (wie aus weiter Ferne). By way of conclusion,
I consider the role of imagined distance in the work of two twentieth-
century composers, Alban Berg and Luciano Berio. In what amounts to an
extended epilogue, I explore this question in the context of Berio’s
Rendering (1988–90), the late Italian composer’s self-described “restora-
tion” of Franz Schubert’s sketches for a presumed Tenth Symphony. By
emphasizing the self-conscious theatricality of Berio’s restoration – and,
Drifting music 49
above all, his introduction of a strain of distant music that sounds from the
stage – I argue that his provocative rehearing of Schubert can also be heard
as a subtle homage to the music of Gustav Mahler.
Drifting music
The carefully calculated approach to the manipulation of offstage space in

Das klagende Lied and the First Symphony reaches its apex in the Finale of
the Second Symphony. Widely considered to be Mahler’s most radical
exploration of distant sound, this movement also offers one of the clearest
reflections of his more general fascination with the idea of distance. Indeed,
it soon becomes clear that the theatrical effect of the Finale’s distant
utterances emerges only in relation to the idea of distant music that
characterizes the movement as whole. This is reflected in two ways: first,
in the use of numerous transitional passages that draw on the illusion of
distant sound to “announce” the impending deployment of physically
distant instruments, and second, in the intricate layering of onstage and
offstage instruments in the context of these larger musical spans. These
tendencies are already evident in the movement’s initial tableau, the first
part of which functions as an extended introduction to the initial appear-
ance of the offstage horns. At the outset, the unexpected return of the “cry
of disgust” (Schrei des Ekels) from the work’s Scherzo lends a shocking
immediacy to this otherwise retrospective glance.1 Here this “cry” takes on
a renewed intensity through a modest thickening of the orchestral texture,
the increased prominence of the brass section whose members are
instructed to raise their bells (mit aufgehobenem Schaltrichter), and by
the addition of a new motive in the trumpets and trombones. What is
more, by restaging the Scherzo’s “moment of crisis” in such dramatic
fashion, Mahler suggests its importance as a sonic event in its own right.
1
Mahler first used this famous expression in connection with the work’s Scherzo (nine after 50).
Mahler to Max Marschalk, Hamburg, 26 March 1896, in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler,
ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, and Bill Hopkins (London: Faber and
Faber, 1979), 180. Natalie Bauer-Lechner uses the word Todesschrei (death-shriek).
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 44. Constantin Floros makes a case for the
gesture’s Beethovenian or, more precisely, Wagnerian resonances with the label
Schreckensfanfare (fright fanfare). Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans.
Vernon and Jutta Wicker (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 68. For a detailed exploration of
this parallel, see Constantin Floros, Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts in neuer
Deutung, vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 291–94.
Following a caesura, half-remembered fragments from the conclusion of

the Scherzo’s central E-major trumpet quartet drift across the surface of an
otherwise static tableau that remains anchored in a dream-like C major
(between 2 and 3). Yet these seemingly distant utterances fail to coalesce
and instead gradually unravel, leaving in their wake a gaping silence in the
new tempo (Langsam).
Out of this void, a group of horns sound from the far distance (at 3).
Mahler instructs the offstage ensemble to play as loudly as possible, lending
these distant calls a peculiar intensity that only increases their temporal
and spatial otherness.2 Unlike the highly differentiated spatial layering of
the more elaborate offstage music to come, the stationary group of horns
creates the illusion of two instrumental groups positioned in different
locations.3 Whereas the attentive listener clearly perceives these utterances
as distant, what makes the horns sound so remote has less to do with their
physical distance from the main ensemble than with the fact that they seem
to occupy an entirely different temporal sphere. That the passage as a whole
appears to possess the status of an external utterance is further emphasized
by the fact that these distant calls do not overlap with the onstage
orchestra – the only example of a fully independent offstage tableau
in the composer’s entire output. So powerful is this rupture in the move-
ment’s temporal and spatial fabric that when the orchestra resumes, this
moment too carries the charge of an overtly theatrical gesture.
The practice of creating the illusion of distant sound to introduce the use
of physically distant instruments is again apparent at 6 where the onstage
orchestra offers a fleeting evocation of the pastoral. Like the transitional
passage that preceded the initial offstage calls (between 2 and 3), this brief
passage also announces the return of the distant horn calls, which on this
occasion appear in modified form (six after 6 to five before 7). Unlike the
initial call, which stood as an independent and self-contained gesture, here
these calls are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the onstage orchestra.
2
The passage is marked: “Hörner in möglichst grosser Anzahl sehr stark geblassen, und in weiter
Entfernung aufgestellt” [Horns in the greatest number possible played as loudly as possible and
placed in the far distance]. Mahler provided a similar instruction in the earliest surviving
manuscript source of the First Symphony in connection with the opening horn calls (later
replaced by onstage clarinets). See Chapter 1, 30.
3
This is indicated only by a succession of parenthetical annotations beginning with etwas
schwächer (a little bit weaker). The subsequent call – marked wieder stärker (again stronger) –
remains unresolved and goes unanswered, fading to silence before the onstage orchestra
re-enters. While this suggests a straightforward echo effect, it more closely resembles the call and
response of the horns in the first Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony. The “echo” marking
first appears in the Stichvorlage or engraver’s copy (1895), which is housed in the Beinecke
Library, Yale University (MS 508).
Drifting music 51
Whereas the offstage horns offer a clear example of spatialized sound, the
parallel musical stream created by the onstage orchestra ultimately under-
mines this effect. Indeed, the listener perceives the horn calls not as
physically distant, but paradoxically as part of the orchestra’s ongoing
evocation of the illusion of distant sound.
This interweaving of distant instruments with an onstage ensemble also
plays a crucial role in the extended tableau that precedes the entrance of the
chorus (at 29). Here a sizeable Fernorchester, consisting of four horns, four
trumpets, and timpani, is pitted against a smaller onstage ensemble. By
positioning the first and third trumpets on the right and trumpets 2 and 4
on the left, sound here becomes explicitly directional.4 What is more, the
offstage ensemble, which is initially positioned in the far distance (aus weiter
Ferne), follows a clear trajectory that audibly maps the offstage space: a little
bit nearer and stronger (etwas näher und stärker), much nearer and stronger
(viel näher und stärker), very far (sehr entfernt), nearer (näher), dying away
(sich verlierend), and increasingly distant (immer fern und ferner).
Given the unusual nature of these events, it is not surprising that analysts
have long relied on the work’s programme to make sense of these passages
in the context of the symphony as a whole. Even those analysts whose
primary interest lies in the Finale’s spatial and temporal innovations fre-
quently invoke the programme to account for the movement’s unusual
trajectory, as well as its most important musical events.5 Some have even
claimed that the music makes sense only in direct relation to the pro-
gramme. In his discussion of the Finale, Constantin Floros writes:
“Decisive for proper analysis [rechte Analyse] and interpretation of the
movement is an understanding of the programmatic concept that deter-
mines the layout as well as all details of form.”6 But one might also reason-
ably ask why the programme must determine our understanding of specific
musical events and the details of the movement’s formal structure. Given
that two of the symphony’s earliest manuscript sources – the autograph fair
copy (1894) and the Stichvorlage or engraver’s copy (1895) – feature
descriptive headings that were later incorporated into the symphony’s oral
and written programmes, it seems hard to argue with the position taken by
4
The instruction for the offstage trumpets to be placed to the left (links) and right (rechts) of the
orchestral platform first appeared as autograph corrections in the Stichvorlage.
5
Donald Mitchell, for example, has focused considerable attention on the movement’s explora-
tion of acoustic space and multidirectional sound. Donald Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, vol.
2 of Gustav Mahler (1975; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),
337–43.
6
Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 68.
Floros.7 On the other hand, the relationship of these markings to the events
they purport to describe are not quite as straightforward as Floros claims.
For not only do they predate the formulation of a complete programme for
the work – something that was not articulated until after the composer had
completed the symphony in December of 1894 – they were ultimately never
included in the published score.
In his early study of the symphonies, Paul Bekker already sounds a
cautionary note with respect to the interpretation of such markings.
While he does not deny their programmatic resonances, he argues that
they should be understood more generally as “poetic aids” (poetisierende
Hilfsmittel).8 The same might be said to apply to the symphony’s three
surviving programmes, two of which make specific reference to the Finale:
the oral account that Mahler provided to Natalie Bauer-Lechner in January
1896 and a written programme prepared by the composer in conjunction
with a performance of the symphony in Dresden in December 1901.9 The
portion transmitted by Bauer-Lechner that describes the Finale is worth
quoting in full.
It begins with the death-shriek [Todesschrei] of the Scherzo. And now the
resolution of the terrible problem of life – redemption. At first, we see it in the
form created by faith and the Church – in their struggle to transcend this present
life. The earth trembles. Just listen to the drum-roll, and your hair will stand on
7
These annotations include Der Rufer in der Wüste (The Caller in the Wilderness) (at 3) and Der
grosse Appell (The Last Trump) (at 29). The latter is sometimes translated as “The Great Roll-
Call.” The autograph fair copy of the symphony is housed at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New
York (Kaplan Deposit). See also Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 in C minor, “Resurrection,”
facsimile (New York: The Kaplan Foundation, 1986). That these annotations were retained in
the Stichvorlage suggests that the decision not to include them in the published score came as late
as 1897. A similar pattern is evident in connection with the first movement of the Third
Symphony where the numerous annotations with programmatic overtones were omitted from
the published score.
8
Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921; repr., Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 93.
9
The account transmitted by Bauer-Lechner was published anonymously in Der Merker in 1912.
[Natalie Bauer-Lechner], “Aus einem Tagebuch über Mahler,” Der Merker 3 (March 1912), 186.
A facsimile of the written programme, which was published in the Dresdener Nachtrichten on 20
December 1901, is reproduced in several sources including Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years,
179–82. In its published form, this programme was accompanied by the following disclaimer:
“At the very special request of the direction, Gustav Mahler, who is averse to all explanations and
all programs of any kind or description, has written the following general comments in order to
make the world of emotions expressed in his work more accessible to the audience at the
première.” Quoted in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904),
vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 414n147. For the complete text
of all three programmes, see Edward R. Reilly, “Todtenfeier and the Second Symphony,” in The
Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 123–25.
Drifting music 53
end! The Last Trump sounds [der grosse Appell ertönt]; the graves spring open,
and all creation comes writhing out of the bowels of the earth, with wailing and
gnashing of teeth. Now they all come marching along in a mighty procession:
beggars and rich men, common folk and kings, the Church Militant [die ecclesia
militans], the Popes. All give vent to the same terror, the same lamentations and
paroxysms; for none is just in the sight of God. Breaking in again and again – as if
from another world [wie aus einer anderen Welt] – the Last Trump [der grosse
Appell] sounds from the Beyond. At last, after everyone has shouted and
screamed in indescribable confusion, nothing is heard but the long drawn-out
call of the Bird of Death [Stimme des Totenvogels] above the last grave – finally
that, too, fades away. There now follows nothing of what had been expected:
no Last Judgement, no souls saved and none damned; no just man, no evil-doer,
no judge! Everything has ceased to be. And softly and simply there
begins: “Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n . . .” – the words themselves are sufficient
commentary.10
Mahler’s detailed description offers an overview of the movement’s

broader trajectory that at the same time attempts to account for some of
its most significant musical events. Of particular interest is the reference to
the “Last Trump,” which in the composer’s description breaks in “as if
from another world” (wie aus einer anderen Welt). In contrast to this oral
account, Mahler’s draft programme differs in a number of important
respects, most notably as it relates to the idea of distant sound. In
connection with the passage that has sometimes been referred to as the
“Bird of Death” (Stimme des Totenvogels), Mahler’s note reads, “in the
midst of the awful silence we think we hear in the farthest distance a
nightingale, like a last quivering echo of earthly life!” (mitten in der
grauenvollen Stille glauben wir eine ferne, ferne Nachtigall zu vernehmen
wie einen letzten zitternden Nachhall des Erdenlebens!).11 If the qualifica-
tion that we only think we hear the sound of the nightingale offers yet
another example of Mahler’s ongoing preoccupation with the way in which
distant sound is perceived, it also reveals what would become a recurring
theme in both his vocal and instrumental works: namely, the tension
between earthly (irdische) and heavenly (himmlische) life.12
10
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 44. 11 Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 184.
12
This is made explicit in Karl Weigl’s paraphrase of Mahler’s remarks on the significance of
cowbells in his music: “[t]he sound of the cowbells has become one of the most familiar symbols
of world-weary isolation for those who have visited the grounds of our high Alps: it is the last
sound that reaches the world of man from the desolate heights and reminds us of the ‘valley
below’ from which we have just happily escaped.” Karl Weigl, Gustav Mahler: Sechste
Symphonie, Musikführer no. 320 (Berlin: Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, [1908]),
3. For a more detailed discussion of these remarks, see Chapter 3, 106–07.
Thanks to the widespread reliance on the symphony’s programme as an

explanatory tool, scholars have largely ignored the possibility that the
movement’s offstage utterances might be heard as sonic events in their
own right. Yet the idea that such events might be understood in this way is
hinted at in an extended remark that is often cited to illustrate Mahler’s
own “path-breaking” conception of polyphony:
Mahler told us at table that, on the woodland path to Klagenfurt with W. . . . he was
much disturbed by a barrel-organ, whose sound [Klang] seemed not to bother W.
in the least. ‘But when a second one began to play, W. expressed horror at the
cacophony [Katzenmusik] – which now, however, was beginning to amuse me.
And when, into the bargain, a military band struck up in the distance [aus der
Ferne], he covered up his ears, protesting vigorously – whereas I was listening with
such delight that I wouldn’t move from the spot.’
When [Alfred] Rosé expressed surprise at this, Mahler said, ‘If you like my
symphonies, you must like that too!’
The following Sunday, we went on the same walk with Mahler. At the fête on the
Kreuzberg, an even worse witches’ sabbath was in progress. Not only were innumer-
able barrel-organs blaring out from merry-go-rounds, swings, shooting galleries and
puppet shows, but a military band and a men’s choral society had established
themselves there as well. All these groups, in the same forest clearing, were creating
an incredible musical pandemonium without paying the slightest attention to each
other [die alle auf derselben Waldwiese ohne Rücksicht aufeinander ein unglaubliches
Musizieren vollführten]. Mahler exclaimed: ‘You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s
where I get it from! Even when I was quite a small child, in the woods at Iglau this
sort of thing used to move me strangely, and impressed itself upon me. For it’s all the
same whether it rings out in noises [Lärme] such as these, or in the singing of
thousands of birds; in the howling of the storm, the lapping of the waves, or the
crackling of the fire. Just in this way – from quite different directions [vor ganz
verschiedenen Seiten her] – must the themes appear; and they must be just as
different from each other in rhythm and melodic character (everything else is merely
many-voiced writing, homophony in disguise). The only difference is that the artist
orders and unites them all into one concordant and harmonious whole.’13
This remark – reportedly uttered during the course of a walk that Mahler
took in the summer of 1900 – has often been cited to emphasize the extent
to which the composer’s basic conception of the symphony is informed
by the possibilities of multidirectional sound.14 Yet there is far more at
13
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 155–56. Translation emended. Henry-Louis de La Grange has
identified the interlocutor referred to only by the initial W. as Hubert Wondra, an adminis-
trator at the Vienna Court Opera. La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 280.
14
See especially, Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 337–43; and Robert Morgan, “Ives and Mahler:
Mutual Responses at the End of an Era,” 19th-Century Music 2 (1978): 79–80.
Drifting music 55
stake here. Indeed, this passage can also be read in terms of the very act of
listening itself, in this case to the simultaneous sounding of distant and
entirely unrelated sonic events.15 And despite the fact that Mahler’s aural
observations were made during the course of two walks – an activity that
as we will see in the last chapter emerged as one of the most important
sites of the composer’s own self-fashioning – it is also clear from Bauer-
Lechner’s account that the complexity of this sonic tableau ultimately
brought him to a standstill. If this account reveals the perspective of a
stationary auditor trying to make sense of a complex succession of
unrelated events, it also offers insight into the composer’s interest in
distant sound in the context of a rather specific landscape: the Alpine
village of Maiernigg at the height of the summer tourist season. Equally
striking is the fact that Mahler makes no distinction between the sounds
of “nature” and what he refers to as the noise (Lärm) created by human
activity. Although these remarks were made some years after the comple-
tion of the Second Symphony, it is this attitude towards what might be
termed “environmental sound” that is reflected in the fabric of the Second
Symphony, a work in which the border between sonic event and musical
utterance is particularly porous.
I hope to have shown that despite the programmatic associations that have
inevitably coloured our understanding of the examples from the Second
Symphony discussed earlier that in each case these examples can also be
heard independently of the programme. There is, however, one remaining
case in which the intersection of offstage sound and the illusion of distant
music appears to escape entirely the powerful grip of the work’s suppressed
programme. The passage in question occurs roughly halfway through
the movement shortly before the grosser Appell (22 to six after 25).16 Like
the previously discussed examples of distant music, this brief tableau features
a small Fernorchester, composed here of two trumpets in F and C, as well as a
triangle, cymbals, and bass drum. What lends this ensemble such a distinct
sonic profile is the way in which the physically distant fanfares appear to
draw closer while remaining firmly positioned outside of the auditorium.
Like the previously discussed examples, the source of these fanfares is a
15
It is worth noting that the sounds and images that Mahler invokes to describe the experience of
listening to the natural world echo the written annotations that accompany the “Wolf’s Glen
Scene” in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821).
16
Edward R. Reilly has observed that “[t]his section constitutes an enormously expanded devel-
opment of the material first heard in the previous D section, now with the addition of off-stage
fanfares presented by trumpets accompanied by percussion.” Reilly, “Todtenfeier and the
Second Symphony,” 116.
stationary ensemble positioned on this occasion in the farthest distance

(in weitester Ferne aufgestellt).17 Whereas at the outset of this passage, the
fanfares are accorded the unusual status of a barely audible music (kaum
vernehmbare Musik), by the beginning of the third phrase, their distant
strains are already more clearly audible (schon etwas stärker hörbar).18 And
by the time the Fernorchester presents its final statement, this still distant
music has, nevertheless, advanced more fully into the foreground (hier soll
die Musik viel starker hörbar sein).19
Whereas these performance directions add a new level of precision to
the staging of distant sound, it is the addition of a detailed note to the
conductor that distinguishes this passage from the movement’s other
examples of offstage music:
Note for conductors: this passage must sound so faintly that it in no way interferes
with the songlike character of the cellos and bassoons. The composer has in mind
here the solemn sounds of a barely audible music, which has been carried by the
wind.20
Despite the use of richly metaphorical language to illuminate the execution

of a specific sonic effect, it is also the case that these instructions bear no
obvious relationship to the movement’s programme. For this reason,
scholars have tended to make sense of this passage in terms of its unusual
layering of multiple spatial and temporal levels.21 For Robert Morgan, the
“Conductor’s Note” that accompanies the second movement of Charles
Ives’s Fourth Symphony offers a useful point of comparison. Morgan
suggests that Mahler, like Ives, shows a preoccupation “with the effect of
hearing music from different directions and spatial distances.”22 Building
on this observation, Thomas Bauman has argued that from the perspective
of key and metre, this passage suggests a “heterogeneous, layered
17
In the autograph fair copy, weiter (far) is changed to weitester (farthest).
18
This marking was a later addition that first appeared in the Stichvorlage.
19
This annotation first appeared in the autograph fair copy and was retained in the published
score.
20
“Anmerkung für den Dirigenten: muss so schwach erklingen, dass es den Charakter der
Gesangstelle, Celli und Fag. in keinerlei Weise tangiert. Der Autor denkt sich hier, ungefähr,
vom Wind vereinzelnd herüber getragene Klänge einer kaum vernehmbaren Musik.” Quoted
in Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 285. Translation emended. This remark was a late addition
to the autograph fair copy. It was further refined in the Stichvorlage to include, among other
things, the qualifier kaum (barely).
21
Constantin Floros finds clear programmatic significance in the advancing trajectory of the
fanfares, which, as he suggests, “announce the Apocalypse, its sound coming closer and closer.”
Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 75.
22
Morgan, “Ives and Mahler,” 78.
Romantic distance 57
experience of time.”23 For Ryan Kangas, on the other hand, the interpreta-
tion of this passage revolves around the questions of audibility itself:
Although the fanfares remain unintegrated into the dominant musical discourse –
they are in a different time and a different space – we still hear them as part of the
piece. Their faintness, however, causes us to question our own ears. Perhaps we are
not really hearing the fanfares, perhaps they are only in our head, only “in us.”24
But if these distant utterances are understood as a form of stage music – or

what Kangas goes on to describe in connection with the grosser Appell as
“real world” or “phenomenal” music – we might ask why such a “crisis of
hearing” would arise in the first place. For in the absence of a dramatic
stage, this topically “phenomenal” music does not function in terms of a
traditional dramatic logic. Rather, it suggests in the most abstract sense the
idea of distance itself.
Romantic distance
If Mahler’s ongoing interest in the idea of distant sound owes a clear debt to
the conventions of operatic stage music, less often recognized is his impor-
tant but rather more oblique engagement with the trope of Romantic
distance.25 Whereas this engagement is already evident in his earliest
compositions, his burgeoning interest in the idea of distant sound can be
traced back even earlier to his famous letter to Joseph Steiner from the
summer of 1879:
[I]n the evening when I go out on to the heath and climb a lime tree [Lindenbaum]
that stands there all lonely, and when from the topmost branches of this friend of
23
Thomas Bauman, “Mahler in a New Key: Genre and the ‘Resurrection’ Finale,” Journal of
Musicology 23 (2006): 476.
24
Ryan Kangas, “Mourning, Remembrance, and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection,’” 19th-Century Music
36 (2012): 79.
25
On the idea of distance as a poetic trope and aesthetic category in relation to the music of
Schumann, see Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 55–132. For a slightly revised version, see
Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann’s Distance,” in Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century
German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002), 51–114. See also Richard Kramer, “A Poetics of the Remote: Goethe’s Entfernte,” in
Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 85–101; Charles Rosen, “Mountains and Song Cycles,” in The Romantic Generation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 116–236; and Nicholas Marston, “‘Wie aus
der Ferne’: Pastness and Presentness, in the Lieder of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann,” in
Schubert durch die Brille 21 (1998): 126–42.
mine I see far out into the world: before my eyes the Danube winds her ancient
way, her waves flickering with the glow of the setting sun; from the village behind
me the ringing of the eventide bells is carried to me on a kindly breeze, and the
branches sway in the wind, rocking me into a slumber like the daughters of the elfin
king [Erlkönig], and the leaves and blossoms of my favorite tree tenderly caress my
cheeks. – Silence [Ruhe] everywhere! Most holy silence! Only from the distance
[von Fern] comes the melancholy call [Ruf] of the frog that sits all mournfully
among the reeds.26
It might appear at first glance that this passage has been drawn from the
pages of an early-nineteenth-century novel.27 Yet the surfeit of such images
as the lime tree (Lindenbaum) and the elfin king (Erlkönig) ultimately
betrays its status as a youthful homage to an earlier phase of musical and
literary Romanticism.28 When taken together with its central image of an
archetypical Romantic artist contemplating the wonders of nature, the
letter as a whole can also be understood as a rather self-conscious attempt
to demonstrate fluency with a broad range of familiar Romantic images. Of
particular interest in this connection is the attention that Mahler pays
to the way in which distant sound is dispersed.29 By observing, for example,
how the kindly breeze carries the sound of the eventide bells, he acknowl-
edges, among other things, the crucial relationship between sound and
silence. And although he does not make overt reference to the way in which
the traversal of space might affect the quality of these sounds, the implica-
tion is clear: namely, that silence stands as one of the most important
preconditions for the traversal of distant sound across a given landscape.
Against the backdrop of this letter, it is hardly surprising that so many of
Mahler’s earliest compositions reflect the Romantic obsession with distant
sound. What is unusual is the extent to which he manifested this so overtly
in the form of several prominent annotations that appear in the published
versions of these works. For example, in “Waldmärchen,” the first
movement of the original three-part version of Das klagende Lied (1880),
the marking wie aus der Ferne appears at the return of the movement’s
opening horn call (m. 405). Given that it is identical in contour and
articulation to its initial appearance (m. 7), the question immediately arises
26
Mahler to Joseph Steiner, Puszta-Batta, 18 June 1879, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 55.
Translation emended.
27
The tone of this letter shares many important similarities with Jean Paul’s novel Titan.
28
For an account of Mahler’s literary taste, see Morten Solvik, “The Literary and Philosophical
Worlds of Gustav Mahler,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21–34.
29
For a detailed analysis of this letter, see Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers
(Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1982), 11–38.
as to what this marking adds to our understanding of a musical gesture that

already suggests the illusion of distant sound. The answer lies partly in the
accompaniment, which here features an alternating interval of a fourth in
the lower strings and timpani and a sustained tremolo in the first violins.
Indeed, the resulting texture contains all the elements that have been
identified by Constantin Floros as Musik aus weitester Ferne (music from
the farthest distance).30
Similar passages can be found throughout the original version of “Der
Spielmann,” many of which incorporate variations on the phrase wie aus
der Ferne. These include the passage in which the percussion section is
instructed to play wie fernes Glockengeläute (m. 225) and where the entire
orchestra is instructed to play wie von Ferne (m. 390). During the initial
revision of Das klagende Lied (1893), Mahler deleted both markings. And
despite restoring the offstage orchestra in the second revision (1898–99),
these markings did not resurface either here or in the third and final
revision (1906). Nevertheless, as the first version of the work makes clear,
Mahler initially went out of his way to draw a direct connection between
a set of specific musical characteristics and the idea of imagined
distance.31
By contrast, the closing measures of “Maitanz im Grünen” (1880), the
third of Mahler’s earliest set of songs, present a more complex scenario. For
Julian Johnson, the sense of distance suggested here by the marking wie aus
der Ferne is primarily cultural:
This is not an actual country dance delivered directly: it turns out to be an observed
country dance that, as the end of the song reveals, becomes distant from the
observer (in time or space, or both). The song thus becomes about the distance
of the (solitary) observer from the (collective) dance . . . At the end of “Maitanz” the
30
Floros, Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 151–59. Floros distinguishes between
two types of distant music: one in which the sound in question is produced by a Fernorchester
and one that features only the illusion of distant sound. As we have already seen in connection
with the Second Symphony, these two categories are by no means mutually exclusive. By
restricting his discussion to the published instrumental works, however, Floros omits an
important chapter in the complex history of Mahler’s usage of this marking. See also
Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler, trans. Inge Goodwin (1973; repr., London: Futura Publications
Limited, 1975), 248–54; Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, 336–43; and Marilyn McCoy, “‘Wie
aus der Ferne’ – Die Verwandlung von Technik und Sinngehalt in Gustav Mahlers Erforschung
des Jenseits,” in Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongress der Gesellschaft für
Musikforschung Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. Herman Danuser and Tobias Plebuch, vol. 1
(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 384–87.
31
Martin Zenk makes this connection in the context of “Waldmärchen.” Martin Zenk, “Mahlers
Streichung des ‘Waldmärchens’ aus dem ‘Klagenden Lied’: Zum Verhältnis von philologischer
Erkentnis und Interpretation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 38 (1981): 185–87.
effect of distance is created through control of tempo, tone, and dynamic, but its
effect is to create cultural rather than physical distance. This is an act of nostalgic
reminiscence; the observer is not part of the Ländler.32
Yet one might argue that the song’s final measures also suggest the idea of a
space traversed. As the song draws to a close, the sound gradually begins to
die away (sich verlierend). But rather than simply calling for a decrease in
dynamic level, the obsessive repetition of the song’s unifying eighth-note
pickup instead suggests the illusion of a sound source that retreats gradually
into the distance. By way of comparison, “Maitanz im Grünen” offers a far
less decisive conclusion than its subsequent revision as “Hans und Grete.”33
Whereas the latter concludes with a simple but clear punctuating cadence, in
the original version the final sonority instead seems to occupy the threshold
between the illusion of sound and its very materiality.
My final example comes from a rather unexpected place: the Finale of the
First Symphony. As we have already seen, Mahler was still experimenting
with the intertwining of literal and imagined conceptions of distant sound at
the time of the symphony’s 1889 première. Evidence for this comes in the
form of a tantalizing clue in the work’s earliest surviving manuscript source.34
Indeed, what has been entirely overlooked in accounts of the symphony is
Mahler’s use of the familiar marking wie aus der Ferne midway through the
work’s Finale: an autograph correction that appears in conjunction with the
first major-mode iteration of the movement’s most prominent thematic
gesture (at 26).35 See Figure 1. Given that this gesture already possesses all
32
33
“Maitanz im Grünen” appeared in slightly revised form as “Hans und Grete” in the first volume
of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge (1892). The original song remained unpublished during the
composer’s lifetime, appearing for the first time in print in the Mahler Gesamtausgabe as
Verschiedene Lieder für eine Singstimme mit Klavier (Mainz: Schott, 1990).
34
This copyist’s manuscript, which dates from around the time of the symphony’s 1889 Budapest
première, is housed in The Gustav Mahler – Alfred Rosé Collection at Western University,
London, Canada (OS-MD-694). For a detailed assessment of its contents, see
Stephen McClatchie, “The 1889 Version of Mahler’s First Symphony: A New Manuscript
Source,” 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 99–124. For a more detailed discussion of this manu-
script, see Chapter 1, 27–28.
35
Constantin Floros refers to this gesture as the “Cross Symbol” and argues that it is “a rhythmic
variation of the Grail theme from Wagner’s Parsifal, which is shaped from Liszt’s Cross Symbol
and the Dresden Amen.” Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 47. Bernd Sponheuer
describes it as a Vorgriff (preview) while for James Buhler it serves as the “model” for the
breakthrough itself. Bernd Sponheuer, Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in
den Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978), 51–89. James Buhler,
“Breakthrough as Critique of Form: The Finale of Mahler’s First Symphony,” 19th-Century
Music 20 (1996): 137–41.
Figure 1. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement, rehearsal 26. Copyist’s
manuscript. The Gustav Mahler – Alfred Rosé Collection, Music Library, Western
University, London, Canada.
the characteristics of a distant utterance, the presence of this annotation does

not seem to add much to our understanding of the passage. At the same time,
the fact that it appears only in this manuscript tells us a great deal about
Mahler’s ambivalence concerning his use of such paratextual annotations.
Here the annotation perhaps emphasizes the relative distance of this gesture
from the anticipated moment of breakthrough that in turn signals the work’s
denouement. Indeed, the unexpected brightness of the major key projects a
sense of quiet optimism that offers a glimpse of “Paradise” promised by the
movement’s original programme. In these terms, the implication is clear: this
metaphorically distant figure will eventually make its presence felt, something
that occurs in spectacular fashion just prior to the coda (at 53).
It remains unclear why Mahler chose not incorporate this marking into
any of the work’s published editions. This decision is especially striking
given the fact that he would go on to employ several variations on the
expression wie aus der Ferne in the sprawling first movement of the Third
Symphony, as well as in the first posthorn episode of the symphony’s
Scherzo. Perhaps Mahler chose not to include the marking in the
published versions of the First Symphony because the “distance” of this
gesture from its eventual transformation at the moment of breakthrough
was already self-evident. Perhaps he wished to downplay the associations
with musical and literary Romanticism that the presence of such a
marking would inevitably conjure. Or perhaps this decision can be
attributed to his ambivalence concerning the symphony’s programmatic
dimension and the fear that this annotation might be interpreted as a
programmatic marker. What we do know, however, is that when this
marking appears again in the Third Symphony, it no longer refers to an
isolated musical gesture. Rather, it takes on a greater significance with
respect to the imagined traversal of space, a metaphorical journey that
takes the listener across the entire span of the work’s first movement. And
as we will see in connection with the Scherzo, it also articulates a crucial
distinction between the movement’s layers of physical and imagined
distance.
Sources
The recurring use of this marking in Mahler’s earliest works compels us to

consider the sources of this unusual designation. A possible candidate is
Robert Schumann’s piano cycle Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6 (1837) where at
the end of the sixteenth piece (Mit gutem Humor), Schumann introduces
the marking wie aus der Ferne over an extended F-sharp pedal point.
Paraphrasing Franz Brendel’s famous description comparing Schumann’s
early piano works to landscape paintings, Berthold Hoeckner offers an
evocative description of this passage as a “landscape with a blurred har-
monic background against which melodic shapes stand out like sunlit
Sources 63
objects.”36 But in the context of a passage that can also be heard as

projecting a sense of pastness, the unexpected return of the second piece
from part one of the cycle also forces us to contemplate what precisely it
means for music to emerge “as if” from a great distance.37 Like Schumann,
Mahler possessed an intimate familiarity with a range of Romantic writers
including Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann, no strangers to the
trope of distance.38 Yet in this case it seems more likely that Mahler’s
inspiration came from a musical source. Apart from Schumann’s
Davidsbündlertänze, then, the other most likely source of this idea was
the Finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a work he conducted on
numerous occasions. Here at the initially abbreviated appearance of the
idée fixe (five after 62), the onstage clarinet is marked lointain (distant), and
although Berlioz does not use the designation “as if,” it is clear that he
means for the clarinet to create the illusion of distant sound.39
Given the important connection between the idea of distant sound
and musical Romanticism, it is not surprising that the rhetoric of
imagined distance has found its way into more recent analytical
accounts of nineteenth-century music. Maynard Solomon, for exam-
ple, observes in connection with the repeated fanfares in the third
movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (mm. 120–23 and
mm. 130–33) that these utterances “are heard almost offstage, vainly
striving to break a mood of deep contemplation.”40 Whereas fanfares
are often used to suggest the idea of distance, a more commonly
employed figure is the horn call. For Charles Rosen, such calls
36
Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” 96.
37
If, as Charles Rosen has observed, the distance here is one of memory, the minor changes to
which this passage is subjected upon its return mark it as a reconstituted version of the past.
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 233. For a more detailed discussion of the locution “as if,” see
Johnson, Mahler’s Voices, 282–88; and Laurence Kramer, Expression and Truth: On the Music of
Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 122–65.
38
Throughout the first volume of Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in
Callot’s Manner), he often uses the formulation wie aus weiter Ferne. In what is perhaps the
most famous instance, he describes the state of delirium that precedes sleep and how when
sinking into a dream-like state he hears “as though from far away [wie aus weiter Ferne], the
dark, alternately swelling and subsiding tones of the basset-horn.” E. T. A. Hoffmann,
Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier. Quoted in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed.
David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 105.
39
An intriguing example of this practice occurs in Hans Rott’s First Symphony (1878–80) where
the designation wie von Ferne appears over the unmistakably Mahlerian horn call at measure
217 of the third movement. Since Mahler did not acquire a copy of Rott’s symphony until 1900,
it seems unlikely that he would have been familiar with the work when he was composing Das
klagende Lied (1880).
40
Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order,” 19th-Century Music
10 (1986): 5. Emphasis added.
often serve as symbols of memory, as well as of “distance, absence and

regret.”41 In his discussion of Schubert’s “Suleika I,” Rosen draws atten-
tion to the way in which the horn calls in the piano “steal in with
unsurpassed subtlety as if from afar.”42 This takes on an even greater
poignancy in connection with “Der Lindenbaum” from Schubert’s
Winterreise where, as Rosen points out, the entire texture of the song’s
opening stanza is saturated with their sound.43 Whereas the horn call
emerged during the nineteenth century as a powerful symbol of distance
and memory, it was by no means the only strategy for evoking such
ideas. For Rosen, the two fragmentary quotations of “Papillon” that
emerge unbidden in Carnaval offer a particularly compelling example:
It is the puzzling too-short first quotation that gives sense to the second. Initially
the quotation is an imperfectly understood phrase, only half remembered. Then
the memory becomes clearer, so much so that Schumann can now identify it as
“(Papillon?)” – but with a question mark. The sudden changes to a slow tempo and
light soft touch make the phrase come in a sort of half light and as if from a distance:
the question mark is not so much a cryptic note by the composer as a direction to
the pianist, telling him how to play the phrase.44
In his analysis of Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, op. 85, no. 4, Kofi
Agawu frames the idea of imagined distance in more general terms. For
Agawu, “[i]t is as if key moments in the form are made to flash before our
eyes, not markedly as quotations, but gently and subtly, as if in a mist, as if
from a distance.”45 Here Agawu also makes a point of dwelling on the locution
“as if” for rhetorical effect, lending his own description a self-consciously
Romantic orientation. Finally, Carl Dahlhaus invokes the idea of imagined
distance in connection with Schumann’s Second Symphony to describe the
appearance of the still-evolving final theme in the work’s Finale (m. 280):
“The melody which appears to be summoned as if from the distance . . . has
the character of a memory from the distant past.”46 Whereas these modern
accounts of metaphorically distant music have clear roots in the literary
41
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 117. 42 Ibid., 119. Emphasis added. 43 Ibid., 119–20.
44
Ibid., 100. Emphasis added.
45
Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 59. Emphasis added.
46
Carl Dahlhaus, “Studien zu romantischen Symphonien,” Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für
Musikforschung Preussicher Kulturbesitz (1972): 111. Emphasis added. [“Die Melodie, die wie
aus der Ferne herbeizitiert wirkt . . . hat den Charackter einer Erinnerung an längst
Vergangenes.”] But as Anthony Newcomb observes: “Tentatively – Dahlhaus remarks that the
theme arrives here wie aus der Ferne, though I have heard no performance that finds for this
moment the proper mood of hesitant, gentle wonder – we hear the rhythmically smooth, rising
tail of the introductory flourish take a new thematic guise, one for which the scalar sweeps of the
Processions 65
and musical traditions of Romanticism, as we will see, the discourse

of distance continues to offer a compelling interpretive framework for com-
ing to terms with the spatial and temporal dimensions of much nineteenth-
century music, including, as we will now see, the symphonies of Gustav
Mahler.
Processions
In the examples considered so far, the annotation wie aus der Ferne is
used almost exclusively in connection with brief, self-contained musical
gestures. In the Third Symphony, by contrast, this marking takes on a far
greater significance. Like the Second Symphony, the Third was composed
at Steinbach am Attersee at a time when Mahler was actively grappling with
the problem of symphonic form. What is more, the composition of
this work coincided with a period in which he was actively revising the
introduction of the First Symphony, reconsidering the use of offstage space
in Das klagende Lied, and preparing the Second Symphony for publication.
Whereas the question as to what motivated Mahler to refine so obsessively
the spatial dimension of these works remains open to interpretation, what
we do know is that the implications of these ongoing revisions had a
decisive impact on the work’s larger trajectory. Yet the Third Symphony
also presents a number of additional challenges, above all the fact that the
work itself can seemingly no longer be contained by the spaces for which it
was conceived. In this context, Adorno’s suggestion that Mahler’s first
three symphonies possess an alfresco quality (das Alfresco der drei ersten
Symphonien) sheds light on the fact that for Mahler, the distinction
between the traditional spaces of performance and the world that lies
beyond their confines in these works has been fundamentally blurred.47
Of course, the idea that music might evoke the outdoors is already evident
in compositions by among others Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Webern, Strauss,
previous section are the preparation.” Anthony Newcomb, “Once More ‘Between Absolute and
Program Music’: Schumann’s Second Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 7 (1984): 244.
47
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. This tendency was recognized by Mahlers contempor-
aries. Richard Batka, for example, observed that “[p]opular plein air music is quite literally a
specialty of his symphonic output.” Richard Batka, “Gustav Mahlers ‘Siebente,’” Prager
Tageblatt (20 September 1908), 16. In “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” ed. and trans.
Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press), 323.
and Krenek.48 Mahler, however, takes this one step further with his
uncanny ability to evoke the outside world. And whereas this tendency is
already evident in his first two symphonies, in the Third Symphony it
becomes far more explicit. For not only does Mahler draw our attention to
the very rafters that are barely able to contain the symphony’s sheer sonic
mass, he also situates us in the midst of an unruly procession that aspires to
free itself from the confines of the hall itself.
In the work’s first movement, Mahler introduces the idea of imagined
distance into a sprawling musical structure whose defining characteristic
is its prominent processional topic. Indeed, the movement as a whole
demonstrates the potential of a static orchestral apparatus to produce the
effect of a mobile sound source. Since these “stationary” processions
emphasize the gradual intensification of sound rather than the more
characteristically Romantic preoccupation with its decay, this movement
also presents the march not as a past event heard through the filter of
memory but rather as an active site of becoming. It is well known that
Mahler’s songs and symphonies draw extensively on military topoi,
which in addition to the march also include a range of fanfares and
signals.49 What characterizes the extended evocation of the march that
haunts the first movement of the Third Symphony, however, is a tension
between its seemingly strict trajectory and an unruliness that we sense
cannot be fully controlled.50 As Adorno famously observed, “[Mahler’s]
symphonies and marches do not express a discipline which triumphantly
subdues all particulars and individuals; instead, they assemble them in a
procession of the liberated, which in the midst of unfreedom necessarily
sounds like a procession of ghosts.”51 Paradoxically, it is the movement’s
assemblage of fragmentary march topoi that in the end allows it to convey
48
These works include Schubert’s Winterreise; Berlioz’s Harold en Italie; Liszt’s Années de
pèlerinage; Webern’s Fünf Stücke für Orchester, op. 10; Strauss’s Alpensinfonie; and Ernst
Krenek’s Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen.
49
For a discussion of military topoi, including the march, in the context of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century music, see Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and
Pastoral (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 113–33. For a
discussion of military music during Mahler’s early years in Iglau, see Timothy Freeze, “The
Public Concert Life of Mahler’s Youth: Iglau, 1866–75,” Naturlaut 7 (2009): 6–7.
50
This unruliness can only be held in check when Mahler’s note to the conductor is strictly
observed: “The opening tempo is, for the most part to be retained throughout the whole
movement, and the strictest continuity of tempo is to be maintained in spite of momentary
changes in beat or modification.” [Das Anfangstempo ist im Ganzen und Grossen für das ganze
Stück durchaus festzuhalten und trotz der jeweiligen Taktwechsel oder Modificationen
strengste Continuität durchzuführen.]
51
Theodor W. Adorno, “Mahler” in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 97. It is instructive to compare these remarks with
Processions 67
such an actively processional character. While there are many important

examples of processional music in the orchestral literature, with the
exception of the “Marche de pélerins” from Berlioz’s Harold en Italie
and the “Marche au supplice” from the Symphonie fantastique, these
processions rarely leave such a decisive imprint on an entire movement.52
Even without its discarded programmatic title, the movement bears
witness to the idea of the march on almost every page of the score.53 This
is particularly evident in those passages of imagined distance that emerge
not as isolated instances but rather as crucial components of the move-
ment’s larger structure. Adorno articulates this in terms of what he under-
stands to be the movement’s most basic formal impulse – the idea of a
spatially moving source of music:
If its first movement achieves true sonata exposition, this is not simply, as the
rhythm suggests, a long march; rather, the section proceeds as if the musical subject
were marching with a band playing all kinds of marches one after another. The
formal impulse is the idea of a spatially moving source of music. Like much recent
music, the movement, in its inner structure, has a shifting, not a fixed, frame of
reference. Yet the result is not an impressionistic, timelessly spatialized interpene-
tration of sounds as in Debussy’s Feux d’artifice with the July 14 fanfare; instead,
the juxtaposed fragments of marches create, through their exact proportions,
articulated history.54
those he made in his 1936 essay, “Marginalia on Mahler” in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on
Music, sel. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002), 616–17. In his Mahler monograph, by contrast, Adorno offers a more
explicitly “political” formulation: “Even the marches in these symphonies are heard and
reflected by those whom they drag away. Only those cast from the ranks, tramped underfoot,
the lost outpost, the one buried ‘where the shining trumpets blow,’ the poor ‘drummer boy,’
those wholly unfree for Mahler embody freedom. Bereft of promises, his symphonies are
ballads of the defeated, for ‘Nacht ist jetzt schon bald’ – soon the night will fall.” Adorno,
Mahler, 166–67.
52
A case might also be made for the funeral march in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. For a
discussion of musical processions from Mozart to Debussy, see Floros, Mahler und die
Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 159–63.
53
“Introduction: Pan awakes, leading directly into No. 1: Summer marches in (‘Bacchic
procession’)” [Einleitung: Pan erwacht folgt sogleich Nro I: Der Sommer Marschirt ein
(“Bachuszug”)]. These titles appear only in the autograph fair copy (1896). Gustav Mahler,
“Symphony No. 3.” Autograph score. 1896. Lehman Collection. Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York (M214.S986). For a discussion of the evolution and significance of the work’s
programmatic dimension, see Peter Franklin, Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37–99.
54
Adorno, Mahler, 79. Translation emended. In his “Centenary Address,” Adorno puts it in
slightly different terms when he suggests that the sequence of marches is not heard from a fixed
reference point but rather “from a series of shifting vantage points and which sweep the ear
along in the Dionysian revelry.” Adorno, “Mahler,” 90.
By drawing attention to the music’s “shifting frame of reference,” Adorno

alludes – albeit indirectly – to the movement’s most striking feature:
namely, the relationship of its lengthy introduction to the multiple
marches that feature so prominently over the course of the movement
as a whole. Although Mahler’s programme makes clear reference to a
bipartite structure composed of an introduction (Einleitung) and a main
section labelled “Summer marches in” (Der Sommer Marschirt ein), what
contributes so decisively to its expressive effect is the calculated ambiguity
surrounding the start of the march itself.
In spite of the astonishing plurality of views concerning the movement’s
formal outline, most analysts have identified the start of the exposition as
the moment where the movement’s march material first makes its presence
felt (at 20).55 It is significant that this also marks the first of four occasions
in which the presence of seemingly distant music is acknowledged directly
in the score:
wie aus weiter Ferne (as if from a far distance) (at 20)
immer wie aus weiter Ferne (always as if from a far distance) (two before 21)
wie aus weitester Ferne (as if from the farthest distance) (six after 36)
wieder Alles aus weitester Ferne sich nähernd (everything again as if from the
farthest distance, coming nearer) (seven after 62)
In connection with the first of these annotations (at 20), it is important to

recognize that the distant march forms part of an already unfolding process.
Indeed, it is introduced here not as a static representation of a march topic
but rather as something that is meant to be perceived as a mobile event. For
Peter Franklin, it is only at this moment that “a real march begins to
materialize.”56 David Greene provides an equally compelling explanation,
one that takes into account the gradual emergence of the march:
The ambiguity of the temporal process at the onset of the march is such that one
cannot properly speak of its “beginning”: when we first become aware of the
march, we are aware of a process that is already underway; there is no moment
in its past which we can designate as its beginning.57
Greene’s reading – while deeply intertwined with his phenomenological

account of this work – allows us to make sense of the temporal component
55
The idea of a march has already been broached at 2 and again rather mysteriously just before 13.
For Peter Franklin, the latter instance features “four bars of solo military percussion that seem
distantly to be preparing the tempo of a march.” Franklin, Mahler: Symphony No. 3, 85.
56
Ibid., 86.
57
David B. Greene, Mahler, Consciousness and Temporality (New York: Gordon and Breach,
1984), 154.
Processions 69
that is so central to Mahler’s conception of imagined distance. Indeed, if

we can agree that the march comes into being through the framework of
an imagined procession, this ultimately shows the extent to which the idea
of imagined distance plays an important role in the movement’s formal
processes.
Whereas the annotation wie aus weiter Ferne makes clear Mahler’s
desire to create the illusion of distant music, the passage in question also
creates the impression of an advancing procession on its own terms. This
is achieved in two ways: first, by allowing the eight transitional measures
between 19 and 20 to dissipate completely (sich gänzlich verlierend),
while preserving a degree of motivic continuity between sections; and,
second, by allowing the initial march figure at 20 to emerge only gradu-
ally from the texture. At the same time, the sense of forward motion
implied by the emerging march is complicated by the temporal instability
of the passage as a whole. This is manifested, above all, in the fragmentary
outbursts in the clarinet and piccolo that according to the composer’s
instructions are to be performed without regard for the tempo (ohne
Rücksicht auf den Takt). Three measures before 21, the march returns to
the foreground. Although a sense of stability is restored, signalled here by
the entrance of the clarinets and side drum (two measures before 21),
Mahler indicates that the orchestra should remain “as if from a far
distance” (immer wie aus weiter Ferne).
If by 23 the march has been firmly established, it is not easy to pinpoint
the moment at which it comes fully into the foreground. This ambiguity
is reflected in the measures leading up to 23 where the march seems
to retreat ever so slightly. After 23, however, the march becomes increas-
ingly prominent despite the marked restraint by which it is characterized.
Even the trumpet fanfares that might otherwise suggest an advancing
mass of sound are held in check. It is not until the close of the exposition
at 26 that the full orchestra offers a full-throated statement of the steadily
unfolding march. Although it has not yet reached its apex, the steady grip
of the march is clearly reflected in the instruction immer dasselbe feurige
Marschtempo, ohne zu eilen (always in the same fiery march tempo,
without hurrying).
Given the highly episodic nature of the development (between 29
and 55), it seems inevitable that here the march’s forward impetus will
be undermined. Yet the development section only seems to intensify
the sense of forward motion. At the outset, Mahler indicates that
the march material should initially create the impression of sounding
at an even greater distance than before (wie aus weitester Ferne) (six
after 36).58 That the march continues to advance is confirmed by the

trajectory of the development’s final episodes. In the context of the
episode marked Das Gesindl! (The Mob!) in the autograph, the orchestra
takes on the character of what Stephen Hefling has aptly described as a
“shrieking windband” (between 43 and 49).59 The increasing intensity
that characterizes the last two episodes – Die Schlacht Beginnt (The Battle
Begins) (between 49 and 51) and Der Südsturm (The Southern Storm)
(between 51 and 54) – culminates in a chaotic outburst that further
heightens the temporal instability of the earlier passages of imagined
distance.
Mahler’s account of this final episode, as related by Natalie Bauer-
Lechner, places particular emphasis on the increasing prominence of the
march:
It all tumbles forward madly in the first movement, like the gales from the south that
have been sweeping over us here recently. (Such a wind, I’m sure, is the source of all
fertility, blowing as it does from the far-off [fernen] and abundant lands – not like
those easterlies courted by us folk!) It rushes upon us in a march tempo that carries
all before it; nearer and nearer, louder and louder, swelling like an avalanche, until
you are overwhelmed by the great roaring and rejoicing of it all.60
Indeed, the overwhelming force of the march is so great here that it

compels Mahler to exploit the effect of distant sound in an unexpectedly
literal way. Three measures after 54, as the chaos begins to recede, a distant
side drum (einige kleine Trommeln in der Entfernung aufgestellt) enters in
the original march tempo (im alten Marschtempo) without regard for the
cellos and basses (ohne Rücksicht auf Celli und Bässe). This is a startlingly
disruptive gesture that breaks the illusion of distance. And whereas the
gesture serves to release the movement’s pent-up tension, it is not until the
sudden reappearance of the movement’s introductory horn call, signalling
the start of the recapitulation, that a sense of order is finally restored.
If the march plays a prominent role in the movement’s chaotic devel-
opment section, it comprises what is perhaps the most crucial component
of its radically abbreviated recapitulation. For not only does it represent
the triumphant return of the movement’s defining musical event – the
procession – it also marks the end of a process that can be heard as
58
For Constantin Floros, the passage that runs from five before 35 to 39 is an example of “music
from afar.” Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 94–95.
59
Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler: Symphonies 1–4,” in The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D.
Kern Holoman (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 394.
60
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 64.
Intersections 71
resolving the movement’s conflicting temporal streams. As Adorno

observes: “the recapitulation of the march does not simply begin, but
seems to become gradually audible again, as if latently it had always
continued playing.”61 Yet the process itself is a gradual one as reflected in
the initially hesitant return of the march at 62.
What distinguishes this final presentation of the march is that for the
first time in the movement, the idea that it draws closer is directly acknowl-
edged in the score. Shortly after the march has been re-established (five
measures after 62), the following indication appears in the score: wieder
alles aus weitester Ferne sich nähernd (again everything from the farthest
distance coming closer). What is so significant about this moment is that
the march’s potential for uninterrupted forward motion has finally been
realized. If, as David Greene has suggested, the coherence of the first
movement can be understood in terms of a “musical goal-lessness being
supplanted and overcome by musical goal-directedness,” it is in this
concluding passage that such a transformation takes place.62 Indeed, it is
precisely at this point that the movement begins drawing to a close,
culminating at 75 in a noisy coda that unfolds mit höchster Kraft (with
greatest power).
Intersections
The complex layering of distance that characterizes the work’s first move-
ment is made even more explicit in the context of the Scherzo’s two
posthorn episodes. Alternately celebrated and denigrated by critics and
analysts alike, these remarkable tableaux continue to attract considerable
attention.63 Yet one aspect of this movement has remained almost entirely
unexplored: namely, the careful distinction between literal and imagined
distance that sharply differentiates these two episodes. The first episode is
61
Adorno, Mahler, 78. 62 Greene, Mahler, Consciousness and Temporality, 163.
63
The most important analyses remain those by Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht,
and Morten Solvik. See Adorno, Mahler, 8–9, 36–39; Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 169–
97; and Morten Solvik, “Biography and Musical Meaning in the Posthorn Solo of Mahler’s Third
Symphony,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth
Birthday, ed. Günther Weiss (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 339–50. See also Thomas Peattie, “In Search
of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler’s Broken Pastoral,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 185–98. More recent accounts by Laura Dolp
and Timothy Freeze make clear that the movement continues to inspire new interpretive strate-
gies. Laura Dolp, “Voice, Ground, and the Construction of Space in Mahler’s Third Symphony,”
Naturlaut 8 (2011): 3–11. Timothy Freeze, “Ambiguity in the Posthorn Episodes of Mahler’s Third
Symphony,” News about Mahler Research 60 (2010): 33–50.
preceded by a lengthy transitional passage signalled by a sharply articulated

trumpet fanfare that slices through the orchestral fabric (four before 12).
During the course of this transition – marked ein wenig, aber merklich,
langsamer (a little bit slower but noticeably so) – a substantially reduced
orchestral ensemble attempts to contain the solo trumpet as it struggles to
emerge from the texture. After momentarily falling silent, the trumpet
returns and attempts to assert itself more forcefully (etwas stärker als
vorher). In many respects, this transition resembles those passages in the
Finale of the Second Symphony in which the illusion of distant sound
is used to announce the imminent deployment of physically distant
instruments. But here something unusual happens. As the trumpet sustains
its final note, a second instrument gently imposes itself, sounding accord-
ing to Mahler’s instruction not from the far distance but rather “as if from a
far distance” (wie aus weiter Ferne).64
The first episode proper (between 14 and 17) consists of three state-
ments, each of which is interrupted by a brief orchestral interlude.
Although the posthorn remains onstage, the performance indications in
the score suggest that the impression of mobile sound source should be
established over the course of the episode as a whole. Whereas the first
statement is marked “as if from the far distance,” the second statement is
marked simply “as if from the distance” (wie aus der Ferne), a subtle
alteration that leaves it to the performer to create the illusion that the
instrument has come closer. While this is made explicit by the parenthe-
tical instruction sich etwas nähernd (coming nearer), in the third and final
statement the sound instead retreats (sich entfernend). In what follows, the
broken quality of this complex pastoral evocation is decisively shattered by
an unexpected fanfare marked schnell und schmetternd wie eine Fanfare
(fast and blared out like a fanfare). That the performer is instructed to play
“without regard for the tempo” (ohne Rücksicht auf das Tempo) only
heightens the sense of separation between the posthorn itself and the
context in which it so tentatively emerges.
In contrast to the first episode where the posthorn sounds from the
stage, in the second (between 27 and 30) the instrument occupies a
position “in the far distance” (in weiter Entfernung). Here the episode
consists of two rather than three statements; although the posthorn is
physically distant, it also remains immobile for the duration of the episode.
Given Mahler’s penchant for mapping offstage space through the mobili-
zation of distant instrumental ensembles (as, for example, in the
64
It is also marked wie die Weise eines Posthorns (in the manner of a posthorn).
Berg’s distance 73
introduction of the First Symphony), it might seem surprising that in

this context the posthorn is not mobilized in any obvious way.65 But by
resisting the temptation to set the instrument in motion, Mahler draws
attention to an important and largely unexamined distinction in his
symphonic writing between literal and imagined conceptions of distance,
a distinction that while rarely presented in such a straightforward manner,
ultimately emerges as a crucial component of Mahler’s dramaturgy of
sound.
The explicit use of literal and imagined conceptions of distance might
have reached its peak with the Third Symphony, but the composer’s
ongoing preoccupation with the idea of distant sound also left a clear
mark on his later music. When, for example, he introduces the sound of
physically distant cowbells in the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, the
associated passages always evoke “dream worlds” that seem far removed
from the here and now. In his last works, by contrast, the idea of distance is
evoked without the physical deployment of distant instruments. In the
closing movement of Das Lied von der Erde, the movement’s two grand
tableaux interiorize the exuberant theatricality of the earlier symphonies,
creating in turn a kind of music that sounds at once abstract and remote.
And in the Tenth Symphony – perhaps Mahler’s most unusual engagement
with the idea of distance – Alma’s account of a fireman’s funeral procession
that they witnessed from their perch on the eleventh floor of New York’s
Majestic Hotel has left us with a powerful description of distant sound, one
that provides an important interpretive key with respect to the unusual
sonic landscape of the Tenth’s unfinished Finale.66
Berg’s distance
By way of conclusion, I consider the extent to which Mahler’s interest in

the idea of distant sound continued to resonate well into the twentieth
century. In the early decades of the century, it was Alban Berg who offered
the most sustained engagement with what on the surface appears to be a
65
Although the second statement is marked in weiter Ferne in contrast to the first, which is
marked in weiter Entfernung (both can be translated as “in the far distance”), this minor
distinction does not imply physical movement as is the case in the introduction to the first
movement of the First Symphony.
66
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner,
trans. Basil Creighton, 4th ed. (London: Cardinal, 1990), 135. See also Henry-Louis de La
Grange, A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911), vol. 4 of Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 94–96.
particularly Mahlerian concern. Like Mahler before him, Berg tended to

employ the marking wie aus der Ferne in connection with specific musical
gestures, often at the conclusion of a work or movement. This is already
evident in the autograph manuscript of his early song “Er klagt, daß der
Frühling so kortz blüht” (1905) where it appears over the song’s conclud-
ing measures.67 The same marking also appears in “Reigen,” the second
of Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 where it coincides with the
movement’s final fleeting gesture in the winds. Although Berg continued
to draw on this annotation throughout his life, what motivated him to do
so long remained a mystery. A possible clue first emerged in 1976 with the
discovery of the annotated score of the composer’s Lyric Suite (1925–26).
At the end of the second movement, the two pizzicato C’s in the cello part
bear the cryptic annotation wie aus der Ferne: “Do-do” (as if from the
distance: “Do-do”), an annotation that was later revealed to be a cipher for
Dorothea (Dodo), the daughter of Berg’s lover Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.68
Whereas Berg’s use of the annotation wie aus der Ferne in the Lyric Suite
appears to have served purely as a private reference to Fuchs-Robettin’s
daughter, its presence in the Violin Concerto (1935) turns out to possess a
more direct connection to Fuchs-Robettin. Although it was long assumed
that Berg’s prominent use of a Carinthian folksong referred to the work’s
dedicatee, Manon Gropius, Douglas Jarman has shown that in its first
iteration, it referred instead to an early affair with Marie Scheuchl (with
whom Berg had an illegitimate daughter), and that when it returns in the
closing measures of the concerto (marked wie aus der Ferne), it is a
reference to Fuchs-Robettin herself.69
Berio’s distance
Whereas many composers among the postwar avant-garde demonstrated a

fascination with the spatial qualities of imagined distance, it was Luciano
Berio who offered the most imaginative homage to the Mahlerian concep-
tion of distant sound.70 Nowhere is this more clearly in evidence than in
67
These measures, along with the marking in question, were excised from the published version
of the song.
68
George Perle, “The Secret Programme of the Lyric Suite. 2,” Musical Times 118 (1977): 710.
69
Douglas Jarman, “Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess, and the Secret Programme of the Violin
Concerto,” in The Berg Companion, ed. Douglas Jarman (Houndmills, UK: The Macmillan
Press, 1989), 191.
70
See, in particular, György Ligeti’s Lux aeterna (1966), which is marked Sostenuto, molto calmo,
“Wie aus der Ferne,” as well as Lontano (1967).
Berio’s distance 75
the second movement of Berio’s Rendering (1988–90). Although late in life

Berio declared this work to be an “act of love” for Franz Schubert, in his
preface to the score he makes the equally bold proclamation that the
stunning expressive climate of the second movement “seems inhabited
by Mahler’s spirit.”71 Midway through the movement, a fleeting expansion
of the orchestral texture offers the listener a tantalizing suggestion of the
expressive force that lies behind Schubert’s simple two-voice sketch. At the
same time, and in spite of Berio’s uncanny ability to create the illusion that
we are listening to a symphony by Schubert, his full-throated rendering
of this passage also grates gently against the implications of Schubert’s
unrealized outline. Indeed, from the perspective of sheer sonority, Berio
gives us just a little bit too much. So overwhelming is this moment that it
acquires the status of a theatrical utterance, an event that in this context is
self-consciously framed as singular and unrepeatable.
It might seem on the surface that Berio has done nothing more than
intensify the expressive arc of Schubert’s compact thematic declaration, even
if he does largely adhere to the rudimentary indications of instrumentation
that appear in Schubert’s original sketch: horn in the first phrase and the full
orchestra in the second. Yet Berio’s over-determined treatment of this
gesture also belies a more modern sensibility. Whereas the instrumentation
chosen to bring these sketches to life is unmistakably that of Schubert’s
“Unfinished” symphony, the manner in which this passage is orchestrated
clearly belongs to a later time. In his accompanying note, Berio alludes to the
presence of Mendelssohn, but the sheer weight of the passage also suggests
Brahms and perhaps even Strauss. But what makes this moment unique can
be attributed to something that goes beyond this gesture’s richly orchestrated
façade: indeed, the theatrical framing of this passage as a whole is empha-
sized not by something Berio adds but rather by something he subtracts. A
brief comparison with the two most important attempts to realize these
fragmentary sketches will illustrate the significance of Berio’s striking
omission.
The attempts in question are Brian Newbould’s performing edition from
1980, later published as Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 10, and the more
modestly titled Three Symphonic Fragments by the German musicologist
and conductor Peter Gülke, first published in 1982.72 As suggested by their
respective titles, these completions have rather different aims. Whereas
71
Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 40.
Berio/Schubert, Rendering, preface (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1989).
72
Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 10 in D major, ed. Brian Newbould (London: Faber Music,
1995); Franz Schubert, Drei Sinfonie-Fragmente, ed. Peter Gülke (Leipzig: Peters, 1982).
Gülke’s score offers a hypothetical reconstruction of what he acknowledges

to be a fragmentary work, Newbould is explicit in his stated aim of
completing the symphony “as Schubert himself might have done.”73 Not
surprisingly, Berio’s project proceeds from an entirely different premise.
As he writes in the foreword to the score: “Rendering with its dual
authorship is intended as a restoration of these sketches, it is [neither] a
completion nor a reconstruction.”74 As such, one of Berio’s principal if
unstated goals is to draw attention to the fragmentary state of the materials.
Against the backdrop of Berio’s version, it is instructive to compare the
solutions offered by Gülke and Newbould.
Whereas Gülke and Newbould adopt the rhythmic values indicated by
Schubert, Berio is not afraid to make small adjustments to Schubert’s
outline. This is particularly evident in the second half of the phrase
where he alters the rhythm by eliminating the last eighth rest. To be sure
this is a small change, but in conjunction with the rich doublings of the
horn line and added legato phrasing, Berio significantly transforms the
weight and trajectory of the musical line. Equally important is his striking
omission of Schubert’s repeat sign, an omission that puts the passage in
quotation marks: “I present to you a thematic utterance,” Berio seems to
say. And although it is Schubert’s gesture, it is projected here through the
lens of the nineteenth-century symphony.
It is this tendency to emphasize the work’s very construction that offers
an example of what I argue is Berio’s quiet homage to the music of
Gustav Mahler. For like the self-conscious framing of musical events that
characterizes much of Mahler’s music, Berio’s engagement with Schubert is
similarly preoccupied by the desire to frame individual utterances as
unique “theatrical” events. Over the course of the movement, this
Mahlerian rhetoric is manifested in two ways: first, in terms of Berio’s
fascination with thresholds and, second, through his preoccupation with
the idea of distant music. In the remainder of this chapter, I consider
Berio’s newly composed connecting passages in the second movement of
Rendering and explore their function as vibrant framing devices that fore-
ground the charged nature of the project’s dual authorship. Finally, I revisit
the popular notion that in the context of this work, we can tell where
Schubert ends and Berio begins.
The story of Berio’s involvement with these sketches dates back to 1978,
the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death. Perhaps the greatest legacy of
these celebrations was the publication of three symphonic fragments:
73 74
Schubert, Symphony No. 10, ed. Newbould, v. Berio/Schubert, Rendering, preface.
D. 615, D. 708A, and the fragment under discussion here, D. 936A.75 Along
with the other incomplete sketches, the latter was long presumed to date
from 1818. Closer study revealed, however, that this material was
composed nearly a decade later, in the final year of Schubert’s life. Given
the extraordinary nature of these sketches, the subsequent flurry of interest
in bringing them to life is hardly surprising. In the case of D. 936A,
however, the challenges were enormous: three incomplete movements
with ambiguous formal outlines on two – and sometimes three – staves
with only the barest indications of instrumentation. It was perhaps because
of these challenges that Berio initially declined to take on the project.
However, in the late 1980s, he finally accepted a commission to compose
a work in which the sketches would play a central role. The working title
was Schubert-Berio Opus X. Following the first performance in 1988, Berio
subjected the work to substantial revision before it was finally published in
1991 as Schubert-Berio, Rendering.76
We have already seen that Berio’s remarks in the preface to the score
make clear the nature of his engagement with the sketches as one of
restoration rather than completion or reconstruction. In David Osmond-
Smith’s pungent paraphrase of Berio’s declared attitude towards the project,
Rendering is a work that runs “[i]n calculated opposition to those musicol-
ogists who propose to ‘complete’ unfinished works by . . . exercise[s] in
pastiche.”77 Indeed, Berio’s restoration is distinguished by the fact that
he makes audible the fragmentary state of the surviving materials. It is in
this sense that scholars have heard Rendering less as “a completion of
Schubert’s Tenth Symphony [than] as a discourse on the musical potential
of the sketches.”78 Berio realizes this potential in part by interweaving a
succession of newly composed connecting passages throughout the work. He
illuminates the function of these passages in the preface to the score by
adopting two strikingly different metaphors:
In the empty places between one sketch and the next there is a kind of connective
tissue which is constantly different and changing, always ‘pianissimo’ and ‘distant’,
intermingled with reminiscences of late Schubert . . . and crossed by polyphonic
75
Franz Schubert, Drei Symphonie-Fragmente: D 615, D 708A, D 936A: Faksimile-Erstdruck der
Originalhandschriften, ed. Ernst Hilmar (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978).
76
The history of the work is neatly summarized in Lorraine Byrne Bodley, “Late Style and the
Paradoxical Poetics of the Schubert-Berio Renderings,” in The Unknown Schubert, ed.
Barbara Reul and Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 240–41.
77
David Osmond-Smith, “Only Connect . . . ” The Musical Times 134 (1993): 80.
78
David Metzer, “Musical Decay: Luciano Berio’s Rendering and John Cage’s Europera 5,” Journal
of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000): 96.
textures based on fragments of the same sketches. This musical ‘cement’ comments
on the discontinuities and the gaps that exist between one sketch and another and
is always announced by the sound of a celesta.79
To determine the appropriateness of these two metaphors, we need to

begin at the threshold of the work’s refashioned Andante, an enchanting
and mysterious space that takes us to the heart of Berio’s surprisingly
Mahlerian project.
By introducing the metaphor of the threshold here, I echo David Metzer’s
canny observation that “Rendering presents a symphony on the threshold of
existence, never able to take final form, continually breaking apart and
always remaining in fragments.”80 What is unusual about this particular
threshold – a space that possesses many of the qualities of Mahler’s “music
from afar” – is that Berio chooses to orchestrate material that is not part of
the sketch proper. The unrelated counterpoint exercises that appear on the
top stave of the sketch are divided by Berio into three distinct utterances,
each of which is separated by a brief connecting passage. If the first of these
exercises comes across as methodical, the second already possesses a greater
fluidity (it is as if we are bearing witness to Schubert’s own sketching
process). As the exercises wind down, an accompanimental figure in the
strings sets Schubert’s re-imagined sketch in motion. Whereas this sketch
begins with a rather rudimentary “unaccompanied unison phrase,”81 Berio
replaces it with an uncannily idiomatic accompanimental figure that subtly
transforms the original figure. In short, what we hear as Schubert is entirely
Berio’s own invention.
If the sense of distance at the outset of the movement is only implied, in
the three remaining connecting passages, a clearly identifiable strain of
distant music is more clearly articulated. This is emphasized by the inclu-
sion of a succession of highly differentiated performance annotations that
bear a remarkable resemblance to those already discussed in connection
with Mahler’s Third Symphony. Indeed, Berio, like Mahler before him,
explores the possibilities of Musik aus der ferne by ensuring that these
invocations of imagined distance are in a state of constant flux. Whereas in
the two outer movements, these recurring passages tend to share a single
marking – molto lontano and lontano, respectively – in the Andante, they
follow a characteristically Mahlerian trajectory of receding and then com-
ing closer (lontano, immobile e lontanissimo, and molto lontano).
79
Berio/Schubert, Rendering, preface. 80 Metzer, “Musical Decay,” 98.
81
Maurice J. Brown, “Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in D,” Music and Letters 31 (1959): 107.
The transition to the first of these “distant” passages (lontano) is haunted

by the triplets of the accompaniment, which are manifested here only as
halting fragments. If the insertion of this passage appears to disrupt the
sketch, Berio is also clearly at pains to establish a sense of continuity. It is
almost as if he is expressing regret at the prospect of leaving Schubert
behind. The next connecting passage (immobile e lontanissimo) features a
particularly reluctant transition into what is the movement’s briefest and
most distant interpolation. Running sixteenth notes serve to preserve
continuity despite the fact that the passage coincides with the only gap in
the original sketch. Rather than serving as a bridge, the final connecting
passage (molto lontano) instead brings the movement to a close. Like the
cowbell episode in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, it evokes a dreamworld
littered with scraps of what has come before. David Metzer claims that
by “abruptly [cutting] off the movement before it reaches the coda,” Berio
thus “obstruct[s] the musical flow” in an invasive fashion that not only
“blocks the sketches” but also prevents the movement “from returning to
the tonic.”82 Yet Berio’s solution is hardly surprising given that in the
sketch Schubert crossed out the coda. Presumably, Schubert would have
revisited these concluding measures had death not intervened. But as
we know, Berio was never interested in completing what Schubert left
unfinished. While his ending is on some level disruptive, the lack of any
clear resolution also creates a sort of suspended upbeat to the work’s
exuberant Finale.
Given the extraordinary nature of these connecting passages, it is not
surprising that they have occasioned such an ambivalent response. In
David Metzer’s estimation, they represent “neutral” contributions,
“which come across as grey and lifeless next to the revived Schubert.”83
For Metzer, these sections sound hollow, featuring “thin static sonorities”
that “call attention to the emptiness of [these] spaces.”84 And in the context
of his discussion of what he calls the movement’s “phantom peripheries,”
he suggests that they “further enhance the perception of the interpolations
as a void, suggesting a space from which the Andante has emerged and to
which it will return.”85
For Lorraine Byrne Bodley, these passages represent a “musical no-
man’s-land” in which Berio’s “technique of alienation prevents the illusion
of lost beauty in Schubert’s score.”86 In spite of this critical consensus, and
in the face of the unquestionable otherness of these passages, I suggest that
82
Metzer, “Musical Decay,” 103. 83 Ibid., 98. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 103.
86
Bodley, “Late Style and the Paradoxical Poetics of the Schubert-Berio Renderings,” 248.
they are far from empty or lifeless. For not only do they sparkle with
rhythmic vitality, they also possess a dream-like, even magical quality.
But above all, they act as framing devices whose function is to emphasize
the illusory nature of a fragmentary and unfinished work that has been
given the dubious title of Schubert’s Tenth.
It is hardly surprising that Berio’s attempt to join together the “empty
patches” in Schubert’s fragmentary symphony has received so much cri-
tical attention. Yet, some of the most interesting material is to be found not
in the joining passages – the cement works or connective tissue – but rather
in Berio’s orchestration of the sketches themselves. For in the end, it is
gestures like the presumed Schubertian accompaniment that sets the
Andante in motion, which emerge as the movement’s most significant
binding agents. If on the surface, it is often possible to tell where
Schubert ends and Berio begins, a more careful hearing reveals that things
are not quite so simple. For throughout this jointly authored work, Berio
does far more with the sketches than simply orchestrate them: he adds to
them, subtracts from them, and by animating their empty spaces he frames
them. And while Berio clearly hears the presence of Mahler in Schubert, I
suggest that Mahler emerges here as a far more significant presence,
becoming the essential guiding figure in Berio’s provisional rendering of
music history’s multiple pasts.
3 Alpine journeys
Here they’d thrown themselves down upon the meadow and for a long
time lay there quietly, without speaking, letting their eyes feast on the vast
expanses of land and their ears on the sound of the bells, both of them
thinking that somehow, somewhere sounds can be heard in every land-
scape, even when no bells are ringing.
Robert Walser – The Tanners
[M]usic in which cowbells ring is kitsch.

Hermann Broch – “Artistic Style as Style of the Epoch”
In his late autobiographical sketch Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche

reflects on the genesis of Also sprach Zarathustra against the backdrop
of the work’s central concept of eternal return. Assigning his discovery
of this idea to a specific time and place – August 1881 on the shores of
Lake Silvaplana in the Oberengadin – Nietzsche recalls that after
making note of the idea, he felt compelled to add the following
postscript: “6,000 feet beyond humanity and time” (6000 Fuss jenseits
von Mensch und Zeit).1 At first glance, the notion that an abstract
philosophical concept might have been inspired by a particular land-
scape seems at best fanciful. Yet, as it turns out, such a connection
stands as a recurring theme in the philosopher’s own writings. In
the preface of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche elaborates on this point by
emphasizing a more specific parallel between his writings and the alpine
landscapes to which he was so frequently drawn:
Whoever knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the
heights, a strong air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no little danger
that one will catch cold in it. Ice is close by, and the loneliness is vast – yet how
tranquilly all things repose in the light! how freely one breathes! how many things
one feels to be beneath one! – Philosophy as I have understood and lived it till now
is a voluntary life in ice and high mountains.2
1
Quoted in David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in
Word and Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 133.
2
Ibid., 147. Emphasis in original. 81
82 Alpine journeys
In a letter to Carl Fuchs, Nietzsche goes even further by suggesting that it

was the alpine experience itself that ultimately allowed him to become a
philosopher:
Do you not in retrospect feel something of the air of heights? It is a little chillier
around us, yet how much freer and purer than in the midst of the valleys! I at least
feel more robust and more resolved for all the good things in life than ever before –
also ten times more gentle toward human beings than in the period of my earlier
writings. In sum, and with regard to the smallest particulars: I will now dare to
pursue wisdom itself, will now dare to be a philosopher.3
Like Nietzsche before him, Mahler also drew considerable inspiration

from the mountain landscapes he so actively sought out during the sum-
mer months. Indeed, his well-known attachment to the Salzkammergut
and the eastern Dolomites continues to exert a powerful influence over our
image of the composer. As commonly told, these Alpine retreats were
places of refuge characterized by pristine landscapes largely untouched
by human activity. While there is a certain truth to this image, in this
chapter I propose an alternative account, one that reassesses the relation-
ship between music and landscape in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony as it relates
to the reception of the symphony’s presumed alpine identity.
Whereas the perceived connection between Mahler’s music and the alpine
landscapes in which it was composed is often acknowledged in passing, this
relationship has largely escaped a more detailed assessment.4 In his discus-
sion of the opening of the Seventh Symphony, for example, John Williamson
leaves us only the wry remark that the apparent presence of a mountain
landscape in this music is “scarcely illuminating, in that commentators have
always sensed this dimension to Mahler’s work in general.”5 Yet during
Mahler’s own lifetime critics and analysts alike made repeated and often
3
Nietzsche to Carl Fuchs 1878. Quoted in Krell, The Good European, 146. Emphasis in original.
4
For a recent exception, see Karlheinz Gradl, “Mahler in the Alps. A Musical-Philosophical
Sketch,” News about Mahler Research 63 (2012): 27–32. See also Otto Brusatti, Alles schon
wegkomponiert, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997). Brusatti discusses, among other things, the
well-known remark Mahler made to Bruno Walter during the composition of the Third
Symphony: “I arrived by steamer on a glorious July day; Mahler was there on the jetty to meet
me, and despite my protests, insisted on carrying my bag until he was relieved by a porter. As on
our way to his house I looked up to the Höllengebirge, whose sheer cliffs made a grim back-
ground to the charming landscape, he said ‘You don’t need to look – I have composed all this
already. [Sie brauchen gar nicht mehr hinzusehen – das habe ich alles schon wegkomponiert].”
Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler, trans. supervised by Lotte Walter Lindt (New York: Schocken
Books, 1974), 28.
5
John Williamson, “Mahler and Episodic Structure: The First Movement of the Seventh
Symphony,” in The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler: A Symposium, ed. James L. Zychowicz
(Cincinnati, OH: The University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, 1990), 29.
Alpine journeys 83
rather specific reference to the alpine qualities of the Third, Sixth, and
Seventh symphonies, as well as Das Lied von der Erde.6 Indeed, as the
reception of the Sixth shows, the alpine dimension is hardly incidental to
an understanding of the work. On the surface, this is not always immediately
evident, particularly given the work’s firmly terrestrial orientation. Yet the
fact that the first movement’s self-consciously alpine associations recur
elsewhere in the symphony only confirms their broader significance.
With respect to the work’s presumed alpine identity, perhaps the most
evocative passage comes midway though the first movement where a
sudden interruption derails the movement from its seemingly relentless
trajectory (at 21). As the music draws to an unexpected halt, the march that
haunts the movement’s exposition gives way to a succession of delicate and
increasingly fragile tableaux that project a sense of cool detachment from
their tumultuous surroundings (between 21 and 25). If the radically
stripped-down texture and harmonic stasis of these passages mark
them as moments of relative tranquility and repose, there is also something
disturbing about these fleeting episodes. This sense of unease is only
heightened by the introduction of distant cowbells, a startlingly inap-
propriate sonority in the context of the Austro-German symphony. What
is more, the seemingly self-evident symbolic associations of the cowbells
are complicated by the fact that these extra-symphonic utterances emerge
in the context of a non-programmatic work. As the symphony unfolds, the
increasingly unorthodox treatment of the cowbells undermines any claim
to a specific symbolic meaning. While the bells initially remain hidden
from view, when they eventually (re)appear in the Andante, they are
ostentatiously and indeed ironically displayed as a fully integrated part of
the orchestral apparatus. In the sprawling Finale, they are relegated to their
6
Discussing the first movement of the Third Symphony, Mahler reportedly remarked: “I might
equally well have called the movement ‘Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt’ [What the mountains
tell me].” Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed.
Peter Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 59. Writing about the first
Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony, Elsa Bienenfeld wrote: “Here one is reminded of the
atmosphere in high mountains when night draws to an end but before dawn warms and colors
the earth: mist covers the mountaintops, and everything shivers and appears gray in the cold,
hazy light of morning.” Elsa Bienenfeld, “Mahlers Siebente Symphonie,” Neues Wiener Journal
(10 November 1909), 8. In “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” ed. and trans. Karen Painter
and Bettina Varwig, in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), 326. In his review of the première of Das Lied von der Erde, William Ritter
makes reference to the “alpine quality” (l’impression alpestre) of “Der Abschied” while also
observing that Mahler’s works will contine to reflect “the most beautiful alpine ‘states of soul’”
(les plus beaux ««états d’âme»» alpestres) for a long time to come. William Ritter, “Une nouvelle
symphonie de Mahler,” La Vie Musicale 5 (1 December 1911): 136–40. Quoted in Stephen
E. Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72.
84 Alpine journeys
original position in the distance (in der Ferne) where they are joined by an
array of deep bells, a more familiar orchestral sonority that together creates
an unusual and particularly unnerving juxtaposition.
In most accounts of the Sixth Symphony, the cowbells have been under-
stood both as a symbol of solitude and contemplation and as a sonority
that suggests a specifically alpine setting. In this chapter, I consider the
interpretive roots of these well-established symbolic associations and by
extension the way in which they have become inseparable from the
assumption that this passage evokes a pure and untainted landscape.
More specifically, I show the extent to which Mahler’s own remarks
concerning the symbolic meaning of the cowbells continue to play a
significant role in the interpretation of these remarkable tableaux. As a
way of confronting the powerful grip of this long interpretive history, I
begin not with the immediate context surrounding the work’s composition
and reception, but rather by situating the composer in the broader context
of the rapidly changing landscape of fin-de-siècle Austria. I reconstruct the
first of Mahler’s many self-described “solitary” excursions into the heart of
the Dolomites: a journey made in the summer of 1900, some three years
before he composed the Sixth Symphony.7 By doing so I reveal Mahler not
as a traveller-pilgrim in the Romantic mould, but rather as a fully “mod-
ern” inhabitant of a far more complex landscape, one that has been
transformed into one of the most important sites of fin-de-siècle urban
culture. Against this backdrop, I argue that the sound of the cowbells in the
Sixth Symphony creates an aural disturbance that ultimately undermines
any utopian impulse these passages might otherwise be said to possess. I
suggest that the cowbells function less as signifiers of “world-weary isola-
tion” and the “solitude of nature high above” than as ironic souvenirs of the
fin-de-siècle Austrian institution of the Sommerfrische.8
The journey to Toblach
On the evening of 22 June 1900, Mahler boarded a train at Paris’s Gare de

l’Est. He had just finished conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the
7
By the summer of 1893, Mahler had established the pattern that he would maintain until his
death in 1911, of conducting during the year and composing during the off-season. During the
course of his lifetime, Mahler spent his working summers in three principal locations in the
Austrian countryside: Steinbach am Attersee (1893–97), Maiernigg (1900–1907), and Toblach
(1908–10). Both Maiernigg and Toblach afforded him easy access to the Dolomites.
8
For a concise introduction to the concept of the Sommerfrische, see Deborah R. Coen, “Liberal
Reason and the Culture of the Sommerfrische,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 145–59.
The journey to Toblach 85
last of five performances held in conjunction with the Universal Exposition

of 1900.9 As the train sped away from the French capital, Mahler was less
than a day’s journey from his final destination: the lakeside village of
Maiernigg in the Austrian province of Carinthia. The previous summer,
Mahler had purchased a plot of land on the Wörthersee, an idyllic lakeside
retreat at the edge of the Eastern Alps that served as one of the many
fashionable destinations for Vienna’s cultural elite. Work on the villa
where he would eventually compose symphonies Four through Eight was
nearing completion.10 That summer, in the stifling heat, Mahler resumed
work on his Fourth Symphony in the solitude of his newly built composing
hut.11 Some three weeks after his arrival in Maiernigg, Mahler travelled to
Toblach (Dobbiaco) in the Südtirol. This journey, made in part by railway,
represented the first stage of what Mahler later referred to as “lightning
journeys” (Blitzausflüge) to the Dolomites, in the heart of the Eastern Alps.12
The very possibility of making such an impromptu journey was in itself
hardly a novelty. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the
railway had significantly transformed the European landscape, making
possible the exploration of many previously inaccessible regions. The
significant increase in tourism that soon followed brought with it thou-
sands of visitors to the popular and rapidly expanding alpine resorts of
central Europe.13 The effects of this transformation are described with
particular clarity in the writings of the Berlin-based sociologist Georg
Simmel. In 1895, Simmel published a short essay entitled “Alpine
9
These concerts marked the first appearance of the Vienna Philharmonic outside of Austria.
Mahler led the orchestra in five separate performances from 18–22 June 1900 in the Théâtre
Municipal du Châtelet and the Palais du Trocadéro. For a complete list of repertoire, see
Knud Martner, Mahler’s Concerts (New York: Kaplan Foundation and The Overlook Press,
2010), 150–55.
10
Since the new villa was not yet complete, the family instead rented the nearby Villa Antonia.
11
As Mahler observed in a letter to Friedrich Gernsheim, these summer retreats offered a
necessary respite from the increasing pressures of metropolitan life, above all the “terrible
treadmill of the opera-house.” Mahler to Friedrich Gernsheim, [Hamburg, January] 1897, in
Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, and
Bill Hopkins (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 206.
12
For the earliest use of this term, see Mahler to Alma Mahler, Maiernigg, 9 July 1904, in Ein
Glück ohne Ruh’: Die Briefe Gustav Mahlers an Alma, ed. Henry-Louis de La Grange and
Günther Weiss (Berlin: Siedler, 1995), 214.
13
For a discussion of this expansion, see Jill Steward, “Tourism in Late Imperial Austria: The
Development of Tourist Cultures and Their Associated Images of Place,” in Being Elsewhere:
Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed.
Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001),
108–34. For a recent collection of essays that situates Austria’s alpine culture in its broader
historical context, see Judith Beniston, Jon Hughes, and Robert Vilain, eds., “Austria and the
Alps,” special issue, Austrian Studies 18 (2010): 1–196.
86 Alpine journeys
Journeys” (Alpenreisen) in the Viennese periodical Die Zeit.14 Taking as his

starting point the massive expansion of Switzerland’s transportation
network during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Simmel considers
the impact of this expansion on the bourgeois conception of nature, as well
as its role in encouraging alpine exploration. Of particular interest is
Simmel’s contention that with the opening up of areas once accessible
only by solitary wandering, the “Faustian wish” of standing alone before
nature had become both “rarely realized” and “increasingly rarely
declared.”15 For Simmel, what was once an eminently private activity had
been transformed by the “ease of an open road, and the concentration and
convergence of the masses.”16 The consequence of this development was a
newly constituted access to nature: an environment designed specifically
for the tourist.17 While Simmel does not deny the impact that visiting this
newly accessible environment could inspire, he also suggests that for the
modern traveller it was no longer possible to cultivate one’s “inner depths
and spirituality” through such visits. Ultimately, Simmel argues that this
approach to alpine exploration was incapable of producing any important
or lasting effect, and that in the end such journeys offered nothing more
than “the temporary delusion of aesthetic stimulation.”18
Mahler, while in no sense an alpinist, nevertheless manifested a deep
attachment to the Austrian Alps. Yet his complex relationship to the alpine
landscapes he inhabited during the summer months also reflects many
of the basic tensions illuminated by Simmel. On the one hand, Mahler’s
well-known dependence on these landscapes was sustained by the relative
ease of access afforded by the railway; on the other, this very accessibility
meant that the promise of solitude was largely an illusion. If in the end the
“concentration and convergence of the masses” was unavoidable, it is
perhaps for this reason that Mahler went to such lengths to fashion himself
in the image of a solitary wanderer. Nowhere is this more apparent than in
the composer’s own account of his first “lightning journey,” a trip that took
him through the Ampezzo valley from Toblach to Cortina from 16–19 July
14
Georg Simmel, “Alpenreisen” Die Zeit [Vienna] 7 (13 July 1895): 23–24. For a translation of the
full text, see Georg Simmel, “The Alpine Journey,” trans. Sam Whimster, in Theory, Culture, &
Society 8 (1991): 95–98.
15
Ibid, 95. This “Faustian wish” is uttered by the protagonist in Act V (v. 1406): “Stünd’ ich,
Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein.”
16
Simmel, “The Alpine Journey,” 95.
17
David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge,
1992), 130.
18
Simmel, “The Alpine Journey,” 97.
The journey between Toblach and Schluderbach 87
1900 (Figure 2).19 According to an unpublished letter from Mahler’s close

friend and confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner to the poet Siegfried Lipiner,
Mahler later boasted about the fact that he had gone the entire trip without
speaking to a soul. Claiming that he had met several Viennese who were
cowed into silence by his withering glances, Mahler apparently added: “I
looked so furious whenever someone came up to me that they went away
immediately and left me in peace.”20 In the same letter, Bauer-Lechner
offers a more general observation concerning Mahler’s penchant for
solitary walking: “He walks for hours in these mountains and forests
without meeting a living soul, as if this God-given world was part of
Gustav’s private property.”21 According to Bauer-Lechner, Mahler was
stopped shortly after his return to Maiernigg by the local police who
because of his dishevelled state mistook him for a vagrant.22 What is so
striking about this narrative is that it offers a clear manifestation of
Mahler’s desire to accomplish what Simmel claimed was “evermore rarely
realized and so increasingly rarely declared.” Yet, as we will see, the extent
to which Mahler could have actually entered into solitary communion with
nature remains very much open to question.
The journey between Toblach and Schluderbach
Already by the mid-1890s, Toblach had emerged as a busy transportation

hub that served as the principal gateway to the Dolomites. Indeed, it was
considered by contemporary guidebooks to be the valley’s “most comfor-
table summer resort.”23 In a colourful account of the region published five
19
Mahler’s itinerary can be reconstructed on the basis of a correspondence card addressed to his
sister Justine. Mahler to Justine Mahler, Schluderbach [16 July 1900], in The Mahler Family
Letters, ed. and trans. Stephen McClatchie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 339.
20
Quoted in Henry Louis de La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904), vol. 2 of
Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 278. The roots of this persona can be
traced to a letter from 1891 in which the composer claimed to have roamed around Norway “for
weeks on end without speaking a word to a living soul.” Mahler to Emil Freund, Hamburg [late
Autumn 1891], Selected Letters, 140. For Stuart Feder, Mahler’s claim suggests a clear
identification with the figure of the outsider: “Once again, in a retreat from life, Mahler
perceived himself as an outsider and a wanderer.” Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 42.
21
Quoted in La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 277–78.
22
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 151. There is a striking parallel with Beethoven who was similarly
misidentified by the police in 1820. See Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The Life of Beethoven, ed.
Henry Edward Krehbiel, vol. 3 (New York: The Beethoven Association, 1921), 42.
23
“Toblach gilt als komfortabelste Sommerfrische des Pustertahls.” Deutsche Alpen, 9th ed.
(Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1906), 224.
88 Alpine journeys
Figure 2. Alexander Robertson, Through the Dolomites, 2nd ed. (London: George
Allen, 1903).
years prior to Mahler’s first visit, the photographer and alpinist Theodor
Wundt describes his arrival at the village’s busy railway station:
A thick swarm of tourists pressed toward the exits, happy to leave behind the
smoking iron horse and to breathe in the fresh mountain air. Outside the station,
however, the battle-ready horde of porters and coachmen awaiting us did not let us
leave so easily. Greedily they threw themselves at their prey. Hotel Ampezzo! Hotel
Toblach! Hotel Ploner! Would you like a wagon? Wagons to Cortina etc. etc.,
resounded in wild confusion. But we kept a stiff upper lip. Only then for the first
time were we able to look around in peace.24
On 16 July 1900, Mahler arrived in Toblach by way of the Pusterthal

railway.25 Since the railway did not yet run south to Cortina, to continue
his journey Mahler would have had the option of proceeding by foot,
bicycle, postal omnibus, or automobile.26 According to a correspondence
card addressed to his sister Justine, Mahler departed Toblach by bicycle at
3:00 p.m. by way of the famous coach road that ran south through the
Ampezzo valley.27
It was at this moment that he joined the many thousands before him
who, according to the Austrian mountaineer Paul Grohmann, had made
“pilgrimages” (Wallfahrten) to that “great temple of beauty” (grosse Tempel
der Schönheit).28 Grohmann was the first German-speaking writer to
undertake a serious exploration of this region. His influential “guidebook”
Wanderungen in den Dolomiten (1877) offers detailed descriptions of
the region’s most important and beautiful excursions, descriptions that
24
“Ein dichter Touristenschwarm drängt sich dem Ausgange zu, froh, das rauchende Dampfross
hinter sich zu lassen und die frische Luft der Berge einzuatmen. Draussen aber vor dem
Bahnhof erwartet uns die kampfbereite Schar der Portiers, Dientsmänner und Kutscher, die
uns nicht so leicht ins Freie lässt. Gierig stürzt sie sich auf ihre Beute. Hotel Ampezzo! Hotel
Toblach! Hotel Ploner! Wagen gefällig? Stellwagen nach Cortina etc. etc., so tönt es wild durch
einander. Doch wir halten uns brav und kämpfen uns mutig durch. Dann erst können wir uns
in Ruhe umsehen.” Theodor Wundt, Wanderungen in den Ampezzaner Dolomiten, 2nd ed.
(Berlin: R. Mitscher, 1895), 3.
25
Although it was the completion of this line in 1871 that provided the initial impetus for the
exploration of this region of the Dolomites from the north, several writers had already made
full-fledged expeditions by the early 1860s. See, in particular, Josiah Gilbert and G. C. Churchill,
The Dolomite Mountains: Excursions through Tyrol, Carinthia, Carinola, & Friuli in 1861,
1862, & 1863 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864).
26
A railway line between Toblach and Cortina was proposed as early as 1909 but was not
completed until 1921.
27
Mahler to Justine Mahler, Schluderbach [16 July 1900], The Mahler Family Letters, 339. For a
description of this “magnificent road” (la magnifica strada carozzabile), see Leone Sinigaglia,
“Ricordi alpini delle Dolomiti,” Bollettino del Club Alpino Italiano 27 (1893), 81.
28
Paul Grohman, Wanderungen in den Dolomiten (Vienna: Verlag von Carl Gerold’s Sohn,
1877), 4.
90 Alpine journeys
are distinguished by the way in which they capture the pace and perspec-
tive of the walker.29 By the time Mahler entered the valley, more than
twenty years later, he would have been confronted with more than just
pedestrians as he began his gentle ascent to the shores of the Toblacher See.
For what created the single greatest challenge for walkers and cyclists alike
was the presence of automobiles. As one writer observed, their presence
was conspicuous: “On roads like that from Cortina to Toblach, with
brusque turnings and precipitous drops, a car must be driven with the
extreme of caution, and the horn should be constantly sounded.”30
Upon his arrival in the village of Landro, any lingering hope that his
journey might afford the opportunity for private reflection would have soon
been dashed. By the late 1890s, the original Gasthaus had become a hotel
composed of six separate houses and more than two hundred beds. By 1903,
the hotel was receiving more than seven thousand guests each year.31 The
preface to the second edition of Alexander Robertson’s popular guidebook
underlines the dramatic increase in tourist traffic throughout the region:
Every year more and more travellers, seeking rest from hard labour, strength for
new tasks, healthful exercise, and that bracing of mind and peace and hope of heart
which mountains, lifted high above all human sorrow, seldom fail to give, find their
way to the Dolomites. Since the first edition of my book was published the number
of such has increased from twelve to twenty thousand.32
Moving south, Mahler would have skirted the Dürrensee before arriving in
Schluderbach, the other important, if less fashionable, settlement in this
stretch of the valley. The English novelist and travel writer Amelia Edwards
provides a colourful description of what Mahler would have seen from the
valley floor:
Great mountains close it in on all sides, and the rich woods of the lower hills slope
down to the water’s edge. The clustered peaks, the eternal snows and glaciers of
29
Ibid. Although Grohman claimed that his book was not meant as a comprehensive guide to the
Dolomites, it nevertheless went on to serve as the model for virtually every subsequent account
of the region. See W[enzel] Eckerth, Die Gebirgsgruppe des Monte Cristallo: Ein Beitrag zur
Kenntnis der südtirolischen Dolomit-Alpen (Prague: Verlag von H. Dominicus, 1877);
Emil Zsigmondy, Im Hochgebirge: Wanderungen von Emil Zsigmondy (Leipzig: Duncker &
Humblot, 1889); as well as the popular guidebooks published by Karl Baedeker and Joseph
Meyer’s Bibliographisches Institut.
30
A. B. Filson Young, The Complete Motorist: Being an Account of the Evolution and Construction
of the Modern Motor-Car, with Notes on the Selection, Use, and Maintenance of the Same: And
on the Pleasures of Travel upon Public Roads (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904), 308.
31
Alexander Robertson, Through the Dolomites: From Venice to Toblach, 2nd ed. (London:
George Allen, 1903), 214.
32
Ibid., ix.
Monte Cristallo; the towering summit of the Piz Popena; and the extraordinary
towers of the Drei Zinnen come one after the other into view. As for the Drei
Zinnen, they surpass in boldness and weirdness all the Dolomites of the Ampezzo.
Seen through an opening between two wooded hills, they arise abruptly from
behind the intervening plateau of Monte Piano, as if thrust up from the center of
the earth, like a pair of tusks. No mere description convey to even the most
apprehensive reader any correct impression of their outline, their look of intense
energy, of upwardness, of bristling, irresistible force.33
It was against the backdrop of this dramatic landscape that Mahler claimed
to have spent “the entire afternoon gloriously outdoors.”34 He most likely
spent the night at the Hôtel Plöner in Schluderbach, a popular inn where he
wrote and posted the aforementioned correspondence card to his sister
Justine. Mahler devoted the following day to exploring Lake Misurina, a
short two-hour hike southeast of Schluderbach. During the last decade of
his life, Mahler returned almost every year to the shores of this celebrated
lakeside retreat. But if he climbed the steep and narrow road in search of
solitude, he was surely disappointed. The recent opening of the Grand
Hotel Misurina had increased the already considerable number of visitors.
A colourful description by the celebrated alpinist and composer Leone
Sinigaglia makes clear that this area had already been well travelled long
before Mahler’s initial visit to these shores.35 In his reminiscences of the
region, Sinigaglia describes the much-frequented portion of the road
between Schluderbach and Misurina that Mahler would have ascended to
reach the lake:
One meets a number of interesting and amusing types worthy of appearing in the
pages of the Fliegende Blätter, especially the pedestrians: the professional walker,
who wears a Tyrolese hat with the feather of a grouse and a scarf around his neck,
dutifully perspires in order to accomplish in time the section of the road assigned
to him for that day by the [Julius] Meurer or the Baedeker; the fat and out of breath
lady who devotedly follows her “Herr Gemahl,” who fiercely loves the march
prescribed by his doctor as a highly hygienic way to recover from the fatigue of
fulfilling his own duties as a citizen; the young neophyte mountain-eaters with
colourful knickerbockers who brandish with pious zeal their interminable
33
Amelia B. Edwards, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: A Midsummer Ramble in the
Dolomites (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873), 105–6. Many of the earliest published
accounts of the Dolomites are by British writers. See also Gilbert and Churchill, The Dolomite
Mountains. A direct consequence of these accounts was a significant increase in the number of
British travellers in the Pusterthal during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
34
Mahler to Justine Mahler [Schluderbach, 17 July 1900], The Mahler Family Letters, 339.
35
Mahler’s final concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 21 February 1911 featured the New York
première of Sinigaglia’s concert overture, Le baruffe chiozzotte.
92 Alpine journeys
alpenstocks whose tip vanishes into the clouds. The complete family, that traverses
the Misurina way with the same Olympic serenity and methodical disposition – the
parents behind, the children in front, and well done! – as if they were taking a
Sunday stroll under the “Linden” trees in Berlin – subordinating their awe to the
instructions on the signposts.36
Central to Sinigaglia’s commentary is the implication that this motley

group is out of place in what should properly be a tranquil mountain
setting. Indeed, he accuses the group of behaving as if they were taking
an urban promenade on Berlin’s fashionable Unter den Linden. While he is
overtly critical of the way in which such behaviour disturbs the otherwise
“unspoiled” natural surroundings, Sinigaglia is ultimately far more con-
cerned with the fact that these tourists are simply unaware of the spiritual
component he believed to be at the core of the alpine experience. For in
Sinigaglia’s view, it was the duty of travellers to be awed and morally
improved by mountain scenery. Like Nietzsche before him, such experi-
ences were meant to improve one’s relationship with others. Commenting
on his own successful ascent of nearby Monte Cristallo, he writes: “[h]ow
much better we all feel, and how readily would we forgive anybody
anything when we are up there!”37 In the end then, Sinigaglia still believed
that alpine travel could help in the cultivation of one’s “inner depths and
spirituality,” something that Georg Simmel claimed was no longer possible.
If on his way to Misurina Mahler did not encounter any travellers such
as those described by Sinigaglia, the following day in Cortina he would
surely have found them hard to avoid. Perhaps the most popular summer
resort in the Dolomites – both then and now – Cortina was together with
Schluderbach one of the most important centres for guided hikes and
expeditions to the surrounding peaks. Following a further day of leisure,
36
“S’incontra una quantità di tipi interessanti e divertenti, degni di figurare sui ‹‹Fliegende
Blätter››, specialmente i pedestri: dal camminatore professionale, che ha il cappello tirolese colla
penna di gallo montano e il fazzoletto al collo, che suda coscienziosamente per compiere in
orario il tratto di strada assegnatogli per quel giorno dal Meurer o dal Baedeker; alla signora
pingue e trafelata che segue devota il suo ‹‹Herr Gemahl››, il quale ama ferocemente la marcia
ordinatagli dal medico come altamente igienica per rifarsi dalle fatiche subite nel disimpegno
dei propri doveri cittadini; ai giovani neofiti mangia-montagne; coi knikerbokers fulgenti di
vario colore, che brandiscono con santo zelo degli interminabili alpenstocks la cui punta si
perde nelle nuvole; alla famiglia, completa, che percorre la via di Misurina colla stessa olimpica
serenità e metodica disposizione – dietro i genitori, i ragazzi avanti, e bravi! – come se fossero in
una passeggiata domenicale sotto ai ‹‹Linden›› Berlinesi –subordinando la loro ammirazione
all’indicazione dei pali.” Sinigaglia, “Ricordi alpini delle Dolomiti,” 85–86.
37
“Come ci si sente migliori, e quante cose, e a quanti si perdonerebbe quando si è lassù!” Ibid., 40.
Nietzsche expresses a strikingly similar sentiment in his 1878 letter to Carl Fuchs discussed on
page 82 of this chapter.
Alpine visions 93
Mahler began to retrace his steps northward, stopping again in

Schulderbach and Toblach. After travelling by railway east to Lienz, he
returned the next morning by steamer and bicycle to Maiernigg.
Presumably refreshed from his journey, he retreated to the solitude of his
isolated composing hut, where he resumed work on the Fourth Symphony.
Alpine visions
With the exception of the following summer (1901), Mahler returned to

the Dolomites every year until his declining health finally put an end to
these working holidays. During the two summers he devoted to the Sixth
Symphony (1903–4), Mahler continued to make regular Blitzausflüge to
the Dolomites.38 Indeed, by this time such escapes had become an integral
part of his established pattern of work and leisure. Yet in spite of
his apparent desire to embody the figure of the solitary wanderer, the
landscape he traversed was anything but uninhabited. It is for this reason
that Mahler’s own accounts of these journeys might be best described in
terms of what Simon Schama has called “the myth of a mountain utopia.”39
According to Schama, this sentiment had its roots in the notion of the
alpine idyll, a literary trope that was reinvented during the mid-eighteenth
century in the writings of Albrecht von Haller, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and
Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières.40 The promise of solitude
articulated by these authors took on a new urgency during the nineteenth
century when the increasing pressures of metropolitan life intensified the
public’s desire to seek refuge in these increasingly idealized alpine
landscapes.41 A significant portion of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters
38
Mahler’s regular correspondence with Alma began in 1901, making it relatively easy to
reconstruct these itineraries. In July 1903, he travelled to Schluderbach and Dölsach, and in July
1904 to Schluderbach and Misurina.
39
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 479.
40
Ibid., 447–513. See Albrecht von Haller, “Die Alpen,” in Versuch von schweizerischer Gedichten
(Bern: Bey Niclaus Emanuel Haller, 1732); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres de deux amans,
Habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1761); and Louis-
François Ramond, Observations faites danes les Pyrénées, pour servir de suite à des observations
sur les Alpes, insérées dans une traduction des letters de W. Coxe, sur la Suisse (Paris: Belin,
1789). The best and most comprehensive account of this topic remains Jacek Woźniakowski,
Die Wildnis: zur Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europäischen Neuzeit, trans.
Theo Mechtenberg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).
41
For a recent account that explores the transformation of mountaineering in this context from
an “aesthetic regime” to one that is “physiological,” see Philipp Felsch, “Mountains of
Sublimity, Mountains of Fatigue: Towards a History of Speechlessness in the Alps,” Science in
Context 22 (2009): 341–64. The article is drawn from the author’s larger study on the physiology
94 Alpine journeys
(1843–60), for example, is devoted to describing mountains as the quin-

tessential Romantic landscape that in turn served as important places of
pilgrimage. As Ruskin famously observed:
They seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and
cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in
simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in
holiness for the worshipper.42
Although he does not acknowledge it directly, Ruskin’s observation must

be understood against the backdrop of the rapid expansion of alpine
tourism. But as we have already seen in the writings of Friedrich
Nietzsche and Leone Sinigaglia, it was not until the latter decades of the
nineteenth century that the figure of the tourist was acknowledged more
directly. Nietzsche was particularly critical of what he saw as the inability of
tourists to conceive of alpine exploration as a contemplative activity. As he
writes in Human, All Too Human: “Pleasure tourists. – They climb up the
mountain like animals, stupid and perspiring; no one has told them there
are beautiful views on the way.”43
It is perhaps not surprising that in the face of an ever-encroaching
tourist infrastructure, the rhetoric of solitude found its way into the
literature on the Dolomites, as well as into Mahler’s own accounts of his
annual Blitzausflüge. If the composer’s attempt to seek out a mountain
utopia was doomed to failure, it is precisely this failure that is in many ways
reflected in the Sixth Symphony. For while the symphony’s alpine traces
are undeniable, the associated passages rarely project any clear sense of
solitude or tranquility.44 Indeed, the fraught character of the work’s alpine
episodes, which have been widely understood to evoke eternity, infinity,
of alpine travel. Philipp Felsch, Laborlandschaften: Physiologische Alpenreisen im 19.

Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007). Felsch’s contention that physiologists treated
the Alps as a Laborlandschaft (laboratory landscape) is traced in part through the examination
of alpine travel journals of the renowned Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso (1846–1910).
42
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 4 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856), 359. Quoted in
Robertson, Through the Dolomites, viii. On Ruskin’s attitude towards mountains, see
John Hayman, John Ruskin and Switzerland (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990);
and André Hélard, John Ruskin et les cathedrals de la terre (Chamonix: Guérin, 2005). For a
discussion that explores the intersection of pilgrimage and tourism in the Austro-Hungarian
context, see Alison Frank, “The Pleasant and the Useful: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Habsburg
Mariazell,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 157–82.
43
Translation adapted from Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
44
Marjorie Hope Nicolson Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 392–93.
Alpine visions 95
and solitude, instead reveal a deep-seated ambivalence that lies at the core
of Mahler’s conception of musical landscape. Mahler may have believed in
the restorative power of nature, but as we will see, the manner in which he
chooses to evoke landscape also reveals the extent to which this power has
been compromised.
If the Sixth Symphony is a work that has often been linked to the alpine
setting in which it was composed, the work’s opening measures hardly
suggest such a connection. Indeed, the movement’s most obvious feature
is the sheer weight of its initial march. Perhaps the most stubbornly
terrestrial of Mahler’s symphonic movements, the uncharacteristically
repetitive character of these opening measures casts an overwhelming
shadow over the rest of the movement and indeed on the work as a
whole. It is therefore surprising that the march figure recurs at only three
points in the exposition (the pickup to 2, at 4, and in distorted form
at 10). The development section features only a single one-measure
fragment (at 17) and the recapitulation, like the exposition, contains
only three fragments of the march (three after 29, 31, and ten after 36).
That the presence of the march can be felt even during its frequent
absence – infecting even the work’s fleeting lyrical turns – reveals the
extent to which it serves as the work’s defining idea. A particularly
striking example of this comes in the initial presentation of the
movement’s second group (between 8 and 13), the “Alma” theme.45
Shortly after this soaring theme is initiated, an abrupt backward glance
brings the unexpected return of the march (between 10 and 11). This
interruption ultimately has far-reaching consequences for the overall
character of the second group itself. Although at 11 the “Alma” theme
simply picks up where it left off, it is now weighed down by elements of
the march that have infiltrated the lower brass, timpani, and basses.
Whereas this jarring interpolation feels entirely out of place in the
context of the second group, its unexpected appearance also has an
immediate and consequential impact on what follows. For if the march
as heard at the outset of the movement advances with grim determina-
tion, here it functions as an invasive and destabilizing force.
45
According to Alma, Mahler is reported to have said: “I have tried to capture you in a theme.”
(Ich habe versucht, dich in einem Thema festzuhalten). Alma Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe
(Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 90. Seth Monahan has recently proposed a revised hearing
of the “Alma” theme in the contex of the movement’s sonata narrative, which he describes as
staging a “conflict and strained reconciliation between its two suggestively gendered sonata
subjects.” Seth Monahan, “‘I have tried to capture you . . . ’: Rethinking the ‘Alma’ Theme from
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (2011): 123.
96 Alpine journeys
And yet, the first movement also contains an extended passage that
attempts to resist the influence of the movement’s inexorable forward
march. Occurring roughly a third of the way through the development
section, this passage consists of a succession of subdued episodes that
have long elicited evocative descriptions of pastoral bliss and limitless
alpine vistas (between 21 and 25). For most commentators, the passage
as a whole has been understood to stand entirely apart from its surround-
ings. In his two early analyses of the work, Ernst Otto Nodnagel makes
reference to its status as a separate episode within the larger context
of the development section proper.46 With the exception of Karl Weigl,
who shortly thereafter referred to the passage more specifically as a
“dream world” (Traumwelt), most subsequent analyses have employed
Nodnagel’s terminology.47
Despite the fact that this passage is clearly set off from its surroundings,
its appearance is not entirely unexpected. Prior to the emergence of this
remarkable succession of tableaux, a gentle fracturing of the orchestral
texture takes place. The strain begins to show shortly after 18 with the
emergence of a series of fanfare-like figures derived from the movement’s
second group.48 But it is the introduction of two tam-tam strokes (four
measures after 19) that decisively signals the development’s impending
collapse. At 21 the music is brought to a sudden halt, a moment that
marks the beginning of the episode. Here, a sustained tremolo in the first
and second violins supports a final fragment in the upper winds derived
46
Nodnagel refers to the passage in separate reviews as an eigentümlich phantastische Episode
(characteristically fantastic episode) and an eigenartige Episode (peculiar episode). See Ernst
Otto Nodnagel, “Gustav Mahlers A moll-Symphonie No. 6,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 21/22
(23 May 1906): 466; and Nodnagel, “Sechste Symphonie in A-Moll von Gustav Mahlers,” Die
Musik 5 (1906): 239.
47
Karl Weigl, Gustav Mahler: Sechste Symphonie, Musikführer no. 320 (Berlin:
Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, [1908]), 7. Those following Nodnagel’s lead
include Erwin Ratz, “Gustav Mahler: Symphonie Nr. 6 in a-Moll,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze,
ed. F. C. Heller (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1975), 125 (lyrische Episode); Hans
Ferdinand Redlich, foreword to Gustav Mahler, Symphony VI (New York: Edition
Eulenberg, 1968), xvi (Herdenglockenepisode); Peter Andraschke, “Struktur und Gehalt im
ersten Satz von Gustav Mahlers Sechster Sinfonie,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 35 (1978):
289–90 (Naturepisode); and Hans Peter Jülg, Gustav Mahlers Sechste Symphonie (Munich:
Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1986), 65–78 (“Traumepisode”). Norman Del Mar refers to it
as a “pastoral interlude,” in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study (London: Eulenberg Books,
1980), 37–38. Warren Darcy, while acknowledging the status of this passage as an
episode, refers to it as “Fantasy Projection.” Warren Darcy, “Rotational Form, Teleological
Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” 19th-
Century Music 25 (2001): 54.
48
Eight after 18 in the bassoons, cellos, and basses.
Alpine visions 97
once again from the second group. And then, without warning, the sound
of distant cowbells is heard.49
That so many commentators have described what follows in terms of the
evocation of landscape is hardly surprising. Indeed, Mahler draws here on
a specific compositional device, commonly employed by nineteenth-
century composers to evoke the natural world. Monika Lichtenfeld was
among the first to label such passages as “sound-sheets” (Klangflächen),
first in the music of Richard Wagner and later in the symphonies of
Mahler.50 Perhaps their most characteristic feature is the sense of stasis
that is attained in part through the use of pedal points and non-functional
harmony.51 Although in the case of the Sixth Symphony, Lichtenfeld does
not comment directly on the passage’s symbolic meaning (indeed, she
makes no mention of the cowbells at all), her assessment of the way in
which the Klangfläche functions “as a foil for a vague memory of the past”
resonates with Weigl’s notion of a Traumwelt.52
What is crucial here, however, are the powerful and unavoidable
associations with landscape. Carl Dahlhaus famously describes how
Klangflächentechnik is employed to evoke landscape in a range of well-
known operatic scenes:
49
The subsequent use of cowbells in an orchestral context finds two strikingly different mani-
festations, both of which pay homage to Mahler. Whereas in Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie
(1915), they are employed quite literally to symbolize a grazing herd, in the third of
Anton Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10 (1913), their primary function is timbral. For
Brooks Toliver, Strauss “conjures up the acoustical reality of the Alps.” Brooks Toliver, “The
Alps and the Alpine Symphony, and Environmentalism: Searching for Connections,” Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 15 (2011): 14.
50
Monika Lichtenfeld, “Zur technik der Klangflächenkomposition bei Wagner,” in Das Drama
Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1970),
161–67; and Lichtenfeld, “Zur Klangflächentechnik bei Mahler,” in Mahler – eine
Herausforderung: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Ruzicka (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977),
21–34. Klangfläche is most often translated as “sound-sheet.” See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-
Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989), 307–8. It has also been rendered variously as “sound-plane” and “sound surface.”
See Thomas Bauman, “Mahler in a New Key: Genre and the ‘Resurrection’ Finale,” Journal of
Musicology 23 (2006): 478; and Rey M. Longyear, review of Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century
Music in Notes 47 (1991): 749. For a discussion of Klangflächenkomposition in connection with
the music of Hans Pfitzner, see John Williamson, The Music of Hans Pfitzner (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 275–77.
51
In the music of Mahler, Lichtenfeld identifies the first sixty-one measures of the Finale of the
Second Symphony as the paradigmatic example of this technique. With respect to the passage
from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, she points out its resemblance to measures
55–61 of the Second Symphony’s Finale. Lichtenfeld, “Zur Klangflächentechnik bei Mahler,”
125–28.
52
“Die Klangfläche fungiert, wie im Finale der Zweiten Symphonie, als Folie einer vagen
Erinnerung an Vergangenes.” Ibid., 129.
98 Alpine journeys
As far as compositional technique is concerned, almost all the outstanding musical

renditions of nature – the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, the Nile scene from Aïda,
or the riverbank scene from Gounod’s Mireille – follow a principle that was driven
to extremes in modern art music, even serving as the basis for entire works: the
sound-sheet or Klangfläche, outwardly static but inwardly in constant motion.
Regardless of whether the scene is a bucolic idyll or a thunderstorm (like the
Prelude to Act I of Die Walküre), the music remains riveted to the spot motivically
and harmonically, no matter how gentle or violent its rhythmic motion. To put it
another way, a musical depiction of nature is almost always defined negatively, by
being excluded from the imperative of organic development which, at least in the
mainstream of compositional history, dominated the thematic and motivic structure
of nineteenth-century music as well as its harmonic schemes. The Klangfläche
conveys a landscape because it is exempted both from the principle of teleological
progression and from the rule of musical texture which nineteenth-century musical
theorists referred to, by no means simply metaphorically, as “thematic-motivic
manipulation,” taking Beethoven’s development sections as their locus classicus.53
Absent from Dahlhaus’s assessment is any discussion of the layers of

meaning such “landscapes” might accrue through the process of reception.
In the case of the Sixth Symphony, the work’s presumed evocation of a
specifically alpine landscape raises the question as to what precisely con-
stitutes such a landscape in the first place. For Peter Andraschke it repre-
sents the Austrian countryside itself:
The nature episode in the development section from the first movement of the
Sixth Symphony is fashioned by Mahler as a pastoral idyll, a point of rest and
relaxation. It is in this sense, namely as an ideal world, that Mahler had personally
sought a nature experience that he ultimately found during his carefree annual
summer holidays in the landscape of the Austrian mountains and lakes.54
As we have already seen, however, the alpine landscape of the Austrian fin

de siècle hardly resembled such an idyllic world. What is striking in this
context is that although Mahler draws on a compositional technique that
establishes clear associations with landscape, his representation departs
significantly from the nineteenth-century models he knew so well. Despite
53
Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 307. Dahlhaus’s summary is perhaps the most commonly
cited definition. See, for example, Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian
Identity (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2006), 95–108. What is seldom observed is the
fact that Dahlhaus traces this technique to a symphonic model.
54
“Die Naturepisode in der Durchführung des ersten Satzes der 6. Symphonie ist von Mahler als
pastorale Idylle gestaltet, als Ruhe- und Erholungsphase. In dieser Weise, als heile Welt, hat
Mahler das Naturerlebnis persönlich gesucht und während seiner unbeschwerten jährlichen
Sommerurlaube in der österreichischen Berg- und Seenlandschaft auch gefunden.”
Andraschke, “Struktur und Gehalt,” 291.
Alpine visions 99
the sudden reduction in dynamic level and dramatic thinning of the

orchestral texture, the passage is at its core anything but tranquil.
Whereas the extended pedal point acts as a stabilizing force, the musical
fragments that are scattered throughout this episode serve instead to
destabilize the passage as a whole. The first and most prominent of these
is the gentle rocking figure in the celesta and upper strings. While this
succession of seventh chords and triads unfolds in a gentle stream, their
steady pulse can also be heard as a distant echo of the movement’s opening
march figure. This is emphasized in part by the placement of accents on
each beat in the celesta (four after 21). What is more, the episode as a whole
is littered with scraps of recognizable thematic and motivic material that
includes four elements: (1) a distillation of one of the movement’s principal
rhythmic gestures into a fanfare-like motive, (2) the major-minor motto,
(3) the principal thematic material of the second group, and (4) material
from the bridge passage that connects the first and second groups. Yet it is
the presence of distant cowbells that contributes most obviously to the
general sense of unease. For in an already cluttered texture, they also
occupy an uncomfortable position at the very threshold of the audible.
Like many other of Mahler’s evocations of distant music, this too is
characterized by its remarkable fragility. In the first of its three main
sections (between 21 and 22), the cowbells are “placed in the distance”
(in Entfernung aufgestellt) and emerge only intermittently from the orches-
tral texture. In the second section (between 22 and 24), the cowbells fall
silent; with their disappearance, the music becomes increasingly serene: an
idyll within an idyll. Here the music moves from G major to the remote key
of E-flat major, anticipating the Andante while opening up a space for the
music to turn inward. Finally, in the third section (between 24 and 25), the
cowbells return in a passage that closely resembles the first, the idyll is soon
shattered by the sudden and unexpected return to Tempo 1 in the distant
key of B major (at 25). In certain respects, this passage resembles the oases
in the Scherzos of the Second and Third Symphonies. Similarly deceptive
in that it does not serve as a true point of repose, the compromised nature
of the episodes in the Sixth is, however, of a more fundamental nature.55
This in turn raises the question as to what broader claims we might make
about this cluttered musical landscape. One might argue that Mahler’s
55
In the central E-major passage from the Scherzo of the Second Symphony (between 40 and 43),
the sixteenth-note pattern that dominates the Scherzo proper hovers in the background, gently
undermining the apparent tranquility of the passage. In the Scherzo of the Third Symphony, the
interruptions are frequent and sudden and the music appears to move, as it were, in and out of
consciousness.
100 Alpine journeys
music is already built on such an assemblage of materials. As Richard

Leppert has observed:
Mahler is a dealer in detritus, one who picks from the scrap heap of the present;
something of a naïve and visionary, he finds new ways of assembling the scraps so
that they both retain the look of what they were when he found them and also gain
a new essence, often profound and invariably meaningful, as he sets them in
tension with the aesthetic principles of the art work, but not without affecting
the formal “mould” into which they are put.56
As Leppert suggests, part of the reason that Mahler is able to incorporate

disparate materials to such great effect is that he knew very well the “social
semiotics of sound.”57 Yet in the case of the cowbells, what Leppert
describes as their association with the Austrian peasant offers only one of
many interpretive possibilities. Indeed, as Julian Johnson has observed, the
cowbells generate an enormously complex web of extra-musical associa-
tions. Among the things that Johnson sees as significant about Mahler’s
transformation of the cowbells is the way in which their sound, which he
describes as neither programmatic nor referential, “intrudes on the her-
metic, autonomous world of symphonic music – a piece of extra-musical
reality imported into the concert hall, every bit as shocking as Varèse’s later
use of the siren.”58 On the other hand, Johnson also suggests that Mahler’s
“introduction of this ancient piece of agricultural machinery into the
symphony orchestra is the most appalling piece of tourist kitsch. A pastoral
scene is remembered by the sound of the cow bell evoking happy memories
of rustic holidays and bovine warmth.”59
Yet there is nothing particularly comforting about the passage in ques-
tion. For Theodor W. Adorno, the music here is “pausing to draw breath,
knowing the way back to be blocked, rather than feigning to follow that
way.”60 What Adorno senses here, however, ultimately results less from a
suspension of the temporal order than from the scraps that litter the path.
Rather than offering a moment of repose, the cowbell episode atomizes
56
Richard Leppert, “Nature and Exile: Adorno, Mahler and the Appropriation of Kitsch,” Frispel:
Festskrift till Edström, ed. Alf Björnberg, Monna Hallin, Lars Lilliestam, and Ola Stockfelt
(Gothenberg: Skrifter från Institutionen för musikvetetenskap, Göteborgs universitet, 2005),
458. In Richard Leppert, Sound Judgment: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 257.
57
Ibid.
58
Julian Johnson, “The Sound of Nature? – Mahler, Klimt, and the Changing Representation of
Nature in Early Viennese Modernism,” in Wien 1897. Kulturgeschichtliches Profil eines
Epochenjahres, ed. Christian Glanz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 203.
59
Ibid.
60
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37–38.
Altitude 101
time with a mechanical coldness that is underscored by the precise yet

otherworldly sound of the celesta. It is an inflection of the pastoral that is at
its core fractured and broken, and that like the composer’s own “lightning
journeys” is both fleeting and temporary. Mahler’s evocation of the
pastoral here is broken not only because of this clutter but, perhaps more
importantly, because its temporal frame has been shaped by a conception
of time that is fundamentally urban. It remains surprising then that in most
discussions of the work, the darker undertones of this passage are so
seldom acknowledged. But as we will soon see, this can be attributed, at
least in part, to a long interpretive tradition that was shaped to a consider-
able extent by remarks long attributed to the composer himself.
Altitude
In the context of a movement so firmly grounded by the sheer weight of its

terrifying march, the cowbell episode might be heard as a form of protest
against the march’s terrestrial pull. Despite being weighed down by scraps
of previously heard music including a ghostly echo of the march, the
episode, after all, stands at a considerable remove from its immediate
surroundings. On the one hand, it has been heard by almost all analysts
as possessing an “otherworldly” character that embodies the characteristics
of “music from afar” explored in the previous chapter. At the same time,
the unmoored quality of the episode also points to something far more
intriguing: the idea of music that sounds from above.
The idea of Musik aus der Höhe is hardly unique, particularly in the
history of opera. The voice of the sailor that emerges aus der Höhe at the
opening of the first scene in Act I of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde offers only
the most famous example. Although height is rarely exploited in the
realm of nineteenth-century concert music, Robert Schumann did make
a tantalizing reference to the idea of music from above in connection with
the opening trumpet call of his First Symphony, op. 38. In a letter to
Wilhelm Taubert, Schumann wrote that this opening call should sound
“wie aus der Höhe klänge.”61
Mahler, on the other hand, exploited the effect of height on only two
occasions: in the fifth movement of the Third Symphony where the boys’
choir and bells are marked in der Höhe postiert (placed high up), and in
61
Schumann to Wilhelm Taubert, Leipzig, 10 January 1843, in Robert Schumann’s Briefe: Neue
Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jansen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1904), 224.
102 Alpine journeys
the Eighth Symphony where at the end of the first and second parts a
group of trumpets and trombones are “posted in an isolated place”
(isoliert postiert). If the idea of “music from above” offers an additional
example of the theatrical expansion of symphonic space that charac-
terizes the music of the so-called Wunderhorn years, in the cowbell
episode of the Sixth Symphony, Mahler offers the listener something far
subtler. Rather than drawing on instruments that literally sound from
above, Mahler instead evokes a kind of music that suggests the idea of
altitude itself. Whereas the idea that music might suggest a sense of
altitude might only seem applicable to a work such as the Sixth
Symphony, it is equally relevant to the interpretation of Mahler’s later
works. Writing about “Der Trunkene im Frühling” from Das Lied von der
Erde, for example, Donald Mitchell observes that “[t]he song’s extraor-
dinary orchestral coda is virtually bassless, which no doubt reflects its
high altitude and aviary-like character.”62 And in the face of the work’s
otherwise terrestrial orientation, we will see in the last chapter how its
final movement, “Der Abschied,” in fact remains caught somewhere
between the earthly (irdische) and the heavenly (himmlische).
Nowhere are the implications of Mahler’s modest experiments with the
idea of music from above taken up with greater enthusiasm than in the
music of Anton Webern.63 On a biographical level as Julian Johnson has
observed:
Webern often referred to the world of the mountains simply as ‘da oben’ – ‘up
there.’ This was a key term in his own version of the duality familiar in Mahler’s
work between the city as claustrophobic containment and the site of frantic
movement and the spaciousness and stillness associated with the mountain
landscape.64
Webern’s considerable compositional debt to Mahler is well known. His

admiration of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies was profound, above
all the Seventh’s first Nachtmusik with among other aspects its distant
62
Donald Mitchell, Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations, vol. 3
of Gustav Mahler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 474n100.
63
Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999). For a recent account that explores this topic in the context of Austro-German
Modernism, see Christopher Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera,
Cinema (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
64
Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 30. Yet as Johnson point out, there is also a
strong spiritual dimension to Webern’s solitary experiences: “In Webern’s scheme of things, the
proximity of mountains to ‘the heavens’ and their unique world ‘up there’ was much more than
a matter of physical altitude. It was rather the physical embodiment of a spiritual image, a
concrete realization of a utopian concept.” Ibid., 33.
Altitude 103
cowbells. Whereas several of Webern’s works have alpine overtones, it is

undoubtedly his Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10, that seem to occupy the
same altitude as the cowbell episode of the Sixth Symphony. Composed
between 1911 and 1913, the op. 10 set was given titles in 1919 that suggest
both a preoccupation with the “memory of [Webern’s] mother and the
enduring sense of her transfigured presence.”65 Yet like Schoenberg’s
op. 19, no. 6, the third piece of Webern’s set is also an homage to Mahler.
The rarified mountain air of the Austrian Alps blows throughout the piece.
The most concrete manifestation comes in the form of an annotation wie ein
Hauch (like a breath – or perhaps more appropriately in this context, like a
waft of cool air), which Webern presumably borrowed from Mahler’s Eighth
Symphony where it marks the entrance of the Chorus Mysticus at the end
of the work (five after 202).66 For Julian Johnson, the connections between
the op. 10 set and the Eighth Symphony go even deeper. After all, Webern
not only attended the symphony’s 1910 Munich première, but he also played
the celesta part during subsequent performances in Vienna and Prague in
the year after Mahler’s death.67 Indeed, as Johnson goes onto suggest, these
two works are rather closely bound together:
A cursory comparison of the orchestration of the third of the Five Pieces for
Orchestra, op. 10, and that of the music associated with the Virgin Mary in
Mahler’s Eighth, will show an immediate kinship: harmonium, harp, celesta,
glockenspiel, mandolin, and even solo violin. The vast Part II of Mahler’s symph-
ony ascends gradually to this high altitude, demarcated as a new space by sonorities
unprecedented in the rest of this symphony.68
But if the alpine character of these two works shares a range of Marian and
maternal associations, in the Sixth Symphony the complete absence of such
associations gives rise to a mountain air that is anything but pure.
65
Ibid., 123. The common view of a straightforward tension between country and city that is
found throughout the Mahler literature is re-inscribed in terms of Johnson’s broader
interpretation of Webern.
66
This annotation also appears in the Andante of the Sixth Symphony (five after 99) as well as in
the last measure of Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, no. 6. Egon Wellesz’s
observation that Schoenberg’s piece “came into being as the result of the impression made on
him by Mahler’s funeral” has generally been understood as a reference to the bells that
mourners would have most likely heard during Mahler’s funeral at Vienna’s Grinzinger
Friedhof. Egon Wellesz, Arnold Schönberg, trans. W.H. Kerridge (London: J.M. Dent & Sons
Ltd., 1925), 31. By employing this marking, Schoenberg pays homage to Mahler while affirming
his close connection to Webern.
67
Julian Johnson, “Webern’s ‘Middle Period’: Body of the Mother or Law of the Father?”
repercussions 6 (1997): 93.
68
Ibid., 94.
104 Alpine journeys
Of cowbells and solitude
Mahler completed the Sixth Symphony in the summer of 1904, during

which time he also composed two additional songs for the
Kindertotenlieder cycle and the two serenades (Nachtmusiken) that were
eventually incorporated into the Seventh Symphony. The Sixth was first
published in March 1906 by C. F. Kahnt of Leipzig and appeared in a
revised edition in November of the same year. Whereas the bulk of the
revisions concern matters of orchestration, what has received the most
scrutiny is the “reordering” of the inner movements and the omission of
the third hammer blow in the Finale.69 What has received far less attention
is the subtle reworking of the cowbell episode in the development section
of the first movement. For in the revised edition of the score, Mahler added,
among other things, a footnote that attempts to foreclose the possibility of
a programmatic reading of this crucial passage.
Following the première of the Sixth Symphony in Essen on 16 May 1906,
a critical consensus began to emerge that attributed programmatic
meaning to the cowbells. Friedrich Brandes, for example, wrote that they
“gave to the whole a pastoral not to mention bovine character.”70 For Otto
Neitzel, their meaning shifted over the course of the work, suggesting in
the context of the first movement a “calling motiv” (Lockmotiv), in the
Andante “alpine accessories” (Alpen-Accessoire), and in the Finale the
“sounds of longing” (Klänge der Sehnsucht).71 In the wake of the work’s
Munich première on 8 November 1906, a more detailed assessment of the
cowbells soon followed. In a lengthy review, Hugo Daffner initially
expressed puzzlement about their inclusion: “How should these offstage
69
The most important account of the work remains Jülg, Gustav Mahlers Sechste Symphonie. A
detailed discussion of the Finale can be found in Peter Andraschke, “Gustav Mahlers Retuschen
im Finale seiner 6. Symphonie,” in Mahler-Interpretationen: Aspekte zum Werke und Wirken
von Gustav Mahler, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1986), 63–80. For a summary of the
issues, see Henry Louis de La Grange, Vienna: Triumph and Dissolution (1904–1907), vol. 3 of
Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 813–16. For a reassessment of the
question of the movement order, see The Correct Movement Order in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,
ed. Gilbert Kaplan (New York: The Kaplan Foundation, 2004); and Gastón Fournier-Facio,
“The ‘Correct’ Order of the Middle Movements in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” in
Donald Mitchell, Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005, selected by
Gastón Fournier-Facio and Richard Alston, edited by Gastón Fournier-Facio (Woodbridge,
UK: The Boydell Press, 2007), 633–47.
70
“[D]ie dem Ganzen einen pastoralen, um nicht zu sagen bovalen Character geben.”
Friedrich Brandes, “Von der Essener Tonkünstlerversammlung II,” Kunstwart 19 (July
1906): 428.
71
Otto Neitzel, Signale für die musikalische Welt 64 (6 June 1906): 690.
Of cowbells and solitude 105
cowbells be taken in music that is neither programmatic nor operatic?”72

Yet he soon engaged in a discussion of their symbolic potential by quoting
the remarks of an unnamed commentator who connected the cowbells
with “high (!) pure air and wonderful solitude” (hohe (!), reine Luft und
wundervolle Einsamkeit).73 Ultimately, however, he accused Mahler of
profaning art with the “crassest and most superficial naturalism”
(oberflächlichster, krassester Naturalismus).74
If such criticism led to a concerted effort on the part of the composer to
discourage an overtly programmatic interpretation, it also resulted in a
contradictory picture regarding the reasons for their inclusion in the first
place. Mahler’s calculated intervention came in two stages. The first
involved the addition of a cryptic footnote in the revised edition of the
score published in November 1906:
The cowbells must be treated with great discretion so as to produce a realistic
impression of the bells of a grazing herd of cattle whose sound drifts from the
distance, sometimes alone sometimes in groups, in sounds of high and low pitch. It
must, however, be made explicit that this technical remark does not allow for a
programmatic interpretation.75
While Mahler appears to acknowledge, if not openly encourage, the bucolic

associations created by this sonority, his note also betrays a clear irritation
with the continued perception that his works possessed a programmatic
dimension. On the one hand, as Friedrich Brandes observed in his review of
the work’s première, “[Mahler] wrote program music without a program (Er
schreibt Programmusik ohne Programm).”76 On the other hand, if Mahler’s
footnote was meant to be a response to the critics, it had little influence on
the work’s early reception. Writing in Die Wage following its Viennese
première on 4 January 1907, Max Vancsa remarked, “the many cows in
72
“Was sollen diese hinter der Szene zu ‘spielenden’ Heerdenglocken in einer Musik, die nicht
Programm- oder Opernmusik geben will?” Hugo Daffner, “Sechste Symphonie von Gustav
Mahler. Erstaufführung unter Leitung des Komponisten am 8 November 1906.” Musikalisches
Wochenblatt 37/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73 (22 November 1906): 861/923.
73
Ibid. The unnamed critic is Richard Specht who makes this remark in the introduction to his
analysis of the Sixth Symphony. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler, Sechste Symphonie:
Thematischer Führer (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1906), 5.
74
Daffner, “Sechste Symphonie von Gustav Mahler,” 861/923.
75
“Die Herdenglocken müssen sehr diskret behandelt werden – in realistischer Nachahmung von
bald vereinigt, bald vereinzelnt aus der Ferne herüberklingenden (höheren und tieferen)
Glöckchen einer weidenden Herde. – Es wird jedoch ausdrücklich bemerkt, dass diese tech-
nische Bemerkung keine programmatische Ausdeutung zulässt.” Gustav Mahler, Sechste
Symphonie für Grosses Orchester (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1906), 35.
76
Brandes, “Von der Essener Tonkünstlerversammlung,” 427.
106 Alpine journeys
this ‘tragic’ symphony have been the cause of particular amusement.”77 For
Albert Kauders, the passage as a whole suggested the temperature of an
“otherworldly mountain air” (weltentrückte Höhenluft) in which “the sonor-
ous ice crystals had such a chilling effect on an artistically sensitive lady in the
audience that she tightened her fur collar.”78 Only Julius Korngold was
explicit in his declaration that the cowbells were “never considered to be
programmatic but rather only as a sound nuance” (die nie programmatisch,
sondern nur als Klangnuance in Betracht kommen).79
It was for this reason that in the following year Mahler made a more public
attempt to clarify his intentions, an intervention that would come to have a
direct and lasting impact on the reception of the cowbells in the Sixth and
Seventh Symphonies. On 26 October 1908, during rehearsals for the Munich
première of the Seventh Symphony, he discussed the meaning of the cow-
bells with the musicologist and composer Edgar Istel, who at the time of the
première was a correspondent for the Berlin-based Allgemeine Musik-
Zeitung. In his subsequent review of the Seventh Symphony, Istel published
Mahler’s remarks as part of his discussion of that work’s second movement:
Mahler said that up to now the public and critics had apparently not grasped the
meaning of this timbre. The composer never intended to use cowbells to conjure
up magically an image of a cow or a sheep herd through tone-painting. Rather, he
wanted to characterize the distant ringing and fading of natural sounds. He
envisioned that passage in the work as if he stood on the highest peak, facing
infinity. This sound alone seemed to him suitable for symbolizing loneliness and
complete disengagement from the world, just as the fading sounds of grazing herds
floats upwards, symbolizing the last farewell to existence for someone who walks
alone on the mountaintop.80
77
“Die vielen Kühe in dieser ‘tragischen’ Sinfonie haben besondere Heiterkeit vorgerufen.”
Max Vancsa, “Gustav Mahlers Sechste Sinfonie,” Die Wage 2 (1907): 38.
78
“Die tönenden Eiskristalle wirkten auf eine kunstsinnige Dame so polarisch, daß sie ihre
Pelzboa umhing.” Albert Kauders, “Gustav Mahlers Sechste Sinfonie,” Fremden-Blatt
(5 January 1907), 17.
79
Julius Korngold, “Mahlers Sechste Sinfonie,” Neue Freie Presse (8 January 1907), 2.
80
“Mahler sagte, Publikum und Kritik hätten anscheinend den Sinn der Verwendung dieser
Klangfarbe bisher nicht begriffen. Es kam dem Komponisten durchaus nicht darauf an, mit
diesen Herdenglocken irgendwie tonmalerisch das Bild einer Kuh- oder Schafherde vorzu-
zaubern. Er will vielmehr damit nur ein ganz aus weitester Ferne erklingendes, verhallendes
Erdengeräusch charakterisieren. Jene Stelle seines Werkes kommt ihm so vor, als ob er auf
höchstem Gipfel im Angesicht der Ewigkeit stehe. Und wie dem einsam auf Bergeshöhe
Wandelnden als letzter Gruß lebender Wesen nur noch der verklingende Ton fern weidender
Herden herauftönt, so erscheint ihm auch jener Klang als einzig geeignet zur Symbolisierung
weltfernster Einsamkeit.” Edgar Istel, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 35 (6 November 1908):
797–98. Quoted in Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–
1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 93. Translation emended. These
Of cowbells and solitude 107
Paraphrased summaries of Istel’s remarks almost immediately made their

way into the emerging literature on the Sixth Symphony, although at first
these paraphrases were not used in the analytical portions of these
accounts. Karl Weigl, for instance, confined his own remarks to the
introduction of his detailed guide to the work:
The sound of the cowbells has become one of the most familiar symbols of
world-weary isolation for those who have visited the grounds of our high Alps: it
is the last sound that reaches the world of man from the desolate heights and
reminds us of the “valley below” from which we have just happily escaped.81
It was not until after Mahler’s death that paraphrases of Istel’s remarks
began to find their way into analytical accounts of the first movement. In
particular, it was their use in the influential studies of Richard Specht and
Guido Adler that set in motion the tradition of interpreting the cowbell
episode as a contemplative enclave.82 This was given added weight by Paul
Bekker, whose paraphrase of Istel’s remarks are elevated to the status of
Mahler’s “own words” (nach Mahlers eigenen Worten). In addition, by
describing the cowbells as “sound-symbols” (Klangsymbole) that are “highly
symbolic in intention” (hoch-symbolisch intentioniert), Bekker firmly
ascribes this intention to Mahler himself.83
The postwar period gave rise to a generation of writers who continued
this interpretive tradition while suggesting new interpretive possibilities. In
his brief but rarely cited discussion of the passage, the German philosopher
Ernst Bloch alludes to the established symbolic associations that linked the
cowbells with the notion of solitude while reframing in more explicitly
visual terms the alpine connection first made by Karl Weigl:
remarks were reprinted in a slightly revised form as Edgar Istel, “Persönlichkeit und Leben
Gustav Mahlers,” in Karl Weigl, Gustav Mahler: Vierte Symphonie, Musikführer no. 318
(Berlin: Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, [1908]), 5–6; and again as the foreword to
Edgar Istel, Ludwig Schiedermair, Hermann Teibler, and Karl Weigl, Mahlers Symphonien,
Meisterführer no. 10 (Berlin: Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, [1910]), 9–13.
81
“Der Klang der Herdenglocken ist jedem, der die Böden unserer Hochalpen besucht hat, ein
vertrautes Symbol ihrer weltfernen Abgeschiedenheit geworden: es ist der letzte Klang, der
aus der Menschenwelt zu den verlassenen Höhen hinauftönt und an das ‘Unten’ mahnt, dem
wir eben glücklich entronnen sind.” Weigl, Gustav Mahler: Sechste Symphonie, 3. Although
Weigl’s analysis was published in 1908, it appears to be a shortened paraphrase of Istel’s
article. In his analysis of the movement, Weigl makes no special mention of the cowbells but
does nevertheless refer to the episode as “one of the symphony’s strangest passages” (eine der
merkwürdigsten Stimmungen der Symphonie). Ibid., 6.
82
Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), 293; Guido Adler, Mahler
(Vienna: Universal Edition, 1916), 72.
83
Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), 209.
108 Alpine journeys
Uniquely non-Wagnerian, despite all the Romantic affinities, are the high Alps
[Hochalpe] here in the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which is
otherwise so highly tragic: over an underlying bass keyless chords, third inversions
of the seventh chord which alternate with triads, interspersed with cow-bells,
flutes, drums; a tone image of the solitude of nature high above [Tonbild von
Natureinsamkeit hoch droben].84
Nevertheless, by the middle of the century, more general appeals to the

visual became increasingly common. For Hans Ferdinand Redlich, the
passage is notable for “its associative links with alpine scenery . . . and
its inexhaustible vistas toward distant horizons.”85 Norman Del Mar goes
even further. In addition to offering a general description of its contem-
plative and pastoral character, he comes close to providing a specific
programmatic reading of the passage. In his description of the descend-
ing wind figure at 21, Del Mar writes: “This melodic fragment, seeming at
first to have been left high and dry by the instantaneous change of scene,
in fact returns from time to time in reflective vein, almost as if Mahler
were visualizing his wife strolling amongst the mountain cows on some
verdant Alm.”86 Indeed, for Del Mar, this passage is “pure scene-setting
by a master of theatre, albeit a composer who never in his life wrote a
stage work.”87
Whereas the perceived programmatic resonances of this passage have
long preoccupied commentators and analysts alike, another aspect of
Mahler’s revision has received only passing attention: namely, the careful
addition of performance directions that transformed the already distant
cowbells into a complex succession of mobile utterances. Unlike the first
edition of the score, in which the cowbells remain immer in der Ferne
(always in the distance), in the revised score, Mahler added the following
indications: näher kommend (coming nearer) six after 21, sich entfernend
(going further away) three before 22, sehr schwach (very weak) at 24, and
sich gänzlich verlierend (completely dying away) five before 25. Whereas
this calculated revision does not appear motivated by any obvious
programmatic concern, what it does offer is another clear reflection of
84
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, vol. 3
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1083. Peter Franklin offers a similar perspective but
appeals more directly to the experience of the listener. For Franklin, this passage “evokes an
experience of high-mountain solitude [in which] unrelated triads and 7th chords drift like
mist.” Peter Franklin, “Gustav Mahler,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie, vol. 15 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 620.
85
Redlich, foreword to Gustav Mahler, Symphony VI, xvi.
86
Del Mar, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, 37–38. 87 Ibid., 79.
Utopia 109
Mahler’s early debt to the conventions of operatic “stage music,” a debt that
as this example shows resonated far beyond his early symphonies.
Utopia
Whereas Ernst Bloch’s rather specific notion of Tonbild did not gain much
currency amongst analysts, there is nevertheless one aspect of his assess-
ment that has resonated more deeply: namely, his belief that by offering us
a glimpse beyond the “here and now,” this passage possesses a utopian
impulse. Without mentioning Bloch by name, several recent commenta-
tors have suggested that just such an impulse might lie at the core of this
passage. In his moving epistle to the late Edward Reilly, Donald Mitchell
states that the cowbells in both the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies were
deployed “to represent a vision of an altogether ‘other world’ where peace
reigned and which in some distant future might even be attained.”88 More
recently, Julian Johnson has made explicit reference to the cowbells as “a
cipher of utopian space outside the main discourse of the movement.”89 In
what is perhaps the most thorough assessment of this general impulse,
Hans-Peter Jülg identifies a dualism between the world of the march
(Realwelt) and that of the episode itself (Traumwelt).90 For Jülg, however,
“the ‘dream episode’ [Traumepisode] is not only the antipode of the
preponderant march character but also describes the Other: the moment
of standstill with respect to the hustle and bustle of the world’s course as
well as the vision of another better world.”91 But as we have seen, the
passage’s idyllic surface is nothing more than an illusion. And if we accept
the premise of its illusory nature, it might in turn be thought of as the most
powerful reflection of the symphony’s ultimately unfulfilled utopian
promise.
Recognition of an element of the self-conscious critique that runs
through these episodes has not been entirely absent from recent accounts
of the work. The basic point of departure for such a discussion has been
88
Donald Mitchell, “Dearest Ted,” in Discovering Mahler, ed. Fournier-Facio, 626.
89
90
Jülg, Gustav Mahlers Sechste Symphonie, 65–78.
91
“Die ‘Traumepisode’ ist nicht nur der Antipode zur Präponderanz der Marschcharaktere, sie
beschreibt auch das Andere: den Stillstand im Getriebe des Weltlaufs und die Vision von einer
anderen, einer besseren Welt.” Ibid., 72. By employing the term Traumepisode, Jülg is
acknowledging the early analyses of Karl Weigl (1910), Richard Specht (1913), and Paul
Bekker (1921).
110 Alpine journeys
Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht’s reference to the Other (das Andere) to which

Jülg alludes.92 For Eggebrecht, the very sound of the cowbells is a source of
disturbance in the sense that the “instrument” does not belong to the
traditional orchestral apparatus: “This sound is not ‘beautiful,’ indeed is
not artistically beautiful, but rather artistically foreign, it is the extreme
opposite of art.”93 This thread is picked up by Raymond Knapp, who in the
context of his discussion of the Fourth Symphony suggests that “the
naturalistic deployment of sleigh bells corresponds closely to Mahler’s
later use of cowbells in his symphonies: with each, both referential
meanings and the strangeness of the sound itself in a symphonic context
come into play.”94 Julian Johnson engages more directly with Eggebrecht
and in particular with his discussion of Naturlaut as an embodiment of the
Other, but he takes Eggebrecht’s claim one step further. For Johnson, “the
‘otherness’ of nature is more than a philosophical idea – it was an idea
embodied in the social practice of the fin de siècle and thus a historical ‘fact’
of the social construction of nature.”95 Johnson also alludes to Eggebrecht’s
notion of “transplantation” in which the otherness of the cowbells prevents
them from being “absorbed into musical syntax”:
Mahler urges his performers to attempt a realistic imitation of the tinkling bells of
distant Alpine herds, while at the same time denying any programmatic intention.
What seems like realism is, more accurately, merely deconstructive. By means of
its distance from the tones of art music, the cowbell stands for what remains
unappropriated; the idea of ‘otherness’ is thus embodied by a sound from beyond
the hitherto autonomous aesthetic universe of instrumental music. By importing
‘real nature’ into the symphony orchestra, Mahler exposes the artificiality of the
conventional pastoral.96
What I am suggesting here, then, is that the very presence of this

unappropriated sonority serves to undercut the passge’s utopian impulse
in a way that has profound implications for our interpretation of the
symphony as a whole. In this connection, it is worth noting Warren
Darcy’s discussion of the work’s tonal trajectory and the failure of what
92
Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1982),
17–24, 147–48, 181–82, and 194–97.
93
“Dies Gebimmel ist nicht ‘schön’, ist kein Kunstschönes, sondern ein Kunstfremdes, ein der
Kunst gegenüber extrem anderes.” Ibid., 22.
94
Raymond Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-
Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 216–17.
95
Julian Johnson, “Mahler and the Idea of Nature,” in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed.
Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 25.
96
Ibid., 26.
Utopia 111
he terms the Erlösung paradigm: “[a]s it proceeds the work appears to

question or even deny the worth of the aspiration itself: it posits utopia as
an illusion, a self-deluding conceit, the pursuit of which is ultimately
futile.”97
If in the first movement the cowbells occupy a space on the threshold of
the audible, in the Scherzo they fall momentarily silent. This is perhaps
surprising in light of the fact that in Mahler’s earlier symphonic works, the
“idyllic” voice is most frequently evoked in the context of the Scherzo. As in
the Seventh Symphony, however, such an episode is absent in part because
the distinction between Scherzo and Trio has been so thoroughly blurred.
Put more directly, the idyll has in effect been driven out of the Scherzo. As
for the Andante, it presents a special challenge for those who are deter-
mined to make a case for the cowbells as symbolic markers of solitude. In
this context, the cowbells are treated rather explicitly as a theatrical prop.
Not only is this blatantly non-orchestral instrument on full display, it
seems to compete for attention with the rest of the orchestra. Whereas at
their initial appearance (three after 94 to two after 95), the cowbells
gradually fade away in terms of both dynamics and duration, when they
reappear (nine after 100 to one before 101), they are completely and indeed
shockingly effaced by the collective mass of sound produced by the
orchestra.98
Of these two passages, it is the first that resonates most clearly with the
cowbell episode in the first movement. And like the initial episode, most
analysts have also heard these cowbells as symbolic markers of solitude
(three after 94). Drawing on Paul Bekker’s observation that this passage
strongly resembles the E-major breakthrough in the slow movement of the
Fourth Symphony, Robert Samuels has observed that Mahler consistently
uses E major to “symbolise Utopian escape.”99 For Warren Darcy, this
passage is an instance of breakthrough (Durchbruch) that projects a “sus-
pended ‘vision of paradise’” and through its key of E major can be related to
the “celestial visions” found in the last two movements of the Fourth.100 In
Darcy’s view, then, the passage as whole suggests “a conscious illusion, a
mere fantasy.” It is a passage that is “foreordained to collapse, which it does
through a striking chromatic disintegration.”101 He bolsters this claim by
pointing to the passage’s suggestive intertextual allusions, which include
97
Darcy, “Rotational Form,” 50.
98
For the two inner movements, rehearsal numbers follow the Scherzo-Andante ordering.
99
Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge:
100
Darcy, “Rotational Form,” 63. 101 Ibid., 63–66.
112 Alpine journeys
references to the “Forrest Murmurs” from Act II of Siegfried, the “nature”

motive from the first scene of Das Rheingold, as well as the E-major scenes
of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. But, as Darcy concludes, “Like the child’s
vision of heaven that closes Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, however, this is a
lost paradise that can now exist only in the imagination.”102
Despite the existence of a distinguished interpretive tradition that has
heard this passage as symbolizing the desire for utopian escape, recent
analytical accounts have been more reluctant to suggest that it possesses
such an untroubled sense of longing. If a relative sense of tranquility is
established here, at the same time virtually everything else about this passage
seems designed to undermine this character. From the forced arrival in the
key of E major (one measure before 94) to the presence of an overly active
orchestral texture, virtually everything about this passage lends it an
unusually restless quality. This is further underlined by the treatment of
the cowbells, whose entrance three measures after 94 are anything but
tranquil. Unlike the first and last movements, where the cowbells are
heard from a distance, here they sound from the stage (im Orchester).
Despite what Bekker and others have pointed to as the passage’s uplifting
quality, this is further and in my view decisively undermined by the
increasingly dense orchestral web that gradually envelops them.103
If in the passage described earlier, it is clear that the cowbells are used to
evoke the pastoral, when they return nine measures after 100, their mean-
ing is far less obvious. It is perhaps for this reason that analysts have largely
avoided discussing and ascribing meaning to the role of the cowbells in this
unusual passage. Their entrance is set up at 100 where the listener is
confronted by a virtual wall of sound. Nine measures later, the cowbells
emerge briefly and again struggle to be heard. What is so striking about this
moment is the impression that the cowbells are attempting to force their
way through the orchestral texture. Despite the fact that they are marked
forte, they remain almost completely buried by the orchestra, which even-
tually obscures them entirely.
If the Andante is characterized by increasingly compromised evocations
of the pastoral, it is not until the Finale that the illusory nature of these
evocations is fully exposed.104 Indeed, the presence of the cowbells over the
course of the work as a whole has prompted many critics to offer a more
102
Ibid, 66.
103
In the second revised edition of the symphony, the sound of the cowbells is made more
intermittent.
104
It is in part for this reason that Warren Darcy has suggested that the symphony is “resolutely
nihilistic.” Ibid., 50.
Utopia 113
wide-ranging interpretation of their significance. Peter Andraschke has

suggested, for example, that they can be interpreted as representing the
voice of nature as well as the distance of this voice from modern society.105
In his study of Mahler’s symphonic Finales, Bernd Sponheuer suggests that
several passages in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, including
the cowbell episode, find their ultimate realization in the Finale as
“fulfillment fields” (Erfüllungsfelder).106 Sponheuer observes that in their
new context, these episodes are subject to “critical revision” (kritische
Revision), a process of intensification that in the end only serves to
undermine further their broken quality.107
In comparison with the first movement, what immediately stands out is
the relative brevity of these critically reworked episodes.108 The threefold
“return” of this material over the course of the Finale is distinguished by
the fact that this newly reconstituted episode now forms a crucial part of
the movement’s recurring introduction. At the outset, this introduction
establishes a basic repertory of musical gestures that recurs over the course
of the movement in various guises.109 This material is composed of three
main elements: first, an initial attack accompanied by harp and celesta out
of which a soaring melodic line emerges; second, the so-called double
motto consisting of the major-minor alteration in the brass and the
rhythmic motto in the timpani; and, finally, an exposed melody in the
tuba that anticipates the primary theme of the exposition.
In the context of the introduction, the return of material from the first
movement, while clearly derived from the original cowbell episode, bears
only a passing resemblance to that passage. Reduced from a fifty-three-
measure span to a five-measure fragment, Mahler fundamentally alters the
timbre of this highly compressed passage by replacing the cowbells with
deep bells (tiefes Glockegeläute).110 Several programmatic interpretations
have been put forward concerning the symbolic significance of this new
105
Andraschke, “Struktur und Gehalt,” 290.
106
Bernd Sponheuer, Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den Symphonien
Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing: Schneider, 1978), 281–352, esp. 339.
107
Ibid., 340. Fourteen after 104 to six before 105 (deep bells), 121 to two after 122 (cowbells and
deep bells), and 145 to one before 146 (deep bells and cowbells).
108
Whereas the initial episode is fifty-three measures in length, in the Finale the episodes are five,
twenty-three, and twenty-six measures, respectively.
109
Beginning of movement-nine after 104, 120 to three before 121, 143 to two before 145, and
164 to seven after 164.
110
Mahler broke new ground by incorporating this new timbre into an orchestral context. Anton
Webern followed his lead in op. 6, no. 4., as well as in op. 10, no. 3. In the first published version
of op. 6, Webern calls for the bells to be placed in the distance (in der Ferne aufgestellt), an
instruction that is omitted from the 1928 revision.
114 Alpine journeys
sonority, including the suggestion that it evokes the peal of church bells
and thus stands as a symbol of “dogmatic creed.”111
The second introduction precedes the development section and is nota-
ble because it omits the second and third components of the introduction
described earlier. In this truncated form, the soaring violin melody is
followed almost immediately by the return of the “critically revised”
pastoral evocation (two before 121). From the perspective of sonority,
the return of the cowbells provides a direct connection to the episode
from the opening movement. After suddenly breaking off (twelve after
121), the cowbells are replaced after a four-measure pause by deep bells. In
the second introduction, the two timbres are kept separate; in the context
of the third introduction, they overlap before they are abruptly cut off by
the return of the second theme.
It is the introduction’s fourth and final iteration (at 164) where any
hope of a positive outcome is decisively rejected. Here the music follows
the ordering of materials established at the beginning of the movement.
Following the double motto, however, the tuba melody diverges from its
expected path. In the brief epilogue that ensues, the expected episode,
which has followed the three previous statements of the introduction, is
denied. In its absence, the crushing sense of defeat is palpable. It reveals
the sense of hope offered by the increasingly fleeting evocations of the
pastoral to have been in vain. While it is not until this moment that the
work’s utopian aspirations are fully thwarted, in retrospect it is also clear
that this outcome is already anticipated in the original cowbell episode
from the first movement. That this passage continues to be heard as a
moment of pastoral bliss demonstrates the way in which Mahler’s “own
words” continue to exert a powerful influence over the interpretation of
his music.
Escape routes
In a letter to Friedrich Gernsheim, written during the composer’s

Hamburg years, Mahler refers directly to the theme of escape so often
invoked by his contemporaries:
There are times when I am disheartened and feel like giving up music completely,
thinking of ultimate happiness as an obscure and tranquil existence in some quiet
111
Redlich, foreword to Gustav Mahler, Symphony VI, viii.
Escape routes 115
corner of this earth. What crushes my spirits is this terrible treadmill of the
opera-house.112
In spite of this earnest wish, an underlying ambivalence also haunts this

passage.113 For like Rainer Maria Rilke’s fictional writer Malte Laurids
Brigge – an aspiring poet who wishes for a solitary existence in the
mountains far from his adopted city of Paris – Mahler understood that
the metropolis was the true source of his livelihood, and ultimately the
most significant inspiration for the work he produced.114
As we have seen over the course of this chapter, Mahler’s practice of
seeking out a quieter and more idyllic place forced him to confront the new
reality of the Austrian “countryside,” which during his lifetime had become
fully intertwined with the metropolis from which he so often wished to take
refuge. If, as Georg Simmel suggests in “The Alpine Journey,” the railway
opened up the mountains to the bourgeoisie, his critique of what was
becoming an increasingly common cultural practice also has implications
for our understanding of Mahler’s complex musical evocation of alpine
heights. By challenging Mahler’s own self-interpretation concerning
his relationship to nature, we also gain new insight into his creation of
an alpine topos, that while offering fleeting moments of tranquility is
ultimately crowded to the point of bursting.
112
Mahler to Friedrich Gernsheim, [Hamburg, January] 1897, Selected Letters of Gustav
Mahler, 206.
113
Mahler’s wish to escape from the pressures of urban life is expressed with particular clarity in a
letter to Anna von Mildenburg in which he describes his visit to a bell foundry on the outskirts
of Berlin: “When I arrived in Zehlendorf (that is the name of the place) and tried to find the
way amid pines and firs, all covered in snow, everything quite rural, with a pretty church gaily
sparkling in the winter sun, I left my troubles behind, seeing how free and happy man becomes
as soon as he leaves the unnatural restless bustle of city life and returns to the tranquility of
nature.” Mahler to Anna von Mildenburg, Berlin, 8 December 1897, Selected Letters of Gustav
Mahler, 170–71. Yet during his tenure at the Vienna Court Opera, Mahler “made a point of
being present almost every day in his office and available to his subordinates. Anyone who
wanted a quick answer or a word of advice had access to him, even when he had an outside
visitor with him.” La Grange, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 354.
114
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York:
Vintage International, 1982), 41–42. Despite the clearly autobiographical nature of The
Notebooks, Judith Ryan has pointed out that Rilke offered “repeated warnings that his fictional
protagonist was less a direct stand-in for himself than a negative alter ego.” Judith Ryan, Rilke,
Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 42.
4 Symphonic panoramas
[W]ith the tremendous acceleration of life, mind and eye have become
accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and everyone
is like the traveller who gets to know a land and its people from a railway
carriage.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human
Having mastered totality, the composition turns its thoughts to the

opposite, a meaning that arises from fragments.
Theodor W. Adorno – Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy
As we saw in the previous chapter, the last decade of the nineteenth century
witnessed the transformation of rural Austria into one of the most important
sites of fin-de-siècle urban culture. By the mid-1890s, the fashionable resorts
and spas of the Salzkammergut and Südtirol were already part of a highly
developed tourist infrastructure sustained in part by the extensive network
of the Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways (Kaiserlich-königliche
österreichische Staatsbahnen). Whereas Mahler’s lifelong attachment
to these places remained crucial to his identity, less often noted is his
ambivalent relationship to this rapidly evolving landscape. If the relative
solitude it offered remained a significant attraction, Mahler’s dependence on
regular human contact also meant that the places he sought out needed to be
easily accessible in relation to the major urban centres of Austria-Hungary
and beyond.1 Not only were the villages of Steinbach, Maiernigg, and
Toblach (Dobbiaco) far less isolated than is often imagined, they were also
microcosms of the very cities from which the composer so often claimed to
take refuge. Despite this unmistakable urban imprint, Mahler’s relationship
to these places has been understood almost exclusively in terms of nature
and landscape. What is more, most accounts of Mahler’s attitude towards
nature in this context have focused almost exclusively on the stereotypically
rural pursuits of walking and hiking, a topic to which I will return in the final
1
For an account of the bustling lakeside village of Steinbach that emphasizes its status as a busy
tourist hub, see Julian Johnson, “The Sound of Nature? – Mahler, Klimt, and the Changing
Representation of Nature in Early Viennese Modernism,” in Wien 1897. Kulturgeschichtliches
116 Profil eines Epochenjahres, ed. Christian Glanz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 189–204.
Symphonic panoramas 117
chapter. While the importance of these activities is undeniable, less often

acknowledged is the extent to which Mahler’s relationship to landscape was
also shaped by an entirely different kind of experience: that of the modern
traveller. As an active consumer of the Austrian countryside, Mahler’s
encounter with landscape was determined as much by the traditional
practices of walking and hiking as it was by the technologies that afforded
him such ready access to this newly constituted environment. As a regular
railway passenger, Mahler’s experience of landscape would have been shaped
at least in part by his view through the window of the railway carriage itself.
In what follows, I argue that the breathtaking panoramas he would have been
exposed to from this thoroughly modern vantage point – and in particular
their attendant moments of intrusion, disjunction, and disruption – offer a
powerful metaphor for coming to terms with the panoramic unfolding of
musical events that characterizes parts of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
The perceived relationship between Mahler’s symphonies and the idea
of landscape has most often been discussed in terms of two closely related
ideas. The first, introduced in the previous chapter, revolves around the
idea of the sound sheet (Klangfläche), a specific compositional technique
that gives rise to a musical texture memorably characterized by Carl
Dahlhaus in terms of its contemplative dialectic of motion within stasis.2
The second is tied to the more elusive idea of Naturlaut (the sound of
Nature), an idea that has prompted scholars to consider the relationship
between music and nature in aesthetic rather than in exclusively formal
terms.3 Despite the continuing relevance of these ideas as analytical and
hermeneutic tools, the associations with landscape in the Seventh
Symphony ultimately demand a different interpretive strategy: one in
which the work’s self-contained tableaux are considered more broadly as
part of the larger musical spans in which they are embedded. In this
chapter, I suggest that the interpretive framework for these unconven-
tional evocations of landscape might be broadened to include one of the
most characteristically “modern” aspects of his symphonic writing: the
frequent and often startling juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated musical
material. The frequent moments of disjunction in the Seventh Symphony
ultimately suggest a rather distinct type of temporal unfolding, one in
2
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 307.
3
See, in particular, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich: R. Piper &
Co. Verlag, 1982), 127–68. For a helpful overview of Eggebrecht’s treatment of this topic, see
Julian Johnson, “Mahler and the Idea of Nature,” Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed.
Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 23–36.
which a panoramic assemblage of musical events calls into question the

status of the self-contained tableau as the primary marker of landscape.
And it is in this sense that Mahler’s evocations of landscape in the Seventh
bear comparison with the constantly shifting perspective that charac-
terizes the experience of a modern railway passenger, a figure whose view
of landscape is framed by the very technology that also played a crucial
role in reshaping it.
Mahler’s debt to the established traditions of musical landscape depiction
is reflected in his symphonic works, above all in his reliance on the sound
sheet and its principle of motion in stasis. Yet on occasion, Mahler takes
this a step further by animating these tableaux through the addition of
instruments that are both distant and mobile. As we have already seen
in Chapters 1 and 2, examples of sonic mapping abound in the early
symphonies, including in the first movement of the First Symphony and
the Finale of the Second. The Third Symphony offers yet another kind of
mobile sound in which the first movement’s multiple marches suggest the
active traversal of a succession of imaginary landscapes. In the Seventh
Symphony, by contrast, it is the landscape itself that seems to be in motion.
For in place of the static tableau, the listener is asked to attend to a sonic
panorama in which musical events, while unfolding in a continuous stream,
are also subjected to constant disruption. To lay the groundwork for an
exploration of the relationship between this seemingly discontinuous
assemblage of musical events and Mahler’s own technologically mediated
experience of landscape, I begin by considering the way in which nineteenth-
century painters depicted the place of railway in the increasingly industria-
lized landscapes of Western Europe. I discuss two well-known paintings in
which the intersection between speed and technology is revealed as a
disruptive presence: J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great
Western Railway (1844) and Adolph Menzel’s Berlin-Potsdam Railway
(1847). Here I consider the significance of the elevated vantage point
employed by Turner and Menzel and how this all-encompassing perspective
offers an attractive point of comparison with respect to the relationship
between landscape painting and the nineteenth-century symphony. I then
turn my attention to two representations of the modern traveller as depicted
within the confines of the railway carriage itself: Honoré Daumier’s The
Third-Class Carriage (c. 1862–64) and Menzel’s Travelling through the
Countryside (1892). These depictions serve as a point of entry for consider-
ing the idea of the modern subject as a spectator of landscape, as well as the
widely held belief that the railway’s very speed gave rise to a new physiog-
nomy of landscape. As an analogue to this “new way of seeing,” I then
Turner, Menzel, and the “Elevated viewpoint” 119
consider the proto-cinematic technology of the moving panorama, a

nineteenth-century form of optical entertainment that attempted to replicate
the experience of the modern traveller. This leads in turn to a discussion of a
far more direct and indeed modern way of representing the experience of
landscape in Auguste and Louis Lumière’s early film, Panorama of the
Arrival at Perrache Station from the Train (1896). I show that by recreating
the perspective of the individual passenger, the Lumière brothers capture not
only the way in which landscape came to be experienced by the travelling
public but also the extent to which the railway reconfigured the landscape
itself. I suggest that against this backdrop, the “moving image” emerges as a
particularly apt metaphor for coming to terms with the broad musical
tableaux that characterize much of the Seventh Symphony. Specifically, I
argue that the experience of landscape captured in this short film finds
a surprising analogue in the compositional procedures of the Finale, a
movement that possesses a famously fractured and often seemingly
discontinuous surface. Finally, I consider the role of intrusion, disjunction,
and disruption in the work’s other movements by focusing on the way
in which the idyllic voice itself emerges as the work’s most disruptive force.
Turner, Menzel, and the “Elevated viewpoint”
Among the numerous nineteenth-century depictions of the railway, per-

haps the most famous is J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed – The
Great Western Railway (1844; Figure 3). Turner successfully captures the
modernity of the railway in a late canvas that is still clearly indebted to
conventions of Romantic landscape painting. In Turner’s painting, the
locomotive emerges from the middle of the picture, hurtling towards the
viewer with unprecedented speed. Although its blurred outline is envel-
oped in a modern cloud of steam and smoke, Turner also invokes the
familiar Romantic topos of the storm, depicted here by a thick mist and
banks of low-lying clouds that enshroud much of the pictorial space. On
the one hand, Stephen Daniels has observed that this mingling of rain and
steam obscures a number of important details, including a group of figures
that occupies the riverbank, a small boat, a plough team, and in the left
middle distance what appears to be an old road bridge.4 Indeed, as he puts
it, “[t]he difficulty of recognizing anything but the traces or notations of
4
Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the
United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 124–26.
Figure 3. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western
Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas. 91 × 121.8 cm. National Gallery, London.
objects in an evanescent landscape” suggests a parallel with the accounts of

early rail travellers “who tried to adhere to old painterly ways of seeing
when looking out from trains.”5 Yet as he goes on to argue, Turner’s
painting goes beyond simple “phenomenological observation” regarding
the experience of rail travel:
In travelling through a landscape rather than upon it the railway confirmed visually
what Turner had been doing conceptually with his topographical style . . . breaking
the traditional frame of visibility to co-ordinate features as part of a larger network
of space and time.6
Although Daniels’s primary goal is to establish an interpretive framework

for a social and political reading of this painting, he also opens our eyes to
Turner’s careful depiction of the “railway ensemble” itself as a crucial site
of modernity.
Whereas Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed offers the most famous
depiction of the rapidly evolving relationship between technology and
the perception of landscape, it is Adolf Menzel’s Berlin-Potsdam Railway
5 6
Ibid., 126. Ibid.
Turner, Menzel, and the “Elevated viewpoint” 121
Figure 4. Adolf Menzel, Die Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn [The Berlin Potsdam

Railway], 1847. Oil on canvas. 42 × 52 cm. Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
(Die Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn) of 1847 that remains the most compel-

ling representation of the railway’s impact on the nineteenth-century
imagination (Figure 4). For Michael Fried, it offers a “brilliant evocation
of what must have seemed the astonishing speed of the new means of
transportation as it traversed the countryside.”7 Fried’s brief analysis draws
particular attention to the quality of motion captured by Menzel:
Typically, the large massy tree in the middle distance bends to the right apparently
under the pressure of a gust of wind, but what is easy to miss is that the steam from
the engine has been blown to the right as well, which is to say that the painting
associates the evocation of speed with a sensation of wind that a viewer in the
landscape would be likely to feel, and perhaps also with the rapid, impulsive
movement of the painter’s brush across the canvas (in places the countryside itself
seems to be in motion like a kind of sea).8
7
Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 69.
8
Ibid.
For Reinhold Brinkmann, by contrast, this painting offers a particularly

powerful example of “disturbance” or “interruption,” an element that he
identifies as one of Menzel’s most basic painterly principles. In
Brinkmann’s interpretation,
the diagonal bisecting of the picture by the railroad reflects the historical conflict
between nature and the industrial world in two ways: critically, as an element in
the destruction of an archaic landscape (virgin land, primitive arboreal growth)
and ancient life-styles (farmstead, sandy lane), but also enthusiastically, in
the dynamic progress stirringly evoked by the advancing steam locomotive.
The silhouette of metropolitan Potsdam provides the historical dimension,
constituting the background from which the “interruption” emanates, both
ideologically and formally.9
According to this reading, Menzel’s depiction is fully modern in that it

represents both a celebration and a critique of the charged relationship
between landscape and technology. But when taken together with his
more detailed account of the artist’s slightly earlier Das Balkonzimmer
(1845), what is most significant about Brinkmann’s analysis is that it
forms the basis for his broader claim that an equivalent to such distur-
bances might be found in the musical fabric of Johannes Brahms’s
Second Symphony. Many scholars, including Brinkmann, have observed
that a crucial aspect of the Berlin-Potsdam Railway is its “lofty
perspective.”10 While Brinkmann suggests that a parallel might be
drawn between this perspective and the music of Brahms, he does not
pursue the implications of this observation any further. It seems clear,
however, that it is from precisely this perspective that we begin to
perceive the relationship of this painting to Brahms’s symphony. For if,
by analogy, we consider the Second Symphony from the same lofty
vantage point as Menzel’s painting, the disturbances that trouble the
idyll do so without undermining it in any fundamental way.11
9
Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9.
10
Günter Busch refers to this perspective as an “imagined bird’s-eye view” (imaginierte
Vogelschau), while Michael Fried makes reference to the painting’s “elevated” perspective.
Günter Busch, “Menzels Grenzen,” in Adolph Menzel, Realist, Historist, Maler des Hofes, ed.
Jens Christian Jensen (Schweinfurt: Sammlung Georg Schäfer, 1981), 11. Fried, Menzel’s
Realism, 69.
11
Among the disturbances that trouble the surface of this otherwise serene symphony are what
Vincenz Lachner identified as the “rumbling kettledrum,” as well as the “gloomy lugubrious
tones of the trombones and tuba.” For a discussion of Lachner’s remarkable correspondence
with Brahms on this subject, see Brinkmann, Late Idyll, 125–44.
Ways of seeing: The railway compartment 123
Ways of seeing: The railway compartment
Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed and Menzel’s Berlin-Potsdam Railway

both offer compelling depictions of the way in which the railway
reshaped the British and European countrysides. But what the elevated
vantage point employed in these paintings does not capture is the way in
which landscape was actually experienced from the perspective of the
modern traveller. To this end, we need to turn our attention to the
representation of the railway compartment itself, a favourite subject of
the French printmaker and painter Honoré Daumier. In the unfinished
version of Daumier’s brilliantly restrained painting The Third-Class
Carriage (Le wagon de troisième classe) of 1862–64, the figures depicted
sit huddled together, their weathered faces projecting the quiet dignity of
those confined to the lowest rung of the travelling public (Figure 5).12
Figure 5. Honoré Daumier, Le wagon de troisième classe [The Third-Class Carriage].

c. 1862–64. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
12
This version of the Third-Class Carriage in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York also exists in several other versions including a watercolour from 1864 and
an oil painting from c. 1863–65. The former is in the Walters Museum of Art, Baltimore
(http://art.thewalters.org/detail/16494/the-third-class-carriage/), while the latter is in
the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/
collections/artwork.php?mkey=116).
The passengers are engaged in a variety of activities: resting, sleeping,

talking, and listening. Only the woman at the centre of the canvas is
engaged in the act of looking, though her gaze is directed at the viewer
rather than outward to what lies beyond the confines of the carriage.
Indeed, the weary passengers show no interest at all in the passing
landscape, which is represented here only by two slivers of light in the
upper left-hand corner of the picture.13
Whereas Daumier’s haunting canvas provides little evidence as to what
these nineteenth-century travellers might have seen through the window of
the carriage, Adolph Menzel’s Travelling through the Countryside (Auf der
Fahrt durch schöne Natur) of 1892 gets us one step closer. Among
other things, Menzel offers us a glimpse of a first-class carriage in all its
upholstered luxury. Of greater significance is his portrayal of its passengers
not as passive observers but rather as active spectators.14 Indeed, it is
ultimately their restless absorption that emerges as the main focus of
the painting. But despite the active nature of the viewing experience
represented here, Menzel refrains from depicting the object of the
passengers’ attention.15
If most nineteenth-century artists were seemingly uninterested in depict-
ing the experience of landscape as viewed from the railway compartment,
writers and poets demonstrated a far greater interest in this new perspective.
For many, travel by rail was a profoundly disorienting experience and
occasioned a wide assortment of responses from the celebratory to the
sceptical. Heinrich Heine – reflecting on the completion of the first railway
line between Paris and Rouen in 1843 – described the arrival of the railway as
a “providential event” (providentielles Ereignis):
What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions!
Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is
killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. . . . Now you can travel to
Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just
imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed
and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all
13
In the completed oil painting of 1863–65, the rolling hills outside the train are by contrast
clearly visible.
14
Reproduced in Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism, 71. Fried discusses this painting as part of his
broader critique of the notion that railway travel gave rise to a pre-cinematic spectator whose
active gaze is held in check by an immobile body.
15
Given the presence of the railway official at the window of the carriage, the train is clearly
stopped at a station.
countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees;
the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.16
With this famous observation, Heine makes clear the implications of the
railway’s challenge to the perception of time and space. But by invoking a
series of charged references to landscape, he also seems to be suggesting
that while the railway stood as an important symbol of modernity, what it
ultimately offered was a new kind of access to nature.17
Heine’s embrace of this new spatio-temporal reality was not, however,
shared by all of his contemporaries. For Joseph von Eichendorff, the effects
were entirely negative:
On a fine warm autumn morning, I came from the other end of Germany by railway
in a headlong rush, as if at danger of a life’s sentence I had speedily to finish the very
journey which was my sole purpose. These steam voyages shake the world (which
now really consists of nothing more than railway stations) incessantly like a kaleido-
scope in which the landscapes, flashing past, continuously make new faces before
one has grasped a single physiognomy, and in which the flying salon continuously
forms new assemblies before one has really recovered from the old ones.18
In Eichendorff’s view, speed did not simply distort landscape; it eviscerated it

entirely. Indeed, his observations exemplify the common view that railway
travel had a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of passengers, an
attitude that might also be thought of as masking a sentimental desire
to preserve the imagined bond between the Romantic artist and nature.19
This state of affairs can be attributed in part to a profound shift in the way
travel was conducted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his
study of the French writer Jules Michelet, Roland Barthes frames this shift
against the backdrop of what he calls the physiology of romantic travel:
[F]or the romantics, travel had an entirely different effect from its modern counterpart;
nowadays we participate in a journey by “eyes only,” and the very rapidity of our
course makes whatever we see a kind of remote and motionless screen. The physiology
of romantic travel (walking or coach) is just the contrary: here, landscape is slowly,
16
Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 37.
17
For a discussion of the railroad as a symbol of modernity in the context of the late-nineteenth-
century reception of Beethoven in England, see Ruth Solie, “Of Railroads, Beethoven, and
Victorian Modernity,” in Musicological Identities: Essay in Honor of Susan McClary, ed.
Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 149–62.
18
Quoted in Ludwig Finscher, “Brahms’s Early Songs: Poetry Versus Music,” in Brahms Studies:
Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. George S. Bozarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990), 338.
19
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 113–23.
arduously conquered; landscape surrounds, presses in, threatens, invades – one must
force one’s way through it, and not only by eyes but by muscles and patience: whence its
beauty and its terrors, which today seem to us excessive: romantic travel knows two
movements in which the human body is engaged: either the discomfort of progress or
else the euphoria of a panorama.20
Mahler was no stranger to the slow and arduous conquering of landscape

described by Barthes, but he was just as familiar with the modern indus-
trialized mode of travel created by the railway. As was the case for many of
his contemporaries – both composers and performers alike – the increasing
mobility made possible by the rapidly expanding railway networks of central
Europe continued to play a significant role in shaping Mahler’s career.21 And
for this reason, it is worth considering the attraction that the so-called
“Romantic” modes of travel continued to exert on composers in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Ludwig Finscher has observed that as a young
composer, Brahms “tried to relive the romantic dream of the wayfaring
artisan and artist” in part by shunning the railway.22 To illustrate his
point, Finscher paraphrases this famous story as reported by Brahms’s
biographer Max Kalbeck:
Kalbeck has lovingly described how Brahms and Reményi on their first concert
tour disdained the railroads most of the time and walked their way through
Germany, and how, some months later, the young composer en route to the
Schumanns wended his way on foot down the romantic Rhine valley, from the
region of Mainz to Düsseldorf – approximately 200 kilometres – with rucksack and
walking-stick, knocking at the doors of the other members of his ‘guild,’ like a real
travelling craftsman or one of Eichendorff’s students, poets, and good-for-
nothings who are always on the road.23
Whereas this account appears to reflect a calculated rejection of

modernity, for later generations the role of technology in shaping and
defining the experience of modern life was not only widely accepted but
had also become worthy of reflection and commentary.24 In a celebrated
20
Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 20–22.
21
This tendency was reflected most prominently in the figure of the touring virtuoso. See also
Celia Applegate, “Mendelssohn on the Road: Music, Travel, and the Anglo-German
Symbiosis,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane Fulcher
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 228–44.
22
Finscher, “Brahms’s Early Songs,” 338. 23 Ibid.
24
Kalbeck’s narrative does not accord with Brahms’s interest in and embrace of new
developments in science and technology. See Leon Botstein, “Time and
Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna,” in Brahms and His
World, ed. Walter Frisch and Kevin C. Karnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 3–25. For a helpful discussion that considers the
passage from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator reflects on this change by
describing his attempt to capture a complete picture of the surrounding
landscape from the confines of the railway carriage:
[T]he sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window,
to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of
Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave
place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with
moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a
firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my
strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite
window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running
from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the
intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning,
and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it.25
Like the spectators in Menzel’s Travelling Through the Countryside, the

narrator’s attempt to capture a “comprehensive view” and a “continuous
picture” of the surrounding landscape from the confines of a railway carriage
is revealed as an impossible task. Yet the very activity of viewing described by
Proust’s narrator can also serve as a trigger of memory. In Walter Benjamin’s
Berlin Childhood, 1900 – a sort of companion piece to Proust’s novel – the
author remembers the railway as an integral part of his childhood soundscape:
The rhythm of the metropolitan railway and of carpet-beating rocked me to sleep.
It was the mold in which my dreams took shape – first the unformed ones,
traversed perhaps by the sound of running water or the smell of milk, then the
long-spun ones: travel dreams and dreams of rain.26
But it is as a passenger perched high above the city that offers Benjamin the
crucial vantage point that enables him to look back upon his childhood:
Later, from the perspective of the railroad embankment, I rediscovered the court-
yards. When, on sultry summer afternoons, I gazed down on them from my
compartment, the summer appeared to have parted from the landscape and locked
itself into those yards.27
relationship between technology and literature, see Sara Danius, The Sense of Modernism:
Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
25
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,
rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 317.
26
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 39.
27
Ibid., 41.
Here through the lens of Benjamin’s melancholy prose, the bird’s-eye view
serves to reframe and ultimately reconstitute a once familiar landscape.
Against the backdrop of these vivid attempts by Heine, Eichendorff,
Proust, and Benjamin to describe this new way of seeing, it is surprising
that the perspective of the passenger stimulated so little interest amongst
nineteenth-century painters. But as Michael Fried has shown, a remarkable
exception to this general trend can be found in a sketchbook belonging to
Adolf Menzel. Indeed, Menzel’s pencil drawing Moving Train of 1881
recreates the astonishing perspective of a passenger leaning out the
window of the carriage.28 As Fried describes it,
[t]he extreme foreshortening of the forward section of the train evokes a sense of
speed, and we are led to imagine the wind from the train’s motion (also perhaps the
smell of smoke and perhaps even sparks from the funnel) in Menzel’s face as well as
the bodily contortions by which he must have held a difficult position and executed
the drawing at the same time.29
Here Menzel is not so much interested in capturing the fleeting landscape

than he is in depicting the locomotive. And in doing so, he draws attention
to the very technology that makes possible the acceleration through space
and time.30 Yet Menzel’s bold attempt to depict what lies beyond the
railway carriage is by definition incapable of reflecting the most crucial
dimension of this viewing experience: the rapidly shifting contours of a
passing landscape.
Panoramas
For most nineteenth-century travellers, landscape was all too often experi-
enced from afar, unfolding – as it did for the average railway passenger – as
an endlessly shifting and ultimately inaccessible succession of fragmentary
images. For the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, this new mode of
“panoramic perception” was grounded in the separation of the traveller
from the landscape being traversed. Using London’s Crystal Palace as point
of comparison, Schivelbusch draws on the metaphor of the spectator to
make clear the implications of this separation:
28
Reproduced in Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism, 71. 29 Ibid., 69.
30
This offers a corrective to Michel de Certeau’s observation regarding the locomotive’s pre-
sumed invisibility: “As invisible as all theatrical machinery, the locomotive organizes from afar
all the echoes of its work.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 113.
Panoramas 129
The glass separated the interior space of the Crystal Palace from the natural space
outside without actually changing the atmospheric quality of the latter in any
visible manner, just as the train’s speed separated the traveler from the space that
he had previously been a part of. As the traveler stepped out of that space, it
became a stage setting, or a series of such pictures or scenes created by the
continuously changing perspective. Panoramic perception, in contrast to tradi-
tional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects:
the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved
him through the world.31
Despite the increasing ubiquity of train travel, the railway journey

was not the only way in which the traversal of landscape could be
experienced. Indeed, the parallel development of the moving panorama
offered just such a possibility. Unlike the more commonly discussed
circular panoramas in which the viewer is quite literally surrounded by
a painting, the moving panorama was an entirely mobile construction.
Media historian Erkki Huhtamo offers a provisional description of its
apparatus:
Instead of being surrounded by a stationary wrap-around painting, the spectators
sat in an auditorium. A long roll painting was moved across a “window” (often
with drawable curtains) by means of a mechanical cranking system. The presenta-
tion was accompanied by a lecturer, music, and occasionally sound and light
effects. Other attractions, such as musical acts or feats of legerdemain, could also
be added. The duration varied, but by the mid-century a length of ninety minutes
or more had become common.32
Among other features, this emerging technology allowed paying spectators

to recreate the experience of travel through what Huhtamo refers to
as “vehicular amplification.”33 The auditorium was transformed into a
vehicle – the deck of a boat or the inside of a railway carriage. This served
to heighten the illusion of motion. In the most elaborate moving
31
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 63–64. Emphasis in original. Ana Parejo Vadillo and John
Plunkett offer a critique of this position with their suggestion that the change in perception
brought about by the railway must also take into account such optical recreations as the
panorama. Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett, “The Railway Passenger; or, the Training of
the Eye,” in The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, ed.
Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 45–77. For a refreshing
new account of this topic from the perspective of a cultural geographer, see George Revill,
Railway (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
32
Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related
Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 6–7.
33
Ibid., 309. The sort of “imaginary journey” made possible by such panoramas is recreated in a
particularly memorable scene from Max Ophüls’s film Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).
panoramas, viewers would remain seated while a succession of indepen-

dent canvases, often moving at different speeds, unfolded before them. In
the famous Panorama Transsibérian, on display at the Paris Universal
Exposition of 1900, spectators watched the scenery unfold from actual
railway carriages provided by the Compagnie Internationale des
Wagons-Lits.34 Designed in part as an advertisement for the unfinished
line between Moscow and Beijing, this optical entertainment featured
unfolding scenery that was meant to offer a glimpse of the vast landscape
that separated the two cities. Huhtamo explains the technology behind this
elaborate attraction:
The illusion of travel was enhanced by three zones of moving cutouts – from the
sandy ground next to the tracks to trees further away – rotating as endless loops in
front of the main canvas. The speeds had been carefully calculated so that
the elements closest to the spectators moved fast, and the ones behind them
progressively slower.35
Whereas the moving panorama was only able to offer the crudest approx-
imation of the experience of railway travel, the early pioneers of cinema
were able to offer a far more direct representation of this experience.36 In
1896, Louis and Auguste Lumière produced what remains one of the most
compelling films in the early history of the medium. On the one hand,
Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache Station from the Train (Panorama de
l’arrivée en gare de Perrache pris du Train) is typical of the Lumière
brothers’ early actualités.37 It captures – or more precisely documents – a
slice of life: the arrival of a train at what was then the main railway station
34
Huhtamo argues that the Panorama Transsibérian is not a true moving panorama. He also
points out that this panorama is often confused with “The Great Siberian Route, The Trans-
Siberian Railway Panorama,” a smaller moving panorama that was also exhibited at the Paris
Universal Exposition in 1900. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 307–13. Although Mahler was in
Paris with the Vienna Philharmonic during the time of the Paris Exposition, there is no
evidence that he attended the exhibition.
35
Ibid., 310–11.
36
For an account that explores the ubiquity of the railway in early film, see Lynne Kirby,
Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
See also Patrick Keiller, “Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film,” in The Railway and
Modernity, 69–84.
37
The label actualité, which reflects the filmmakers’ goal of capturing a slice of everyday life, was
first used in commercial catalogues of the Lumière brothers’ films. Louis and Auguste Lumière,
Panorama de l’arrivée en gare de Perrache pris du Train (Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache
Station from the Train). 1896. Lumière catalogue no. 130. August and Louis Lumière, The
Lumière brothers First Films, DVD (New York: Kino Video, 1998). For a brief overview of this
film, see Stephen Barker, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books,
2002), 28–29.
Panoramas 131
in the French city of Lyon. What immediately strikes the modern viewer is
that the film unfolds as a single unedited take: its length determined by the
technological limitations of the early cinématographe. On the other hand
and equally striking is the unusual placement of the camera. During the
1890s, the Lumière brothers typically operated the camera from a fixed
position either at or near ground level. Here they partially abandon the
traditional approach, leaving the camera in a fixed position but placing it in
the carriage of a moving train. The result is at once breathtaking and
disorienting. In the space of just under forty seconds, the viewer is offered
a fleeting glimpse of a continuously unfolding landscape marked by con-
stant interruptions.
Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache Station from the Train remains
important in that it represents one of the first tracking shots in the history
of cinema. More interesting still is the extent to which the unusual
perspective of the camera becomes the “subject” of the film itself. As
the film begins, we see only the wall of a building, a puzzling vista that
soon gives way to the sight of a typical turn-of-century urban landscape.
Almost immediately, a thick cluster of trees partially obscures the frame
before the first deep perspective opens up: a factory at the base of a hill
surrounded by several small buildings. Below lies a river, spanned by a
bridge on which several pedestrians are visible. But again a cluster
of trees enters the frame, which this time creates a more substantial
interruption. We catch a brief glimpse of the sky before this vista too is
interrupted, this time by the side of a building. We experience once again
a momentary sense of dislocation as a result of the unexpected proximity
of the building. And then, a second deeper perspective opens up. In this
fleeting scene, which is framed against the open sky, an apartment house
comes into view followed by a park, and finally a group of distant
buildings.
But it is not until the bridge on which the train has been travelling
comes into sight that we are made fully aware of the railway carriage in
which we are travelling, a perspective that in turn draws attention to the
way in which this “shot” has been framed. It is here that the diagonal
perspective so typical of the Lumière brothers is revealed, suggesting to
the viewer the perspective of an imaginary passenger seated at the
window of the railway carriage. As the first of several stationary carriages
enters the frame, it becomes clear that the train is approaching its
destination. Distant apartment houses frame the composition, creating
an unusually strong depth of focus. And as the station platform comes
into view, the film comes to an abrupt end.
Mahler’s travels by railway
Given their success in recreating the perspective of a fin-de-siècle railway

passenger, we might be tempted to think of the Lumière brothers’ passenger
as Gustav Mahler. At the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps no
other composer was more aware of this new way of seeing. As an inveterate
even obsessive traveller, Mahler spent countless hours in the confines of his
railway compartment. While the railway enabled him to maintain a punish-
ing schedule of conducting engagements, the compartment itself became an
important workspace in its own right. In addition to the task of orchestrating
scores and correcting parts, Mahler often devoted time to correspondence.
Not surprisingly, the resulting letters reflect the joys and frustrations of this
increasingly ubiquitous mode of travel. These sentiments emerge with
particular clarity in a letter he wrote to his wife Alma in January 1903.
Composed over the course of a long journey to Wiesbaden – where Mahler
was scheduled to conduct a performance of his Fourth Symphony – the
composer shares his thoughts while taking in the surrounding view:
Sheer delight! For the past two hours I’ve been sitting in a carriage with panor-
ama windows [durchsichtiger Gukwagen]. Everywhere, as far as the eye can see,
the ground is covered with magnificent white snow, and the sun shining down
brilliantly, almost warmly on it. I keep thinking if only you were here – how you
would enjoy it.38
But despite this initial expression of enthusiasm, Mahler soon makes clear
the extent to which he feels confined by the railway carriage:
Heavens! When I started this letter, I had no idea that the wobbly ride would make
it impossible to write, let alone think. I’ll have to stop. But what a shame that one
can’t get out and wander around outside.
Like the travellers depicted in Menzel’s Travelling through the Countryside,

Mahler portrays himself here as an active and restless spectator, who has
been cut off from the surrounding landscape. When the train comes to halt,
he celebrates the fact:
Station! So the wobbling has stopped! Now at least I can tell you what my pencil
couldn’t put on paper previously, due to all the buffeting, namely that I miss you very,
very much and that I can’t take real pleasure in anything, because you’re not here.
38
Mahler to Alma Mahler [in the train to Wiesbaden, 20 January 1903], in Gustav Mahler:
Letters to His Wife, ed. Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss in collaboration with
Knud Martner, rev. and trans. Antony Beaumont (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2004), 109–10.
As the train resumes its journey, he continues to write:

Rrrrrrr! On we go! Looking out of the window, I’ve just noticed that we’re in
Passau. And how picturesque this little old town looks, nestled into the folds of the
Danube. Last time we passed through here it was night-time and we were together
(on our way to Krefeld).
But once again, his enthusiasm is short lived:

8.00 p.m. Nuremberg. I’ve been unwell for the past five hours! Evidently I can no
longer cope with train travel . . . In the station I heard that Kapellmeister Bruch . . .
had come to look for me in my compartment, but that I was pacing up and down
the corridor at the time, as usual.
Whereas this letter offers a rare a glimpse into the composer’s changing
state of mind over the course of a long journey, on other occasions he
displayed far less enthusiasm. Writing to Alma later the same year from a
train bound for Lemberg (Lviv), Mahler makes clear the toll that his
endless travelling was taking:
Rail travel is the bane of my life. – I’ve been feeling sick all the way! And it really is
too tedious, sitting there hour after hour, deprived of all freedom and smothered by
the stench of burning coal. If only we had reached a point at which I had no further
need to travel for my art . . . Frightful! I have to sit here for another seven hours! I
feel like jumping out of the window and throwing myself under the wheels!39
But in the end Mahler was ultimately unable to resist the lure of the railway.
As late as 1908, a planned move to Munich appears to have been motivated
in part by the fact that the city was “in the heart of Europe, with excellent
railway connections in all directions.”40 Despite his ambivalence, then, one
thing is certain: the railway ultimately transformed Mahler into an entirely
new kind of spectator of the landscapes to which he was already so deeply
attached.
Symphonic panoramas
Whereas the proto-cinematic perspective of railway travel captured in part

by the Lumière brothers resonates in provocative ways with the rather
specific kind of temporal unfolding that characterizes Mahler’s later music,
39
Mahler to Alma Mahler [in the train to Lemberg, 30 March 1903], in Gustav Mahler: Letters to
His Wife, 112–13.
40
Mahler to Alma Mahler, Munich, 21 October 1908, Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, 309.
when attempting to describe some of the music’s most modern features

scholars have tended to draw instead on analogies from a later period of
film history. Specifically, they have appealed to a number of specific
techniques to illuminate those musical processes in his works that have
often been heard as cinematic.41 Raymond Knapp, for example, has drawn
on the idea of “associational montage” as theorized in the 1920s by the
Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, as well as on the use of musical cues in
modern sound film as a way of accounting for certain aspects of Mahler’s
compositional practice in his “re-cycled” songs.42 More recently, Peter
Franklin and Jeremy Barham have considered the broader connections
that exist between Mahler’s music and film with respect to form, as well as
expression and meaning.43 My interest here is less with these still under-
theorized connections than with a pre-cinematic way of seeing with which
Mahler would have been all too familiar. In the end, neither the seductive
metaphor of montage introduced by Knapp nor the bold appeal to
techniques discussed by Franklin and Barham offer a way of coming to
terms with the unruly force of the Seventh Symphony’s relentlessly
unfolding tableaux. As we will see, the nature of the discontinuities that
haunt this work instead suggests a parallel with the experience of railway
travel as captured by the Lumière brothers’ remarkable panorama. Against
the backdrop of this new way of seeing, I now turn my attention to the
Finale of the Seventh to explore the ways in which the metaphor of
panoramic perception might help illuminate the succession of seemingly
unrelated tableaux that characterize this movement.
41
See, for example, Rebecca Leydon, “Debussy’s Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent
Cinema,” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (2001): 217–41.
42
As Knapp observes: “Film offers a richly fertile starting point for discussing Mahler because of
significant parallels between his music and the filmic world, parallels that mark each apart from
similar experiences that had come before. Thus, unlike most earlier forms of enacted narratives,
film allows, and eventually even seems to demand, the kind of discontinuities that mark
Mahler’s symphonic music to an extent that was then unprecedented; fragmentation,
eclecticism, dramatic juxtaposition, and the difficulty of maintaining a sense of continuity
across surface disjunctures, are only some of the features the two media share.”
Raymond Knapp, “Montage and Contexture,” in Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and
Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 11.
43
Peter Franklin, “Music, Oblivion, and Recollection: A Cinematic Perspective on the Case of
Mahler,” in Resonanzen: vom Erinnern in der Musik, ed. Andreas Dorschel (Vienna: Universal
Edition, 2007), 149–61; Jeremy Barham, “Mahler, Music, and the Moving Image: Beyond Death
in Venice,” News About Mahler Research 57 (2008): 28–48; and Jeremy Barham, “Plundering
Cultural Archives and Transcending Diegetics: Mahler’s Music as ‘Overscore,’” Music and the
Moving Image 3 (2010): 22–47. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has also made this
connection, stating in a recent interview that Mahler’s symphonic style “anticipates film
structures” and that his works are often “conceived as a panorama of scenes.” Daniel J. Wakin,
“Pinch Hitters at Tanglewood,” The New York Times, 8 July 2010.
The practice of drawing analogies with visual media as a way of illuminat-

ing aspects of a work’s compositional fabric has a long and distinguished
history.44 In Reinhold Brinkmann’s interpretation of Brahms’s Second
Symphony – to name but one example – we have already seen how the
canvases of Adolf Menzel offer a useful point of comparison for coming to
terms with the critical, sceptical, and indeed historical dimension of that
work. In what follows, I suggest that with respect to the music of Gustav
Mahler, the Lumière brothers’ Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache Station
from the Train has much to offer for a renewed consideration of the unique
presentation of musical events in the work’s Finale. When we begin to
consider the relationship of the movement’s individual episodes to the larger
musical spans in which they are embedded, it soon becomes clear that the
conventional understanding of the outwardly static tableau as a marker of
landscape is no longer applicable. Indeed, in the context of this Finale, the
unique assemblage of musical events might be thought of not in terms of the
traditional evocation of landscape, but rather by analogy in terms of its
perception from the perspective of a fin-de-siècle railway passenger.
As we have seen over the course of the previous three chapters, Mahler’s
symphonies thrive on the tension between episodic construction and an
overarching narrative impulse. Whereas the prominence of the numerous
self-contained episodes in his early and middle symphonies often appears
to sit uncomfortably with respect to the larger formal demands of the
nineteenth-century symphony, in the Seventh this tendency is only inten-
sified. Not since the sprawling expanse of the Third Symphony did Mahler
set in motion a work that featured such a diverse assemblage of musical
materials. On the one hand, the resulting stylistic gulf between individual
movements at times seems to undermine the very possibility of a unified
symphonic discourse. On the other hand, the work’s five-movement
structure possesses a remarkable symmetry: a central Scherzo bookended
by two character pieces, which are in turn framed by two substantial outer
movements. What is more, in the third and fifth movements Mahler goes
44
See, in particular, Julius Bekker, “Ideen über Malerei und Musik,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
33/34 (1840): 129–31/133–34; and Franz Brendel, “Einige Worte über Malerei in der
Tonkunst,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 32 (1850): 249–50. More recently, see
Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner to
Schoenberg (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Helga de la Motte-Haber, Musik und Bildende
Kunst: von der Tonmalerei zur Klangskulptur (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1990); and Marsha
L. Morton and Peter L. Schmunk, eds., The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Garland, 2000). See also Theodor W. Adorno, “On Some Relationships
between Music and Painting,” trans. Susan Gillespie, Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 66–79.
out of his way to stress the thematic connections between these movements
and the first.
Whereas the work’s first four movements continue to pose considerable
interpretive challenges, it is the unusual assemblage and presentation of
material in the Finale that has contributed the most to the status of the
work as Mahler’s most contested creation. The frequent moments of
disjunction are particularly evident towards the end of the movement
where a rapid succession of seemingly unrelated tableaux leads at once in
multiple directions and nowhere at all.45 This complex teleology has been
accounted for in a number of ways, including from the perspective of the
movement’s most conventional gestures, gestures that as Jonathan Kramer
has put it “do not function in accordance with the structural conventions
they invoke.”46 As Kramer observes, this movement is frequently charac-
terized by returns to the “rondo thematic material” that do not necessarily
coincide with the original rondo motive, returns to the tonic that do not
always coincide with the conventional V-I progression, returns to a dia-
tonic language after passages of chromaticism, and finally returns to
metrical regularity after passages that are characterized by metrical irregu-
larity. Kramer continues:
What is particularly interesting in this movement, and unsettling, and in my view
postmodern, is the manner in which these various returns rarely coincide. If a
progression back to the tonic has articulatory power, particularly when it coincides
with a V-I cadence, then why should it not coincide with a reappearance of the
rondo theme? The reason is that the movement questions formal structuring by
means of coinciding harmonic, tonal, and thematic recapitulation.47
Since Kramer views each parameter as a quasi-independent structural

element, for him “the movement’s temporality is – in quintessentially
postmodern manner – multiple.”48
Martin Scherzinger also proposes a “post-modern” hearing of the move-
ment by invoking Jacques Derrida’s notion of the supplement. In an
attempt to make sense of its kaleidoscopic structure, Scherzinger focuses
particular attention on the movement’s larger temporal framework. For
45
In this connection, Adorno offers a typically suggestive remark on the temporal dimension of
Mahler’s music: “If Beethoven’s contemporaries quailed before the accelerated time of his
symphonies as before the first railroads with their allegedly detrimental effects on the nerves,
those who have survived Mahler by fifty years flinch at his works as the habitués of air travel
shrink from a voyage by sea.” Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 73.
46
Jonathan Kramer, “Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time,” Indiana Theory Review 17 (1996): 30.
47
Ibid., 33. 48 Ibid., 48.
Scherzinger, “[t]he Finale challenges tradition precisely by making its own

guiding logic – the denial of its ordinary functions – progressively more
audible.”49 Indeed, as Scherzinger observes, “[t]here is neither a single telos,
nor is the movement a mere sequence of sections: rather, the very ideas of
telos and sequentiality are put into a mere dialogue with each other.”50
Whereas both Scherzinger and Kramer strive to make sense of the move-
ment’s fractured surface and shattered teleology, one aspect that they do not
consider in any detail is the fact that despite the movement’s numerous
surface discontinuities, the individual tableaux are clearly bound together as
a continuously unfolding unit. Indeed, in parts of the Finale, the tension
created by these surface events generates a rather distinct type of temporal
unfolding in which this succession of tableaux appears unbidden within the
context of a continuously unfolding panorama.
That these events do not always seems to unfold according to any
apparent logic is further highlighted through the timbral extremes that
characterize each individual tableau. This is especially evident in the
Finale’s most bizarre passage, which begins with the penultimate statement
of the movement’s ritornello (three before 279 to two after 290). Among its
many distinguishing features, four in particular stand out: first, the sudden
turn to chromaticism in the context of an otherwise diatonic movement;
second, the passage as a whole moves in a relatively compressed span
through a total of six key areas; third, it features a succession of seemingly
forced references to the main theme of the first movement; and finally,
these individual tableaux – each clearly distinguished both timbrally and
tonally – unfold as a single unified span.
Shortly after the start of the ritornello, the music undergoes a sudden
shift of timbre and texture, a gesture that coincides with an unexpected
recollection of the first movement’s principal theme in the horns (two
before 280). After a brief interruption, marked in part by a sudden change
of key, the theme reappears in the horns where it is embedded in a new
texture and treated in an increasingly distorted fashion (at 281). Another
unexpected shift of key finds the same thematic material reworked in a
densely orchestrated passage accompanied by bells (three before 283).
This is followed suddenly, and without warning, by a distorted recollec-
tion of the movement’s earlier reference to the cancan from Jacques
Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, a reference that also brings to mind the
49
Martin Scherzinger, “The Finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: A Deconstructive Reading,”
Music Analysis 14 (1995): 78.
50
Ibid., 85.
Witches’ Sabbath from the Finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (two

before 284). Following two additional “scenic shifts” (four before 285 to
two after 286 and three after 286 to five after 287), the music moves
towards a climax whose anticipated orchestral outburst is ultimately
withheld. In its place, the movement’s gentle Grazioso theme appears in
a delicate reworking, a moment of radical disjunction made all the more
shocking by the unexpected shift of tempo and orchestration. As the
music begins to unravel, a sudden accelerando signals the arrival of the
final statement of the ritornello (one before 290).
Given the unusual nature of these rapidly unfolding events, it is
hardly surprising that scholars have heard this large musical span in
different ways. John Williamson, for example, argues that in spite of its
chaotic surface, the control exerted over the passage as a whole is quite
rigorous. Indeed, for Williamson it “ranks among the most striking
instances of control and dissolution of tension in Mahler’s music.”51
Central to his claim is that despite its jarring shifts of character, this
passage is controlled by the “strong divergent thrust of the outer parts,”
something that Williamson argues “exemplifies the traditional solidity
of contrapuntal construction that, at a fairly deep level, underlies many
of Mahler’s more radical surface procedures.”52 For Julian Johnson,
the sudden shifts of perspective that characterize the Finale can be
explained in terms that instead draw attention to the movement’s
complex teleology:
Structurally, the Finale accrues rather than develops by a series of non sequiturs
and formal disjunctions of apparently unrelated materials, often marked by abrupt
changes of pace and strangely abstract, contrapuntal passages contrasted with
more obviously rhetorical fanfare materials. It is not shaped, as are earlier sym-
phonic movements in Mahler, by an inner drama, a programmatic or novel-like
direction. By contrast, it seems self-propelling and autonomous, disavowing the
earlier dramas by a process of section-by-section assemblage (e.g., from three
measures before Fig. 248 ff.). It makes for a kind of structural polyphony, as if
several musical trajectories were going on at the same time.53
51
Williamson argues that this level of continuity is achieved almost exclusively through the
careful control of pedal notes that “succeed each other through descending chromatic motion.”
John Williamson, “Dissonance Treatment and Middleground Prolongations in Mahler’s Later
Music,” in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 263–64.
52
Ibid., 265.
53
Broken idylls 139
Whereas Johnson hears the Finale’s moments of disjunction as part of a

larger strategy of “section-by-section assemblage” that is both “autono-
mous” and “self-propelling,” Williamson rationalizes them through an
appeal to what he takes to be the music’s broader contrapuntal con-
tinuity and control. But neither Johnson nor Williamson chooses to
entertain how we might best describe the tension that lies at the music’s
very surface, manifested here in a continuously unfolding panorama of
events that at the same time possesses moments of discontinuity.
Indeed, it is precisely in these terms that such passages can be heard
to resonate with the broader idea of panoramic perception as captured
by the Lumière brothers in Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache Station
from the Train. For in the Lumière brothers’ short film, the camera
captures a continuously unfolding landscape, one that while experienced
as steady continuum is nevertheless characterized by constant interrup-
tion. And if in this short film the camera becomes the eye of the modern
subject, for a fleeting moment the viewer is invited to experience the
discontinuous and fragmentary glimpses of landscape that would have
been all too familiar to an end-of-the-century railway passenger. In the
Finale of the Seventh Symphony, a similar principle governs what might
be thought of as a more abstract kind of panorama: an assemblage of
seemingly independent musical events that nevertheless unfolds with
steady and relentless precision. It is in this sense that Mahler’s musical
representation of an unfolding landscape and the Lumière brothers’
real-time panorama can be taken as emblematic of a new relationship
that emerged at the turn of the century between the modern subject
and the increasingly industrialized landscapes and cityscapes of
Western Europe.
Broken idylls
Whereas the succession of fragmentary tableaux in the Finale suggests a

parallel with the notion of panoramic perception, the frequent
moments of discontinuity in the work’s other movements are
best explored in terms of Mahler’s rather particular treatment of the
idyllic voice. Unlike the Finale, descriptions of these movements
have long appealed to rather specific images of landscape, from the
“Eichendorff-ish visions” often mentioned in connection with the
second Nachtmusik to the sound of the oar strokes on the surface of
the Wörthersee that according to Mahler inspired the work’s opening
motif.54 Yet as we have already seen in the cowbell episode in the Sixth,
the idyllic surface of Mahler’s nature tableaux often disguises darker
undercurrents.55
In the Seventh Symphony, this tension is manifested in a slightly differ-
ent way. Unlike the Second Symphony of Brahms, in which fleeting
moments of disturbance interrupt the idyll, in Mahler’s Seventh
Symphony it is the idyllic voice itself that constitutes a relentlessly intrusive
presence. What is more, these intrusions haunt the work’s musical fabric at
every turn, elevating the idyll’s disruptive potential to a compositional
principle. Such potential is already present in the opening measures,
where a fragmentary orchestral fanfare sets the work in motion.56 Here
the fanfare’s curiously halting rhythmic profile is also held in check by the
underlying harmony (a B-minor triad with an “added” sixth), an unusual
sonority that lends a peculiar nocturnal glow to the movement’s opening
tableau.57 But this halting fanfare serves as the underpinning for an even
stranger utterance: the initial tenor horn melody, about which Mahler
reportedly said, “hier röhrt die Natur” (here Nature roars).58 In this con-
text, the otherness of this unusual instrumental timbre immediately unset-
tles the listener, establishing in the work’s opening measures a scenario in
which nature is an intrusive force that comes from outside the work. As the
tenor horn’s initial statement draws to a close, its opening gesture is
repeated before being abruptly truncated by a seemingly unrelated tableau
that projects the character of a slow march (three after 3). This leads in turn
54
The reference to Eichendorff can be found in Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and
Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner, trans. Basil Creighton, 4th ed. (London:
Cardinal, 1990), 89. For the story of the oar strokes, see Mahler to Alma Mahler [Vienna, 8 June
1910], Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, 357. For a concise summary of these “programmatic”
overtones, see La Grange, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 849–53.
55
Adorno’s famous description of the First Symphony in which he compares the work’s opening
sonority to the “whistling of old-fashioned steam engines” is not the only example that goes
against the established view regarding the so-called nature element in Mahler’s symphonies.
Hans Redlich, for example, compares Mahler’s symphonies to Romanesque railroad stations
(romanische Banhöfe) and cathedral-like department stores (kathedralische Warenhäuser).
Hans Redlich, “Mahler’s Wirkung in Zeit und Raum,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 12 (1930): 95.
56
The movement’s introduction has been interpreted by Donald Mitchell not simply as a nature
tableau depicting a nocturnal landscape but also as the starting point of a “typically Mahlerian
journey through a nocturnal landscape.” Donald Mitchell, “Mahler on the Move,” in
Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005, selected by Gastón Fournier-Facio and
Richard Alston, ed. Gastón Fournier-Facio (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007), 398. Emphasis
added.
57
For John Williamson, the G sharp functions as an “irritant.” John Williamson, “The Structural
Premises of Mahler’s Introductions: Prolegomena to an Analysis of the First Movement of the
Seventh Symphony,” Music Analysis 5 (1986): 52.
58
Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), 299.
Broken idylls 141
to a brief transitional passage in which the accompanying fanfares herald

the arrival of an abbreviated but entirely transformed repetition of the
introduction (five before 4). As this section comes to a close, a trio of
trumpets announces the arrival of the exposition in which the “roar of
Nature” is transformed into the movement’s principal theme (five before 6
to 6).
Although at this point this initial disturbance has been folded into the
very fabric of the movement’s exposition, the uncanny power of “Nature’s
roar” is never far below the surface. Indeed, it is not long before it emerges
again, this time in the context of the movement’s central evocation of the
pastoral. As was the case in the Sixth Symphony, the first movement’s most
readily identifiable pastoral space emerges in the context of the develop-
ment section (two before 32 to four after 39). The appearance of this
fleeting evocation is anticipated well in advance by a gentle fracturing of
the orchestral texture (five after 28 ff.). Accompanied by an array of
fanfare-like figures – the most prominent of which is derived from
the work’s opening tenor horn motif – the passage culminates in the
appearance of a distilled version of the symphony’s opening tenor horn
line (the original “roar of Nature”) in the first trumpet (four before 32). But
it is not until this gesture is repeated in modified form – outlined as an
augmented triad – that the musical flow is finally brought to a halt (pickup
to two before 32). If what follows offers a welcome respite from the shrill
and at times violent character of the preceding march, the intrusion here of
the pastoral voice marks it as both illusory and highly unstable.59 Like most
of Mahler’s pastoral episodes, the presence of a tremolo in the upper strings
establishes an otherworldly atmosphere in which time itself seems to come
to a standstill. But unlike similar passages in the earlier works, this delicate
upper pedal does not initially serve as a backdrop for an event on the scale
of the posthorn solo in the Scherzo of the Third or the cowbell episode in
the first movement of the Sixth. Whereas this might be said to account for
the comparatively brief duration of the passage as a whole, the initial
trumpet fanfares do in the end announce a significant musical event: the
transformation of the march from the movement’s introductory tableau
into a “sublime” chorale.60
59
The idyll consists of two passages of seemingly distant music. The first runs from one before 32
to the Subito Allegro, four measures after 33, and the second from 37 to four after 39.
60
Donald Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler (1975; repr., Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 81n5. Mitchell also describes it as “one of the
most telling instances of Mahler showing us that sometimes the commonplace and the sublime
are not opposites at all but simply two aspects of the same idea.” Emphasis added.
No sooner has this episode been established than its sense of calm is
gently shattered by a further variation on the rhythmic figure that initially
brought the passage to a halt. This leads in turn to a lengthy interlude
(Subito Allegro), which is brought to a violent close when the clarinets slice
through the crumbling orchestral texture with an ironic inversion of
“Nature’s roar” (two before 37). The otherness of timbre that is often
associated with this gesture is given a new twist here with all three clarinets
playing with their “bells in the air like trumpets” (Schalltr. auf quasi
Tromp.). This signals the start of the second episode, which in broad
outline closely resembles the first (at 37). Here the tremolo (now in the
second violins) serves not only as a backdrop for the introductory fanfares
and the transformed march, but also for an array of additional utterances
in the winds that adopt the rhetoric of the introductory fanfares. In both
cases, however, the single most important feature is the abrupt move to an
idyllic space. Indeed, it is precisely this shift that reveals the idyll’s potential
to function as a disturbance within the context of the movement as a whole.
But if the fragility of this passage reveals the illusory nature of Mahler’s
pastoral interludes, what follows offers a kind of resistance. And by doing
so, the music here gives way to a level of expression that is unprecedented
in Mahler’s symphonic works. Beginning five after 39, this long-awaited
“fulfillment of [the] untonicized second subject” takes on an increasingly
ecstatic quality.61 Indeed, there is perhaps nowhere else in Mahler’s music
that illustrates so clearly the composer’s own statement that “[m]usic must
always contain a yearning, a yearning for what is beyond the things of this
world.”62 But like the pastoral space that it extends, this yearning is
ultimately in vain. As the music moves towards a long-expected resolution,
it takes a more focused turn as the violins push downward in a deliberate
and studied unison towards the tonic. And then, without warning, the
introduction reappears, reduced here to a shadow of its former self. By
stripping the original sonority of its “added” sixth, as well as by reducing
the orchestral forces, the halting fanfare loses much of its original glow.
The starkness of this brutal return is unprecedented in the context of the
movement suggesting that the attempt to transcend both the mundane and
the earthly is destined to end in defeat. What is more, when the “roar of
Nature” returns, its voice has been stifled. In place of the expected tenor
61
John Williamson, “Mahler and Episodic Structure: The First Movement of the Seventh
Symphony,” in The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler: A Symposium, ed. James L. Zychowicz
(Cincinnati, OH: The University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, 1990), 33.
62
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. Peter Franklin and trans.
Dika Newlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 130.
Night music 143
horn, we are instead confronted with the ghostly timbre of a solo double
bass. Taken as a whole then, the enormous affective power of this passage is
generated by the tension between hopeful yearning and the impossibility of
attaining transcendence. As Adorno observes:
[H]is symphonies discern better than he that the object of such yearning is not to
be represented as something higher, noble, transfigured. It would otherwise
become a Sunday religion, a decorative justification of the world’s course.63
But it is precisely by allowing the “roar of Nature” in its various transforma-

tions to function as a disruptive gesture that exposes the movement’s darker
undercurrent and in turn offers a stark contrast to its affirmative façade.
Night music
The nocturnal references that have long featured in the reception of the
Seventh Symphony’s opening movement only multiply in connection with
the work’s three middle movements: two serenades that Mahler labelled as
Nachtmusiken and a Scherzo marked Schattenhaft (shadowy). Referred to
collectively by Richard Specht as a “dream island” (Insel der Träume), the
notion of the idyllic voice as an intrusive presence is once again fully on
display.64 This is particularly evident in the two Nachtmusiken whose
disruptive power in the context of the symphony as a whole is a direct
consequence of their unusual compositional history. Given that both
movements were composed while Mahler was completing the massive
Finale of his Sixth Symphony, it is tempting to speculate that their unusual
character, as well as Mahler’s apparent departure from his usual practice of
concentrating on a single symphonic project during a given summer, was
triggered by the need to find refuge from the profoundly bleak vision that
the Sixth ultimately yielded.65 While the Nachtmusiken have long been
celebrated as idyllic interludes in the context of the symphony as a whole,
a more careful examination of the musical processes at work in these
movements suggests not only that their relationship to the pastoral is
more troubled than has been commonly acknowledged but also that the
idyllic voice once again serves as a disruptive presence.66
63
Adorno, Mahler, 17. 64 Specht, Gustav Mahler, 303.
65
For a concise summary of the work’s compositional history, see La Grange, Vienna: Triumph
and Disillusion, 842.
66
For a re-evaluation of the supposed innocence of these movements, see Peter Revers, “Return to
the Idyll: The Night Pieces in Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony,” in Colloque International
Gustav Mahler (Paris: Association Gustav Mahler, 1986), 40–51.
As was the case in the first movement, the idyllic voice serves as the initial
point of departure for both Nachtmusiken. The presumed presence of this
voice has been bolstered in part by the claim that these movements represent
a Romantic vision of nature, a claim that can be traced to the summer of
1904 when according to Alma, Mahler was “beset by Eichendorff-ish
visions – murmuring springs and German romanticism.”67 Whereas this
comment is usually taken to refer to the second Nachtmusik, Henry-Louis de
La Grange leaves open the possibility that these remarks are applicable to
both movements.68 For when taken together, these movements represent
what La Grange describes as a more general stylistic turn “from the
pessimism of the Sixth and the wild outbursts in the Allegro of the Fifth,
towards a more poetic world, lit by romantic visions.”69
If the initial horn call of the first Nachtmusik brings to mind the piping
shepherds at the opening of the “Scène aux champs” in Berlioz’s Symphonie
fantastique, here they have been transferred from a more conventionally
pastoral landscape to an alpine one. Indeed, the call and response of the
two solo horns immediately establishes the sheer immensity of the space
that we are asked to imagine. Yet in contrast to the “Scène aux champs,” in
which the answering oboe is placed offstage (derrière la scène), here the two
horns sound from the concert platform. The clearly recognizable pattern of
call and response is further reinforced by the designations rufend (call) and
antwortend (answer). Whereas this opening offers a relatively conventional
manifestation of the idyllic voice, over the course of the first ten measures
the music also takes a number of unusual turns. At the outset, the initial
answer follows closely the contour of the call, save for a fleeting deflection
to the minor mode. But by the second iteration, the answer has diverged
significantly from the call by which it was preceded. Rather than echoing its
contour, it instead takes the lead by presenting a new melodic fragment –
something not immediately apparent given that from the perspective of
dynamics and timbre, it still appears to function as a distant echo. Indeed,
the pattern is reversed here with the final call echoing the previous answer,
if only in fragmentary form. What is more, this fragmentary call is soon cut
off by the orchestra, which in an increasingly agitated flurry of activity
forecloses the possibility of any further exchange. The initial call figure is
then repeated – twice by the English horn and bassoon, and twice in a
shortened form by the tuba – before culminating in a chromatic collapse
that coincides with the same move from major to minor already embedded
67
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 89.
68 69
La Grange, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 849–50. Ibid., 846.
Night music 145
in the opening horn calls.70 When this short-lived pastoral scene is restaged
later in the movement (pickup to five after 83), the initial phrase of the
horn’s call and response is replicated almost verbatim.71 And then some-
thing unusual happens. Rather than continuing with a new motif, the first
horn tentatively begins to repeat the initial call. But before it can complete
its phrase, the sound of distant cowbells (in weiter Entfernung) brings the
movement to a halt. As the call and response resumes, the cowbells
continue to sound, grating gently against the horns’ increasingly animated
exchange.72
Accounting for the presence of the cowbells in this movement has
always posed considerable interpretive challenges. As we saw in the pre-
vious chapter in connection with the Sixth Symphony, the most common
interpretive tendency has been to hear the cowbells as symbols of loneliness
and solitude, something that can be traced back to Mahler’s comments to
Edgar Istel in connection with the première of the Seventh.73 Like the
cowbells in the first movement of the Sixth, however, their use elsewhere in
the first Nachtmusik does not always coincide with the solitude and
tranquility with which they are so often associated. For instance, when
the cowbells make a brief onstage appearance (three measures after 103),
they are deployed not as an isolated sonority in a reflective or contempla-
tive context, but rather they are fully integrated into a complex sonic
tableau that calls to mind the sound of a hand-cranked barrel organ.74
Their use as a colouristic resource reaches a point of ironic culmination in
70
The gesture is evidently borrowed from the Sixth Symphony. That Mahler was completing the
Finale of the Sixth during the same summer that he was composing the two serenades reveals
the extent to which the former cast a considerable shadow over the latter.
71
The answer features one slight rhythmic alteration (an added eighth rest) and the addition of a
tenuto marking.
72
The cowbells, which were a late addition to the autograph fair copy (1905), were not accom-
panied by any specific instructions in early editions of the symphony. The manuscript, which is
owned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Archive, is housed at the Netherlands Music
Institute in The Hague. The following set of instructions, which are similar to those that
appeared in the revised version of the Sixth Symphony, appeared for the first time in the Critical
Edition of the symphony, edited by Erwin Ratz (1960): “Herdenglocken sind immer diskret und
intermittierend, in realistischer Nachahmung des Glockenbimmels einer weidenden Herde zu
spielen” (The cowbells are always to be played discretely and intermittently, in realistic
imitation of a grazing herd). In the revised edition edited by Reinhold Kubik (2012), this
marking is attributed without further explanation to Mahler [GM].
73
See Chapter 3, 106–07.
74
As evidenced by the autograph fair copy and the Stichvorlage (engraver’s copy), Mahler
originally planned to deploy onstage cowbells on three other occasions (at 76 to six after 76; 82
to six after 82; and one after 98 to four after 98). The Stichvorlage is housed in the Music
Division of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (Mus. Hs. 29134).
the closing measures of the Finale where the cowbells are again fully
integrated into the orchestral apparatus.
If the idyll appears to be in constant jeopardy throughout the first
Nachtmusik, it is not until the movement’s coda that it is decisively
undermined. Here the opening tableau is re-imagined as a frenzied
Naturbild – marked wie Vogelstimme (like birds’ voices) – that eventually
collapses under its own weight (at 108).75 At the same time, this collapse is
complicated by the curious reference to the Scherzo of the Second
Symphony in which the concluding measures of its perpetuum mobile
trump the idyllic voice (manifested here in the Vogelstimme). Against the
backdrop of Adorno’s understanding of the perpetuum mobile as an alle-
gory of the Hegelian Weltlauf (course of the world), this gesture draws
particular attention to the fragile and ultimately illusory nature of the
idyllic voice. But if the idyll here is undermined by the mundane and
ever-present course of the world, even in the face of this seemingly decisive
collapse, the movement has not yet come to a complete close.
Following a decisive stroke of the tam-tam – the same gesture that also
brings the Scherzo of the Second Symphony to a close – a single exposed G in
harmonics is heard in the cellos. And it is with this parting gesture that the
presumed collapse of the idyll is opened up to question. Reinhold Brinkmann
finds a striking parallel here with the The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, the
symphonic cantata by Thomas Mann’s fictional composer, Adrian
Leverkühn.76 Towards the end of the novel, the narrator Serenus Zeitblom
describes the final measures of the cantata, a work that is meant as a
corrective to the jubilant conclusion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:
Just listen to the ending, listen with me: One instrumental group after the other steps
back, and what remains as the work fades away is the high G of a cello, the final word,
the final sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a pianissimo fermata. Then nothing
more. Silence and night. But the tone, which is no more, for which, as it hangs
there vibrating in silence, only the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of
sorrow – is no longer that, its meaning changes, it stands as a light in the night.77
But if Leverkühn’s cantata represents a “taking back” of the Ninth, its

conclusion also seems to offer a beacon of hope. And as is the case in the
75
Peter Davison, on the other hand, claims that nature has the last word. Peter Davison,
“Nachtmusik I: Sound and Symbol,” in The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, ed.
Zychowicz, 72.
76
Brinkmann, Late Idyll, 222–26.
77
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage International,
1999), 515.
Night music 147
context of the first Nachtmusik, its glow suggests that while the idyll may be
“endangered,” there remain in this nocturnal landscape occasional flashes
of light.
As if to counter the delicacy of this unexpected gesture, what follows
immediately after plunges the listener into Mahler’s most singularly night-
marish vision. The Scherzo’s initial marking, Schattenhaft (shadowy),
already hints at the fleeting and maddeningly elusive quality of its thematic
material. But as the movement unfolds, it also acquires additional expressive
qualities, the most striking of which can be heard in the lamenting cantus
firmus first heard at 125 that for Adorno mourns the course of the world.78
So extreme is the movement’s expressive surface that at times it cracks.
Passages often screech to a halt as they disintegrate suddenly and without
warning. Whereas the movement’s very structure often seems to teeter on
the brink of collapse, it is also both tightly wound and highly controlled.
Nowhere is this tension between control and collapse manifested more
clearly than in the movement’s Trio – labelled as such for the first time
since the First Symphony – which, like the Sixth Symphony, is subjected to
constant interruption.
Given this volatility, it is hard to imagine in what context the idyllic voice
might emerge, much less as an intrusive gesture. But when the “roar of
Nature” from the opening of the first movement returns in the middle of
this already unstable Trio (five after 137), its transformation into an erratic
waltz figure offers just such a moment. Here the otherness of this figure is
once again transformed through timbral means, assigned in this context to
a solo viola.79 This figure goes on to dominate the Trio before rearing its
head again in a slightly altered form in the Scherzo reprise (four after 149).
It returns again in the movement’s closing measures, where despite its
revised contour it continues to act as a disruptive force.80
If the extended island of serenity represented by the second Nachtmusik
takes a number of dark turns, the moments of disturbance are less
immediately apparent. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht accounts for its unusual
succession of musical events by offering a sort of programme that describes
the aural impressions of the composer himself as he strolls through a
familiar urban landscape:
78
Adorno, Mahler, 9–10.
79
Recall that this gesture in its original form is heard at the beginning of the first movement in the
tenor horn. It then reappears at the start of the recapitulation of the same movement in a solo
double bass.
80
This can be heard first in the English horn and contrabassoon (at 167), and then again in the
coda (at 170 ff.)
Mahler walks through the city, in the evening, at night, and takes in all the music he
can hear: happy violins, quivering mandolins, guitar and the clarinet, the voices of
all the other instruments. Schrammel music, strummed pianos – and then he walks
on, happy, filled with beauty. There are other sounds, melodies and strains from
the left and from the right. There is also the Opera house, music from the
Volkstheater, and at the end the coffee-houses close, the music fades, the lights
go out, night falls.81
In Eggebrecht’s account, the movement becomes nothing less than an aural

mapping of the city at night.82 And by introducing the figure of the flâneur, a
figure who in this movement traverses a specific Klangraum (sound space),
the metaphor of walking imposes a narrative on a movement that has so
often been heard as a succession of fragmentary tableaux.83 But regardless of
how we choose to make sense of the discontinuities that haunt this move-
ment, in the end it is the idyllic charm of the movement itself that constitutes
the most significant disruption to the work’s larger structure.
Reception
It has become customary in recent years to preface any discussion of the

Seventh Symphony with a reflection on its status as a problematic work. As
a way of offering a new spin on an old tradition, I would like to consider
this question by way of conclusion. For if the work’s fractured surface –
evident both in the panoramic unfolding of musical events in the Finale
81
Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 50. Translated in Peter Revers, “Return to the Idyll,” 43.
Translation emended. Donald Mitchell offers a similar description of an urban Spaziergang but
in connection with the first Nachtmusik. For Mitchell “[Mahler] has forsaken boat and oars and
the epic gestures of the first movement’s march . . . and taken to the streets. What confronts us
now is a kind of domesticated military march music, humble in scale, that an evening stroll
through town or city might provide, not only march music but (in the trios) genial, serenade-
like tunes more appropriate to a Stadtpark than a regimental parade ground.” Mitchell, “Mahler
on the Move,” 401.
82
Unlike the urban walks that lie at the core of much modernist literature – including above all
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Arthur Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl, and James Joyce’s
Ulysses – the walk described by Eggebrecht recreates a leisurely stroll that suggests a curious
sense of nostalgia for an idealized Vienna.
83
Hartmut Hein, “Symphonie im Zweiten Gang: zu Mahler’s Poetik des (musikalischen)
Spaziergangs,” in Gustav Mahler und die musikalische Moderne, ed. Arnold Jacobshagen
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 21–34. For a discussion of the relationship between
discontinuity and the narrative impulse of the second Nachtmusik, see Kofi Agawu, “The
Narrative Impulse in the Second Nachtmusik from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony,” in Analytical
Strategies and Musical Interpretations, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26–41.
Reception 149
and in the disruptive potential of the idyllic voice throughout the work –
remains contested interpretive territory, then it is in part the work’s
tumultuous critical reception that continues to offer us an important way
of coming to terms with the symphony in the context of Mahler’s
symphonic output as a whole. In part because of its remarkable diversity
of expression, the Seventh Symphony has long provoked an unusually wide
range of conflicting interpretations. Yet it is worth remembering that early
assessments of the work, including those of Anton Webern and Arnold
Schoenberg, were on the whole rather positive.84 Among the earliest
published accounts of the symphony, perhaps the most enthusiastic
came from Paul Bekker, who, in his pioneering study of the symphonies,
stated that with this work Mahler had “reached the peak of optimistic
affirmation.”85
Whereas the Seventh Symphony certainly had its early detractors, parti-
cularly in the German-language press, more serious doubts about its
quality only began to surface after the Second World War. This more
critical view is particularly apparent in the writings of such otherwise
devoted supporters as Dika Newlin and Hans Redlich. Writing in 1947,
Newlin speculated that the “size of the symphony may have been, then as
now, a deterrent to comprehension.”86 Redlich offered an even more
pointed critique lamenting the fact that “Mahler clung too tenaciously to
a rigorous pattern to which he failed to do justice in the heterogeneous
assortment of movements he chose to call his [S]eventh Symphony.”87
In the 1960s, the work’s standing took a more serious blow with the
appearance of Theodor W. Adorno’s monograph on the composer.88
Adorno’s damning critique was particularly harsh with respect to the
Finale, a movement that he wrote “embarrasses even those who concede
everything to Mahler.”89 In addition to attacking what he describes as the
monotony engendered by the movement’s unrelenting diatonic character,
he also criticizes the “impotent disproportion between the splendid exter-
ior and the meager content of the whole.”90 In the wake of Adorno’s harsh
critique, enthusiasm for the symphony as a whole was severely tempered.
This more sceptical view is particularly evident in the writing of Hans
84
Peter Revers, “The Seventh Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and
Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 376.
85
“Es ist der Gipfel lebensbejahenden Bekennens, den Mahler hier erreicht hat.” Paul Bekker,
Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921; repr., Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 265.
86
Dika Newlin, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1947), 186.
87
Hans Redlich, Bruckner and Mahler (London: J. M. Dent, 1955), 204.
88
Adorno, Mahler, 136–38. 89 Ibid., 136. 90 Ibid., 137.
Redlich, whose earlier objections became even more strenuous. Writing in

1961, Redlich argued that the presence of the two Nachtmusiken created an
“unbridgeable gulf of stylistic incompatibility” in relation to the work as a
whole.91 Deryck Cooke, in his popular monograph on the composer,
claims that when the Seventh is placed in the context of “two shattering
masterpieces,” the Sixth and the Eighth, it presents an “enigmatic, inscru-
table face to the world: a most unusual attitude for a Mahler symphony and
one which arouses suspicions as to its quality.”92 The weight of Adorno’s
powerful critique can even be felt in the writing of such committed
Mahlerians as Peter Franklin who writes that the Seventh “makes use of
as wide a range of allusive musical imagery as any of his works, while
remaining mysteriously canny about its cumulative meaning.”93
Despite the initial and indeed subsequent force of Adorno’s critique,
others began to hear the Seventh with a more sympathetic ear. A significant
turning point in the work’s rehabilitation came from a group of young
German composers who in the mid-1970s openly declared their interest in
Mahler’s music. Peter Ruzicka expressed particular enthusiasm for what he
took to be the symphony’s progressive tendencies by celebrating its
moments of extreme discontinuity.94 Whereas the negative assessments
continued to hold sway in scholarly circles, by the mid-1980s the tide had
already begun to turn. Peter Davison, for example, advanced the bold claim
that the failure perceived by critics might be best understood as a deliberate
move on the part of the composer:
[T]he work’s non-realization of its immanent implications is a calculated

ambiguity which reflects the artist’s attempt to find a coherent interpretation of
his subjective experience. Mahler does not begin to synthesize in the traditional
symphonic way; that is a fallacious ambition. Here is an enigmatic, self-confessed
failure, a work which sets out to be incomplete and unsettling.95
Others including James Zychowicz offered a much-needed corrective to

Adorno’s influential claim with respect to the Finale: Mahler was a “bad
91
Hans Redlich, foreword to Gustav Mahler, Symphony VII (New York: Edition Eulenberg,
1961), iv.
92
Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
93
Peter Franklin, The Life of Mahler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158–59.
94
Peter Ruzicka, “Befragung des Materials,” in Mahler – eine Herausforderung: ein Symposion, ed.
Peter Ruzicka (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 109–13.
95
Peter Davison, “The Nachtmusiken from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: Analysis and
Reappraisal” (PhD diss., Jesus College, Cambridge, 1985), 80. Quoted in La Grange, Vienna:
Triumph and Disillusion, 846–47.
Reception 151
yes-man” (ein schlechter Jasager).96 More recent analyses by Jonathan

Kramer and Martin Scherzinger, discussed earlier, have in turn raised a
broad range of interpretive questions whose consequences have yet to be
fully explored. What is certain, however, is that by reopening this work to
critical scrutiny, these scholars have also laid the groundwork for new
interpretive paths that might take into account the new ways of seeing
and hearing that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Over the course of this chapter, we have seen the extent to which the
unorthodox presentation of musical events stands at the core of the
Seventh Symphony’s formal logic. If in the first movement the idyllic
voice serves as a disruptive presence in which the work’s musical surface
is subjected to continuous interruption, the work’s two Nachtmusiken
intensify this general tendency, while standing apart in tone and character
from the other movements. The ghostly Scherzo – a movement that
seems to be constantly teetering on the edge of collapse – offers a more
conventional symphonic movement in which the idyllic voice, while lar-
gely absent, is not entirely banished. But as we have seen, it is the work’s
Finale that offers the most striking example of the bold assemblage of
seemingly discontinuous musical material. And like the very notion of
panoramic perception, this unorthodox movement presents us with the
idea of a continuously unfolding landscape in which the music that passes
before our ears can be apprehended only as a succession of fleeting and
fragmentary utterances.
96
James L. Zychowicz, “Ein schlechter Jasager: Considerations on the Finale to Mahler’s Seventh
Symphony,” in The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, ed. Zychowicz, 104.
5 Wanderers
Austrian-ness is the art of flight, of escape, of vagrancy, of the love of

sitting back and waiting for a country which, as Schubert’s Wanderer
puts it, is forever sought and foreseen but never known.
Claudio Magris – Danube
The wanderer’s country is not truth but exile.

Maurice Blanchot – The Space of Literature
In a 2006 essay, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a poignant

reflection on Mahler’s late symphonic writing in which he alludes to the
relationship between lateness and the well-worn idea of the farewell:
Gustav Mahler’s work was always late, appearing as it did after the time in which
symphonic writing of his ambition was called for. And if late works are ones in
which an artist takes his eternal leave of the world of his work – or of the world in
which he worked – his last works ought to bear what knowledge he had of
farewells.1
When considered against the backdrop of a “farewell story” that in

connection with Mahler’s last works has been so thoroughly problema-
tized, the link between late style and leave taking posited by Cavell offers a
surprisingly direct and unapologetic appeal to biography.2 Yet Cavell’s
essay also offers an opening, one that invites us to resist the inevitable
associations that link the idea of farewells to the biographical. For in the
end, Cavell is concerned not only with what farewells tell us about the
relationship between life and works but also with the question of Mahler’s
1
Stanley Cavell, “A Scale of Eternity: Gustav Mahler and the Autobiographical,” in Late Thoughts:
Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work, ed. Karen Painter and Thomas Crow (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 207.
2
Vera Micznik, for example, argues that the farewell story long associated with the Ninth
Symphony must be read as a “fictional narrative.” Vera Micznik, “The Farewell Story of Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 20 (1996): 165. Anthony Newcomb also argues against
the significance of biographical concerns in his interpretation of the Ninth. Anthony Newcomb,
“Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquires, ed.
152 Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118–36.
Wanderers 153
knowledge of farewells in all their manifestations.3 Indeed, it is precisely

in terms of such knowledge that the relevance of the farewell story for a
renewed consideration of Mahler’s late music becomes apparent. Mahler
knew all too well music’s capacity to express the idea of leave taking,
something that he would have surely recognized in a range of nineteenth-
century compositions from the “Abschied” of Schumann’s Waldszenen to
the Liebestod of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.4 And if, as Cavell implies,
we find in Mahler’s late symphonic writing a farewell to the genre, it is to
its expression in the fabric of his late works that we must turn if we are to
begin the task of untangling the relationship between lateness, leave
taking, and biography.
Whereas the idea of departure need not necessarily imply a biographical
dimension, it seems that for Cavell, biography is always hovering at the
door. Later in the same essay, he invokes the Freudian concept of detour to
reinforce the claim that Mahler’s preoccupation with death finds expres-
sion in his music.5 But despite this claim, his essay again presents us with
an opening. By equating detour with path – understood in the context of
Cavell’s essay as a “quest for one’s own death” – he alludes to the idea of
walking. And in doing so, he opens up a crucial and largely neglected
aspect of the overworked concept of the farewell.6 Given the prominence
that Cavell accords to the idea of walking elsewhere in this essay, it is hard
then not to take him up on his claim concerning the relationship between
walking and Mahler’s music more generally:7
Walking serves to single us out individually as the music’s object and prompts us to
think of walking – or strolling or wandering – as the signal gait of the human,
invoking in turn the idea of human life as a path that cannot be surveyed. This is
implied as early as the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1884),
in which the wanderer, with his unshakable companions love and sorrow, pictures
himself walking alone in each stanza.8
3
On the relationship between life and works in the context of musical biography, see
Maynard Solomon, “Thoughts on Biography,” in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 101–15. The question of how these two dimensions intersect remains an
ongoing preoccupation in more recent composer biographies. See especially Lewis Lockwood,
Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
4
As Adorno observes, “[e]very work of Mahler’s, from the Gesellenlieder to the Ninth Symphony,
is saying farewell.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia on Mahler,” in Essays on Music, ed.
Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 615.
5
Cavell, “A Scale of Eternity,” 211. 6 Ibid.
7
For a recent account of this relationship, see Hartmut Hein, “Symphonie im Zweiten Gang: Zu
Mahlers Poetik des (musikalischen) Spaziergangs,” in Gustav Mahler und die musikalische
Moderne, ed. Arnold Jacobshagen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011), 21–34.
8
Cavell, “A Scale of Eternity,” 209–10.
154 Wanderers
This observation serves as a useful point of contrast for an entirely different

approach to the relationship between walking and departing in the writing
of the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, one in which biographical
considerations are almost entirely absent. Perhaps best known in musico-
logical circles as the “librettist” of Luigi Nono’s Prometeo, tragedia dell’as-
colto (1984), Cacciari is also the author of a remarkable – and remarkably
neglected – collection of essays on fin-de-siècle Vienna, which appeared in
English translation in the mid-1990s under the title Posthumous People.9
Cacciari’s approach to the topic knows no disciplinary boundaries and it
succeeds in articulating a novel view of Viennese culture, one that entirely
bypasses traditional interpretive paradigms.10 From his metaphorical
perch on the grounds of Vienna’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital, Cacciari
surveys a Nietzschean landscape of “posthumous people” whose borders
extend far beyond the confines of Austria-Hungary. While many of his
guiding figures are Viennese – Berg, Webern, and Wittgenstein feature
prominently – Cacciari also looks beyond the imperial capital to the
Austrian printmaker and illustrator Alfred Kubin; the Triestine poet and
novelist Umberto Saba; and an eclectic range of writers and intellectuals
who fall outside the Austro-Hungarian orbit, including Walter Benjamin
and Lou Andreas-Salomé. At the intersection of these diverse musical,
philosophical, and literary traditions is the practice of wandering, a mode
of existence that, as Cacciari shows, plays a particularly important role in
the works of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Specifically, Cacciari explores
the relationship between wandering (“passeggiare”) and departing (“dipar-
tenza”) against the backdrop of Walser’s fictional wanderers. And while he
acknowledges that their wandering is often born out of despair, he also
recognizes what ultimately distinguishes this practice is its spirit of
affirmation.11 Recalling Simon’s night-time journey in Walser’s early
novel The Tanners (1907), Cacciari observes that “[a]n irrresistible, dis-
turbing force of ‘yes’ [sì] emerges from Walser’s hike.” Wandering, he
writes, “is a way of saying ‘yes’ to every image of life and death, of opening
9
Dallo Steinhof, the original Italian title, reflects Cacciari’s unorthodox vantage point and his
resistance to what he calls in the preface to the American edition of this collection the
“amorphous ‘strudel’ made of waltzes, decadence, a carefree apocalypse, and theatrical destinies
that in the course of the last twenty years has come to be glorified as ‘Grand Vienna.’”
Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Rodger Friedman
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), x.
10
The writings of such scholars as Carl Schorske, Jacques Le Rider, and William McGrath do not
form any obvious part of Cacciari’s intellectual horizon.
11
Cacciari also observes that “[i]n Robert Walser’s prose, wandering is to departing what, in
Mahler, the Lied is to the symphony.” Cacciari, Posthumous People, 140.
Wanderers 155
oneself completely to the infinite possibility of meeting.”12 What is more,

this affirmative practice also contains within it the possibility of discovery.
Indeed, for Cacciari, “[w]andering reveals the facts of the world. It bears
silent witness that the world is all that is the case. Wandering brims over
with directions, situations, meetings, and impressions. It is beyond any
possibility of discourse.”13 When the protagonist in Walser’s novella The
Walk (1917) finds himself responding to the charge that he is always seen
walking, he replies by stressing the connection between walking and his
profession as a writer:
The superintendent or inspector of taxes said: “But you’re always to be seen out
for a walk!”
“Walk,” was my answer, “I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to
maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could neither
write the half of one more single word, nor produce a poem in verse or prose.
Without walking, I would be dead, and would have long since been forced to
abandon my profession, which I love passionately. Also, without walking and
gathering reports, I would not be able to render the tiniest report, nor to produce
an essay, let alone a story. Without walking, I would be able to collect neither
observations nor studies. Such a clever, enlightened man as you will understand
this at once.”14
Whereas walking emerges here as a precondition for writing, its importance

is ultimately shown to lie in its pedagogical value:
“Consider the great unabating importance for the poet of the instruction and
golden holy teaching which he derives out there in the play of the open air.
Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it,
without this equally delicious and instructive, equally refreshing and constantly
admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and indeed am lost.”15
It is also important in this context to recognize that for Cacciari, the

narrator of The Walk belongs to a tradition of wanderers that runs from
Schubert to Mahler, one that as Cacciari observes in the context of
his discussion of Walser is founded on the “endless attempt to silence
agony.”16 For Cacciari, this gives rise to what he identifies as the agony of
the departed, a condition that is reflected in the qualities of:
12
Ibid., 141. 13 Ibid.
14
Robert Walser, The Walk, trans. Christopher Middleton with Susan Bernofsky (New York: New
Directions, 2012), 60.
15
Ibid., 61.
16
Cacciari, Posthumous People, 145. Cacciari attributes this formulation to Elias Canetti.
156 Wanderers
frugality, moderation, avoidance of frenzy, avoidance of novelty, attraction to the

traditional elements, regret over Modernität, simplicity that stems from the most
ardent engagements, and a decency about language.17
While these qualities suggest strategies of affirmation and resistance, it is

their shared sense of restraint that resonates so powerfully with Mahler’s
own “songs of the departed.” It is for this reason that they offer nothing less
than an alternative vocabulary for coming to terms with the fraught
relationship between the ideas of farewell and departure that haunt
Mahler’s final works.
In what follows, I show that the general character of restrained affirma-
tion – which lies at the intersection between wandering and departing – has
particular relevance for a reassessment of Mahler’s most abstract musical
realization of the farewell: namely the closing movement of Das Lied von der
Erde.18 Indeed, Cacciari’s insights – as well as his unorthodox categories –
offer a framework for considering “Der Abschied” independently of the
powerful mythologies involving premonitions of death and world-weary
reflections on mortality that continue to shape its reception. If the individual
elements of Mahler’s so-called late style appear both culturally contingent
and even to a certain extent biographically determined, this is perhaps
inevitable given the continued prominence of biography in the reception
of his music, not to mention the surprising durability of the “farewell story.”
I suggest that Mahler’s late works in general, and Das Lied von der Erde in
particular, are best understood in terms of a broad constellation of ideas that
in addition to the notion of the biographically determined reading also
includes the figure of the wanderer, the relationship between landscape
and its musical representation, and the practice of walking itself. As a way
of coming to terms with the relevance of these diverse ideas and practices,
I begin with a brief exploration of the ways in which Mahler identified with
the figure of the wanderer. I devote particular attention to the literary and
musical models that gave rise to Mahler’s early musical representations of
this figure. I then consider what might have motivated Mahler’s own
17
“La parsimonia, la moderazione, il rifuggire da ogni fretta e quasi, all’apparenza, da ogni novità,
gli elementi tradizionali, il rigetto della Modernität, la semplicità che deve risultare anche dai
più arditi accostamenti, il pudore verso la parola – tutto ciò deve mostrarsi nell’angoscia del
dipartito.” Ibid.
18
Kevin Karnes has argued that like Schoenberg’s setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Gurrelieder,
Mahler’s modifications to the source texts from Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische flöte (1907)
succeed in transforming a poetic text “imbued with Schopenhauerian existential pessimism”
into a work that proclaims the “possibility of overcoming such pessimism through self-
conscious acts of affirmation.” Kevin C. Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the
Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165.
Walkers and wanderers 157
obsession with walking and how this might relate to both Romantic and
modern conceptions of this practice. I also offer a reassessment of the
composer’s much-discussed gait and pace. By considering two important
but seldom-discussed photographs, I next show the extent to which Mahler’s
walking habits are informed by the figure of the modern urban walker.
Against this broad backdrop, I return to my initial point of departure in
the writings of Stanley Cavell to show how the relationship between walking
and thinking gives rise to the practice of walking as a sort of intellectual
exercise. This sets the stage for my discussion of the closing movement of
Das Lied von der Erde. Drawing on aspects of Mahler’s medical history, I
explore the relationship between this work and the composer’s hindered
mobility, as well as the broader metaphorical potential of walking as it relates
to the reception of individual works. Finally, under the umbrella of late style,
I return to the second of my two initial points of departure: namely, the
qualities that for Massimo Cacciari characterize the “agony of the departed.”
Here I show the relevance of these qualities for a discussion of “Der
Abschied” as it relates to the broader idea of walking. For as I hope to
show, it is in the context of the increasingly stylized landscapes of the
composer’s late music – characterized here by an interiorized and ultimately
abstract theatricality – that his own “meta-reality” of walking emerges as a
metaphor for being alive.19
Walkers and wanderers
Over the course of his lifetime, Mahler made frequent reference to the
figure of the wanderer as well as to the idea of wandering. As early as
1886, he described the world as a place through which he felt “destined to
wander without rest.”20 Although by the early 1890s he had already
begun to cultivate the image of a solitary wanderer, at the same time he
also expressed ambivalence about the notion of solitude. During his time
19
Frédédric Gros observes that the experience of walking constitutes a “reconquest” of the
belief that plenitude depends on the possession of objects or social prestige because “sub-
jecting the body to a prolonged activity – which as we know brings joy, but also fatigue and
boredom – causes the appearance, when it is at rest, of fullness or plenitude, that secondary,
deeper, more fundamental joy, linked with a more secret affirmation: the body breathes
gently, I am alive and I am here.” Frédédric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans.
John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), 143–44.
20
Mahler to Friedrich Löhr, Leipzig, 25 December 1886, in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed.
Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, and Bill Hopkins (London: Faber and
Faber, 1979), 104.
158 Wanderers
in Hamburg, Mahler shared his thoughts on the subject in a letter to Emil

Freund:
Oh, anything, anything but this eternal, eternal loneliness! It was there when I
was up in Norway, roaming about for weeks on end without speaking a word to a
living soul – and that after already having had my fill of keeping silence – and
now back in this atmosphere in which I cannot get so much as a single breath of
fresh air.21
Yet in an unpublished letter from Natalie Bauer-Lechner to Siegfried

Lipiner, Bauer-Lechner reinforces the importance of his long solitary
walks during the course of which he behaved as if the world itself were
his own private property.22 But it was not until the last decade of his life
that this carefully constructed image of the solitary wanderer reached its
fullest realization. As we saw in Chapter 3, the composer’s frequent alpine
walks even acquired a name: Blitzausflüge (lightning journeys), which
became a regular part of his routine during his final years in Toblach.
Indeed, references to the figure of the wanderer continued unabated,
culminating in a letter to Alfred Roller in the summer of 1910 in which
he wrote: “wire beforehand – for this summer I am a restless wanderer
[ruheloser Wanderer].”23
Following his death in 1911, the image of the wanderer soon made its
way into the earliest biographical accounts of the composer. Guido Adler
was among the first to make the connection:
A deep longing – for the infinite – runs through almost all of his works, and the
finite does not disrupt the seer’s view. He performs his devotions in nature and
prays in sounds. A yearning for nature stands out here and there, such as that
which fills the culture-weary wanderer of the world [kulturmüder Weltwanderer]
of our time.24
Of particular significance here is the strikingly cosmopolitan orientation

that Adler attributes to the composer. It is worth noting that he also
invokes the figure of the wanderer in connection with individual
compositions. A case in point is his account of the First Symphony in
which the wanderer assumes a central position in the context of the
work’s presumed narrative:
21
Mahler to Emil Freund, Hamburg [late Autumn 1891], Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 140.
22
Quoted in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904), vol. 2 of
Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 277–78.
23
Mahler to Alfred Roller, Toblach, Summer 1910, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 361.
24
In Edward R. Reilly, Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship (Cambridge:
In the majority of his symphonies the artist struggles upward through battles and
sounds of mourning to liberation from sorrow, as in the First, Second, Third, Fifth
and Seventh. This liberation is of various natures: only in the First does the world-
wanderer [Weltwanderer] win through to a victory, to a ‘triumph.’25
Here the figure of the world-wanderer might even be said to stand in for the
composing subject within the context of the work as a whole.
Given Mahler’s early musical portraits of the travelling journeyman in the
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the wandering minstrel in Das klagende
Lied, it comes as little surprise that the roots of this idea can be traced back
to his early childhood. Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s account of the young
Mahler’s unlikely “performance debut” in the synagogue of the Moravian
garrison town of Iglau provides the necessary context for this story:
Around the age of three, Mahler was taken to the synagogue by his parents.
Suddenly he interrupted the singing of the community with shouts and screams:
‘Be quiet, be quiet, that’s horrible!’ And when, from his mother’s arms,
he succeeded in stopping everything, when the whole congregation was in
consternation and had all stopped singing, he demanded – singing a verse for
them – that they should all sing “Eits a binkel Kasi [Hrasi?],” one of his favorite
songs from earliest childhood.26
Scholars have long sought to identify the origins of this song and its text.
Norman Lebrecht first speculated that because Mahler was “telling this
story to an Austrian Gentile (Bauer-Lechner) unfamiliar with either Czech
or Hebrew,” the song was possibly the Hebrew “Etz Hayyim Hi” (The Torah
is a tree of life).”27 Jiři Rychetsky’s exhaustive archival search, however,
turned up another more likely possibility: the Moravian street song “At’se
pinkl házi” (The bundle should swing back and forth) that recounts the tale
of a youthful wanderer who undertakes a solitary journey from Hungary to
Moravia.28
25
Ibid., 69.
26
This passage forms part of the unpublished “Mahleriana” manuscripts of Natalie Bauer-
Lechner housed at the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler in Paris. A translation of this text is
reproduced in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 7–14
(11–12). Parts of Bauer-Lechner’s account were first published in Henry-Louis de La Grange,
Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 15.
27
Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered, 12n7.
28
Jiři Rychetsky, “Eits a binkel Kasi (Hrasi),” News about Mahler Research 17 (1987): 7–8. Ruth
HaCohen has noted the complexities of interpreting this story: “[t]he story may be interpreted
in various ways, but its persistence contains a germ of Mahler’s possible aversion to the sound of
a Jewish house of prayer, exacerbated, no doubt, by the standard anti-Semitic accusations.”
Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel against the Jews: Vocal Fictions of Noise and Harmony (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 431n12. This event is also significant in that it
160 Wanderers
The repeated references to the wanderer by Mahler and his interpreters

have raised the inevitable associations with the figure of the wandering Jew,
mentioned several times by Mahler himself, most prominently in his
famous letter to Joseph Steiner discussed already in Chapter 2:29
A cascade of smoke from Melion covers the whole scene, the clouds become even
denser, and then suddenly, as in Raphael’s painting of the Madonna, a little angel’s
head peers out from among these clouds, and below him Ahasver stands in all his
sufferings, longing to ascend to him, to enter the presence of all that means bliss
and redemption, but the angel floats away on high, laughing, and vanishes, and
Ahasver gazes after him in immeasurable grief, then takes up his stick and resumes
his wanderings, tearless, eternal, immortal.30
For Stuart Feder, the relationship is clear: “Mahler’s version of the ‘outsider’
was that of the wandering, homeless Jew; the Jew not as chosen but as
exiled.”31 More recent commentators have treated the question of self-
identification more cautiously. Carl Niekerk, for example, observes in
connection with what he refers to as the letter’s “dark dream-like sequence”
that “[o]n some level – unconsciously, one would be inclined to say – Mahler
must have identified with the figure of Ahasver.”32 Whereas Niekerk’s
scepticism is certainly justified, it is also true that in a letter to Anton
Krisper, Mahler did make this self-identification explicit:
In the next room lives a young lady who stays at her spinet the whole day long. Of
course she does not know that on account of it I am going like Ahasver to have to
take up my walking stick again. Heaven knows whether I will ever settle down
anywhere. There is always some heedless fellow to drive me from one room to
another.33
In the end, however, it seems clear that Mahler’s reference represents

nothing more than a casual flirtation with a commonly invoked figure
that was on some level interchangeable with the Romantic wanderer.
represents the earliest documented instance of the composer’s well-known hypersensitivity to

sound.
29
See Chapter 2, 57–58. For a brief but important account of this figure, see Hans Meyer, “From
Ahasuerus to Shylock,” in Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis M. Sweet
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 269–71.
30
Mahler to Joseph Steiner, Puszta-Batta, 18 June 1879, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 56.
31
Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 216.
Emphasis added.
32
Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-siècle Vienna
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 68.
33
Mahler to Anton Krisper, Vienna, 18 February 1880, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 60.
Whereas this figure loomed large in Mahler’s imagination, his under-

standing was clearly shaped by a far broader range of figures that would
have included “itinerant players, peddlers, journeymen, gypsies, and
migrants who thronged the roads throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, as well as the artists, scientists, explorers, and
students who from the early phase of Romanticism onward also identified
themselves as wanderers.”34 Mahler would also have had a range of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary models at his disposal, from
Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary
Walker) and Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder (Travel Pictures) to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre.35
Of more immediate consequence were the numerous musical and poetic
representations of the wanderer upon which he drew so freely. Indeed, his
earliest compositions already demonstrate a keen awareness of the rich
tradition of wanderers that populated the nineteenth-century Lied, above
all in the numerous Wanderlieder cycles that continued to appear through-
out the nineteenth century.36 But it was undoubtedly Schubert’s
Winterreise that proved to be the most influential in this respect. As
Susan Youens has argued, “Mahler recomposed the tale of Die
Winterreise through ‘Der Lindenbaum’ in his first song cycle, Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen.”37 Elsewhere Youens observes that while “[t]he ‘fah-
render Gesell’ of Mahler’s title for the cycle recalls the travelling journey-
man in Die schöne Müllerin . . . it is the wanderer in Winterreise, who is not
a journeyman, whose presence we sense more strongly.”38 Indeed, it is
34
Andrew Cusack, The Wanderer in 19th-Century German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2008), 2.
35
Although there is no evidence that Mahler was familiar with these works, Carl Niekerk has
suggested that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as well as its sequel the Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre share a similar openness of form with Mahler’s early song cycle Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen. Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 64–66.
36
Barbara Turchin, “The Nineteenth-Century Wanderlieder Cycle,” Journal of Musicology 5
(1987): 498–525.
37
Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
38
Susan Youens, “Schubert, Mahler and the Weight of the Past: ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’
and ‘Winterreise,’” Music and Letters 67 (1986): 262. In her monograph on Winterreise, Youens
also shows how the poetry of Wilhelm Müller on which Schubert drew was inspired by two
rather different poetic models: the “[a]lienated wanderers who shun the camaraderie of others
on their aimless route to extinction” and “the wayfarers whose optimistic quests end in
reconciliation.” Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey, 52. At the same time, Carl Niekerk
observes that “[w]hile for Goethe and the Romantics the wanderer is a central figure searching
to make sense of life, in the later nineteenth century the wanderer is a marginalized figure, a
journeyman or vagabond driven by unrest, unhappiness, and a pathological urge to travel. In
his songs Mahler seeks to rehabilitate the figure of the wanderer by referring back to the
162 Wanderers
precisely this more abstract depiction that would prove so influential in

connection with Mahler’s final encounter with the figure of the wanderer in
the closing movement of Das Lied von der Erde.
With few exceptions, the wanderers that populate Mahler’s early works
have been interpreted in light of the composer’s own biography. Julian
Johnson, for instance, finds it hard not to read a work such as Das klagende
Lied as a “prescient piece of biographical projection.”39 Raymond Knapp is
even more explicit. In his discussion of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,
Knapp rationalizes the very notion of biographical projection in terms of
the composer’s self-consciously constructed identities:
Mahler takes obvious pains to project, as the narrating persona of the cycle, a
version of his own subjective identity, drawing as fully as possible on his own
sensibilities and life circumstances . . . Certainly, the persona accommodates easily
to the “wandering” topos shared by Mahler’s carefully cultivated identities as a
romantic outsider, a struggling musician, and a Jew.40
But Mahler also invoked his own compositions to make sense of his
personal circumstances. For example, his youthful account of the Lieder
eines fahrenden Gesellen – in which he describes “a wayfaring man [ein
fahrender Gesell], who has been stricken by fate, now sets forth into the
world, travelling wherever his road may lead him” – is transformed by the
mature composer into a plea for recognition: “If only you knew how
greatly I, a wayfaring man [fahrender Gesell], need it, you would certainly
never allow your interest in me and my work to slacken.”41 At the same
time, in the context of the traditional account of Mahler as outsider,
“[a]lways an intruder, never welcomed,” it is often hard to reconcile this
attitude with his own approaches to walking.42 In spite of his frequent
older tradition (represented by Goethe and the Romantics) while simultaneously emphasizing
the critical potential and heterogeneity of that tradition.” Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 64.
39
Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford
40
Raymond Knapp, Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-
Cycled Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 153.
41
Mahler to Friedrich Löhr, Kassel, 1 January 1885, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 81. Mahler
to Max Marschalk, Hamburg, 26 March 1896, ibid., 181.
42
This often-quoted statement originates with Alma. “‘I am thrice homeless,’ he used often to say.
‘As a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout all
the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed” [“Oft sagt er: ‘Ich bin dreifach heimatlos: als
Böhme unter den Österreichern, als Österreicher unter den Deutschen und als Jude in der ganzen
Welt. Überall ist man Eindringling, nirgends ‘erwünscht.’”]. Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler:
Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner, trans. Basil Creighton, 4th ed.
(London: Cardinal, 1990), 109. First published as Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und
Briefe (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940), 135. For a discussion of homelessness as a “well-used
Mahler’s walks 163
references to walking, it turns out that Mahler’s own practice only bears a
superficial relationship to the fictional wanderers that figure so promi-
nently in his early vocal works.
Mahler’s walks
Like the wandering figures that populate his early songs, Mahler was
preoccupied if not entirely obsessed with walking. On the surface, this
practice appears closely tied to his youthful desire to fashion himself in
the image of the Romantic artist. In an early letter to Anton Krisper, for
example, he outlines a plan for an ultimately unrealized summer walk-
ing trip (Sommerreise zu Fuß) that over its three-week duration would
have taken him through the Bohemian Forest to Bayreuth, Nuremberg,
and finally Oberammergau for the Passion Play.43 Three years later, he
wrote wistfully to Friedrich Löhr, “[h]ow often I think with deep
nostalgia of that first walk [Spaziergang] of ours out to Heiligenstadt,
and of the later ones too.”44 Yet if Mahler was hardly a Romantic
wanderer, neither could he be described in terms of the characteristic
nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur. Indeed, by famously describing
him as an “avid walker [leidenschaftlicher Fußgeher], outstanding swim-
mer [vorzüglicher Schwimmer], powerful oarsman [ausdauernder
Ruderer], and agile cyclist [geschickter Radfahrer],” Alfred Roller draws
attention to a crucial aspect of his approach to walking: namely, the
overt demonstration of Mahler’s physical prowess.45 And it was in part
this relentless pursuit of physical activity that gave rise to Mahler’s
unorthodox walking habits, reflected in Alma’s reference to the walks
they took together on Vienna’s main urban boulevard, the Ringstrasse,
as “runs.”46
Given Mahler’s obsessive attachment to walking, the question that
remains is what else might have motivated this practice. On the one
(even over-used) trope of modern identity at the turn of the century,” see Francesca Draughon,
“The Landscape of a Wayfaring Soul: Construction of the Modern Subject in the Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen,” Naturlaut 7 (2010): 13.
43
Mahler to Anton Krisper, Vienna, 3 March 1880, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 62. The trip
did not take place as a result of Mahler’s first conducting job in the spa town of Bad Hall.
44
Mahler to Friedrich Löhr, 10 October 1883, ibid., 75.
45
Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal & Co., 1922), 16.
46
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 65. The word “runs” is rendered in English in the original
German text. See Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe, 83.
164 Wanderers
hand, walking clearly functioned as a defence mechanism, allowing the

composer to retreat from the pressures of daily life, including his own fame
as a composer and conductor. Bauer-Lechner reports, for example, that on
being gawked at in the streets of Budapest, he used to recover by under-
taking solitary excursions (Ausflüge) into the surrounding countryside.47
From this perspective, Mahler was thus a bit like the unsociable traveller in
William Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey” who walks in part “to get rid
of others.”48 Yet his own walks, like those described by Hazlitt’s contem-
porary William Wordsworth, were frequently conducted with some of his
closest friends. Not unlike Walser’s writer-protagonist in The Walk,
Mahler appears to have taken enormous pleasure in walking. For Alfred
Roller, this was attributable in part to his “great love of the outdoors,” a
love that “did not stem from a desire to see anything special or reach any
special objective.”49 For Mahler, then, walking often assumed the status of
a pure aesthetic act.50 But if Mahler’s approach to walking had the potential
to take on such a self-conscious dimension, his sense of himself as an
outsider also suggests that he might have walked for an entirely different
reason: to lay claim to the places that he wished to belong.51
It is in this connection that his walks acquired an important therapeutic
value. Stuart Feder has explored this question against the backdrop of his
relationship with Natalie Bauer-Lechner:
Mahler’s benefited richly from Natalie’s capacity to be a good, empathetic listener
and her relationship with him was in some respects a healing one. During the many
hours they spent together the two would walk endlessly, he talking, she listening.
Mahler could justify and aggrandize himself; readily ventilate the considerable rage
of which he was capable; seek comfort for his psychological wounds; and repair his
chronically bruised self-esteem.52
47
48
William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” in Table Talk; or Original Essays on Men and Manner,
2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 36.
49
Alfred Roller, “A Portrait of Mahler,” trans. Norman Lebrecht, in The Mahler Album, ed.
Gilbert Kaplan, 2nd ed. (New York: Kaplan Foundation, 2011), 19. In this sense, Mahler is like
the protagonist of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen who “is a wanderer . . . in the final song
simply because he wanders.” John Williamson, “Fragments of Old and New in ‘Der Abschied,’”
Nineteenth-Century Music Review 8 (2011): 213.
50
On walking as an aesthetic act, see Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic
Practice (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002), 20.
51
Talia Pecker Berio has described Mahler as a “borderline figure.” Talia Pecker Berio, “Musical
Exiles: Busoni Unlike Mahler,” in Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La
Grange on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Günther Weiss (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 202.
52
Feder, Gustav Mahler, 81.
But Feder goes even further when he suggests that Mahler’s time with
Bauer-Lechner – much of it spent walking – verged on psychotherapy.53
Given the nature of her recollections, one wonders if for Mahler they might
have also functioned as a form of autobiography.54 Indeed, some of the
composer’s most frequently quoted statements originate in what were in
effect transcripts of their regular walks. And it is in this sense that the walks
themselves emerge as one of the most important sites of Mahler’s own self-
fashioning. After his marriage to Alma, Mahler continued this practice of
narrating his own life story during the course of the lengthy walks they so
often took together. In her memoirs, Alma devotes special attention to this
aspect of the six summers they spent in Maiernigg: “Our expeditions were
fairly long. We walked for three or four hours, or else we rowed over the
dazzling water.”55 These walks were shorter in Vienna but followed a
similar pattern: after lunch “a brief pause just as at Maiernigg; and then
either a race four times round the Belvedere or the complete circuit of the
Ringstrasse.”56
Whereas Mahler’s contemporaries often remarked on his distinctive
gait, it was Alfred Roller who provided the most comprehensive descrip-
tion of Mahler’s walking habits. Roller’s remarkable portrait of the
composer begins by drawing attention to his outward appearance:
At his summer homes each year, when he indulged his passion for rambling
[Wandertrieb], Mahler wore a gray walking-suit [Touristenanzug]. He liked to
hang the jacket over his shoulder on a cord, and his cap would be pinned to the
front of his coarse linen shirt. The black pleated belt would be pushed down well
below the waist. His feet sported yellow lace-up boots and above them thin black
knee-length socks. Fawn woolen socks or spats were standard garb with this sort of
outfit, but he never seemed to use them.57
This is followed soon after by a lengthy description of Mahler’s unusual

gait:
No sketch of Mahler’s outward appearance is complete without taking into account
his much-discussed “jerking foot” [Zuckfüß]. As a child, he was afflicted by
involuntary movements of the extremities. These are commonly found in mentally
advanced children and, if neglected, can develop into St. Vitus’s dance [Veitstanz].
53
These walks took place between 1890 and 1902. For a discussion of his four-hour stroll with
Sigmund Freud in the streets of Leiden in August of 1910, see ibid., 206–26.
54
Bauer-Lechner’s recollections were first published in radically abridged form as Natalie Bauer-
Lechner, Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1923).
55
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 46. 56 Ibid., 48.
57
Roller, “A Portrait of Mahler,” in Kaplan, The Mahler Album, 19.
166 Wanderers
That ailment, however, disappears when a child’s mind and body grow and are
properly occupied. With Mahler, unfortunately, an involuntary twitch persisted in
his right leg throughout his life. He never mentioned it to me, and I gathered he was
rather ashamed of it.
When he was walking [beim Gehen], one noticed that anything from one to
three steps would sometimes fall out of the regular rhythm. Standing still, one foot
would tap lightly on the ground, kicking the spot.
With his incomparably powerful will, he usually managed to control the
impulse. But if his will was otherwise occupied or relaxed, the right foot would
resume its unusual habit.58
By attributing Mahler’s irregular gait to the neurological disorder

Sydenham’s chorea – often referred to in the early decades of the twentieth
century as Veitstanz (St. Vitus dance) – Susan Filler raises the possibility
that Roller’s account was influenced by the contemporary theory that
attributed this condition to Jews.59 Kay Knittel is far more direct, arguing
that in parts of the essay, Roller is “unconsciously betraying his own
entrapment in Vienna’s antisemitic culture.”60 What is more, she claims
that the essay as a whole “provides an encapsulation of how pervasive
images of Jewish difference were in Mahler’s Vienna, and how the assump-
tions of Jewish difference shaped the discourse about Jews – even when, as
is the case with Roller, the observer was not only sympathetic but a
friend.”61 While Knittel has little to say about Mahler’s gait, she does
draw attention to Roller’s description of the shape of Mahler’s feet, an
observation that she situates against the backdrop of Hans Günther’s
infamous description of a Jewish gait (jüdischer Gang) as at once groping,
dragging, and slouching.62 Finally, in the context of Roller’s extended
description of Mahler’s physical characteristics, he also makes mention
of Mahler’s unusually quick pace:
His short afternoon rest in the country was followed at around four o’clock by a long
daily walk [Spaziergang], Frau Alma usually accompanying him. It was often not
easy. He could walk at a brisk march tempo, not feeling the pace. Walking slowly,
58
Ibid., 19–20.
59
Susan Filler, “Unfinished Works of Mahler: The Scherzo in C minor, the Presto in F major, the
Tenth Symphony and Comparative Arguments for ‘Performing Versions,’” in Perspectives on
Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 440–41.
60
K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate: 2010), 15.
61
Ibid., 15–16.
62
Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes, 2nd ed. (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns
Verlag, 1930), 252. Quoted in Knittel, Seeing Mahler, 31.
he put one foot daintily before the other, stretching his legs straight out at the knee
(photographs 106, 122, 123). He was a narrow-gauge walker [Er ging so “in einer
schmalen Spur”].
Walking fast, however, as on these long walks, he would lean forward, his chin
stretched out, and tread firmly, almost stamping. This gait had something
stormy, almost triumphant, about it. Mahler was incapable of strolling [Zu
schlendern vermochte Mahler überhaupt nicht]. His body had bearing, if not
always a conventional one. Uphill he would go far too fast: I could barely keep
up with him.63
Whereas our understanding of Mahler’s unusual gait and pace has come
almost exclusively from written accounts, there remains a rich and largely
untapped body of photographic evidence that captures him in the very act
of walking. Among these images are nineteen photographs taken primarily
in the Austrian, Dutch, and Italian countryside.64 Often reproduced, but
seldom discussed, these images continue to play a significant and indeed
largely unacknowledged role in reinforcing the popular notion of Mahler as
a lover of nature. Of greater significance is an even less frequently discussed
group of photographs that capture the composer in the streets of Vienna,
Prague, Munich, Rome, and New York.65 Two in particular, taken in close
proximity to the Vienna Court Opera, offer important visual evidence of
Mahler as an active urban walker. What distinguishes these snapshots
(Momentaufnahmen) from the more commonly reproduced portraits of the
composer is their unpolished and unabashedly candid quality. The first, taken
by an unknown photographer in 1904, captures Mahler in profile as he walks
along the Augustinerstrasse (today Philharmonikerstrasse) (Figure 6).66
Against the backdrop of an electric tram, his purposeful gait reflects the
heightened intensity that so often characterized his urban strolls. The second
photograph, taken in the same year by the Austrian photographer Anton
Kolm, is even less polished. Hat in hand, the composer again appears in haste
if at this moment he also seems somewhat distracted (Figure 7).67 These two
photographs offer nothing less than an alternative image of Mahler. In
addition to reminding us that the bulk of his time was spent in urban
63
64
Ibid. The images in question are 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 105, 106, 107, 108, 121, 122, 123, 124.
65
Ibid. The images in question are 52, 53, 77, 78, 78a, 98, 99, 100, 101, 126, 127, 128, 129, 129a,
133, 134, 134a.
66
This photograph was first reproduced in 1922 in Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler,
image 35.
67
The photograph appeared the year after Mahler’s death under the title “Gustav Mahler auf dem
Spaziergang – Nach einer Momentaufnahme,” in Der Merker 3 (1912). See also Roller, Die
Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler, image 36.
168 Wanderers
Figure 6. Unknown photographer, [Gustav Mahler]. 1904. Reproduced from The

Mahler Album, Gilbert Kaplan, Editor.
environments, these photographs provide a glimpse of the composer in

motion, a welcome contrast to the more commonly reproduced portraits in
which he adopts a more conventional pose.68
68
The relationship of these portraits to the “image of Mahler” remains to be explored.
Walking and thinking/walking and composing 169
Figure 7. Anton Kolm, [Gustav Mahler]. 1904. Bildarchiv der Österreichischen

Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
Walking and thinking/walking and composing
During the course of his brief reflections on Mahler discussed at the

beginning of this chapter, Stanley Cavell makes a surprising (parenthetical)
confession:
(I should confess that I have been increasingly startled to find the image of walking,
in connection with the condition of thinking, recurrent in philosophical writings
from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, as well as
Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.)69
Yet as Cavell surely knows, the connection between walking and thinking
has a long and distinguished history.70 Indeed, this connection has impli-
cations that extend far beyond the realm of philosophy. Poets, in particular,
have long understood the relationship between walking and the creative
process. It is well known that when William Wordsworth “was in the
throes of composition he would stride up and down the garden path
69
Cavell, “A Scale of Eternity,” 210.
70
As Joseph Amato has observed: “Peripatetic, which meant to ‘walk around’ and was aptly
derived from a school of Greek philosophers who walked as they philosophized, came to refer to
itinerant traders and travelers.” Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York:
New York University Press, 2004), 7.
170 Wanderers
outside his home in Grasmere; walking and writing had for him become
synonymous.”71 And we have already seen that Mahler, like Wordsworth,
did not necessarily see walking as a solitary pursuit. Indeed, as Emma
Mason has observed, “Wordsworth’s habits of composition involved a
close interplay between walking in the natural world, conversing with
others and physical acts of writing.”72
Among composers, there are many for whom walking became a regular
part of their daily routine, including Beethoven, Brahms, and
Schoenberg.73 Yet with the possible exception of Beethoven, this practice
has merited only passing attention in biographical accounts. Less common
still is any acknowledgement that walking might play a role in the creative
process or that its impact might be evident in a finished composition. The
works of Erik Satie provide a notable exception in this regard. Armed with
the knowledge that Satie composed during the course of his daily walks
between Arcueil and Paris, Roger Shattuck famously speculated that the
source of Satie’s “musical beat” might have been informed by his “endless
walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day, and finally
taking it all in, which is basically what Thoreau did: the total observation of
a very limited and narrow environment.”74
In the case of Mahler, the extent to which his walking habits might have
informed his compositional practice is particularly hard to gauge.
Nevertheless, two brief accounts by Natalie Bauer-Lechner and Alfred
Roller offer evidence of this practice. Bauer-Lechner’s account, which
dates from July 1896, makes clear the extent to which Mahler viewed the
act of composition as a private activity:
71
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of
Pedestrianism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 256.
72
Emma Mason, The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge
73
For a discussion of the two extant images of Beethoven walking, see Alessandra Comini, The
Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 331–32. On the
relationship between Brahms’s songs and walking, see Yonatan Malin, Songs in Motion: Rhythm
and Meter in the German Lied (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169–71. For an account
that places Schoenberg’s awareness of these traditions in a broad historical perspective, see
Reinhold Brinkmann, “Schoenberg the Contemporary,” in Constructive Dissonance, ed.
Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997), 200–207 and 213–15. Schoenberg discusses composing portions of his First Quartet while
walking in the essay “Heart and Brain,” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein and trans. Leo Black
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 61.
74
Quoted in Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
18. Orledge observes that “[t]his line of reasoning has much to commend it, for almost all Satie’s
pre-Arcueil music has a slow, or very slow, pulse while the faster, more mechanical regularity all
belongs to the latter half of his career.” Orledge, Satie the Composer, 18.
Diagnosis, death, and biography 171
He is preoccupied with his work all the time, not just during the four hours in the
summer-house. You can see this when you’re walking or cycling with him. He’s
constantly losing himself in his thoughts, or else he lingers behind and pulls out his
manuscript notebook to jot something down – only you mustn’t notice this, or he
becomes furious!75
Although her description is vague, it does suggest that for Mahler the act of
walking was conducive to creativity. Alfred Roller offers a similar account
that also draws attention to the composer’s unusual gait:
In conversation, peacefully expounding his thoughts, the tic was never seen. Nor did
it appear when he exerted his will – as, for example, while conducting. But when
walking alone, working out a musical idea before he entered it in his sketchbook,
he regularly started striding along with one or two paces that were too short.76
Whereas Roller’s account offers neither concrete detail nor any considera-
tion of the broader implications of this practice, it does suggest an apparent
link between certain forms of mobility and the creative process. Finally,
Alma offers a tantalizing if frustratingly vague account of the early
compositional stages of Das Lied von der Erde in which she claims that
during the summer of 1907, Mahler had “sketched out” the work during
the course of their “long, lonely walks [Wege].”77
Diagnosis, death, and biography
By the time Mahler began work on Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of
1908, the course of his life had already been irrevocably altered by the
shattering events of the previous year. The events in question – the death of
his daughter Maria from scarlet fever, his resignation from the Vienna
Court Opera, and the diagnosis of a heart condition – have inspired many
colourful turns of phrase that include a “threefold crisis,” the “three blows
of fate,” and what Zoltan Roman has referred to as a “triple trauma.”78
Not surprisingly, the question of how this chain of events affected the
composer’s life, and by implication the musical fabric of his last works, has
75
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 64–65.
76
77
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 123. It is now widely accepted that Mahler did not begin
work on Das Lied von der Erde until the summer of 1908. See Stephen E. Hefling, Mahler: Das
Lied von der Erde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31–36.
78
Zoltan Roman, “Between Jugendstil and Expressionism: The Orient as Symbol and Artifice in
Das Lied von der Erde (or: ‘Warum ist Mahlers Werk so schwer verständlich?’),” in Tradition
and Its Future in Music: Report of SIMS 1990 Osaka, ed. Yoshihiko Tokumaru (Tokyo: Mita
Press, 1991), 301.
172 Wanderers
varied widely. With respect to the diagnosis of Mahler’s heart condition –

perhaps the most over-interpreted event in the composer’s biography –
the established narrative has been unavoidably determined by Alma’s
account. Even though her account has been treated with considerable
suspicion, it also sheds important light on the contested question of
Mahler’s attitude towards his own mortality. According to Alma,
Mahler was examined in July 1907 by Carl Blumenthal, a local doctor
in Toblach, who reportedly said to the composer: “Well, you’ve no cause
to be proud of a heart like that.”79 Mahler was apparently troubled
enough by this initial diagnosis that when he returned to Vienna at
the end of July, he sought a second opinion from the Viennese doctor
Friedrich Kovacs. Alma reports that Kovacs confirmed this diagnosis
and ordered him to give up his intense regimen of physical activity.80
In Alma’s description, the consequences of this diagnosis were
devastating:
[Kovacs] forbade him mountain ascents, bicycling and swimming; indeed he was
so blind as to order a course of training [Terrainkur] to teach him to walk; first it
was to be five minutes, then ten, and so on until he was used to walking [Gehen];
and this for a man who was accustomed to violent exercise! [bis man sich ans Gehen
gewöhnt] And Mahler did as he was told. Watch in hand he accustomed himself to
walking – and forgot the life he had lived up to that fatal hour.81
At the end of August of the same year, Mahler received a third diagnosis
from the Viennese doctor Franz Hamperl, a fact that Alma does not
mention in the main narrative, although Mahler’s letter referring to this
meeting is included at the end of the book:
Yesterday I had my inoculation. Dr. Hamperl did it, and while he was about it he
examined me too. He found a small valvular deficiency which has been entirely
compensated for, and thinks nothing of the whole business. He said I could most
certainly follow my profession and I should live an absolutely normal life, except that
79
80
For a summary of events that casts doubt on this aspect of Alma’s account, see Jens
Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2011), 323.
81
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 122. Stuart Feder observes that “[t]hese restrictions,
according to the accepted medical practice of the time, were in fact unnecessary. Worse, they
tended to induce cardiac neurosis. In Mahler’s case, this would take the form of fear of sudden
death. Later that summer [1907], while out walking with Alma he would stop frequently to
take his pulse and ask her to listen to his heart.” Feder, Gustav Mahler, 138. Alma also reports
that while he was at work on Das Lied von der Erde during the summer of 1908, he used a
pedometer [Schrittzähler]. Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 142.
I should avoid over-exerting myself. The strange thing is that he actually said the
same as Blumenthal, but his whole manner had something comforting about it.82
Hamperl’s diagnosis had immediate consequences in that it allowed

Mahler to ignore the strict instructions laid out by Kovacs earlier that
summer. Indeed, in the same letter he even engages in some wishful
thinking, expressing his desire to “take a hike up the Schneeberg!”83
There is little doubt that the postwar image of Mahler as a man obsessed
with death was intensified by the claim in Alma’s memoirs – first published
in German in 1940 – that for Mahler the initial diagnosis made by
Blumenthal “marked the beginning of the end.”84 Yet it is also important
to recognize that this claim was neither new nor original. In his 1922
“portrait” of the composer, Alfred Roller had already made reference to
the “severe and disabling” effect that Blumenthal’s diagnosis had exerted
on the composer. Indeed, Roller goes on to discuss the effect this
knowledge had on his walking habits:
That summer yielded no artistic fruit. He abandoned Maiernigg forever after the
death of little Maria Anna and rented a place in Schluderbach. His mood was one of
silent resignation. The long, happy rambles [Wanderungen] had been replaced
by careful little strolls [Spaziergänge]. An old friend succeeded in restoring his
shattered confidence in his physical powers. Mahler tried taking longer walks
[Spaziergänge] and ignored the doctor who had sent him so much into his shell.
But there were to be no more route marches [Sturmschritt], mountaineering
[Bergsteigen], rowing or swimming.85
Given the widespread knowledge about Mahler’s precarious health during

his final years, it is hardly surprising that the reception of Das Lied von der
Erde was coloured by the idea of a composer who was bidding farewell to
the world. In November 1911, the following notice appeared in Der Merker
announcing the work’s first performance:
The principal spiritual idea of the entire work is the expression of the utterly
consummate turning away from the world [Weltabkehr] and world-denial
82
Alma Mahler, Memories and Letters, 289. Translation taken from Mahler to Alma Mahler
[Vienna, 30 August 1907], in Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, ed. Henry-Louis de La Grange
and Günther Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner, rev. and trans. Antony Beaumont
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 279.
83
Ibid., 279. The Schneeberg, which lies between Vienna and Graz, is the highest peak in Lower
Austria.
84
85
Roller, “A Portrait of Mahler,” in Kaplan, The Mahler Album, 23–24. Yet as Stuart Feder has
observed, Mahler was photographed in Fischleinboden in August of 1907, a place “reachable
only by active walking.” Feder, Gustav Mahler, 139.
174 Wanderers
[Weltverneinung] that were Mahler’s worldview in his last years. The sixth move-
ment is staggering; it is filled with the artist’s presentiment of death [Todesahnung],
and represents a gripping lament and accusation over his loneliness and his being
misunderstood.86
But it was undoubtedly Bruno Walter who exerted the most powerful
influence over the reception of Das Lied von der Erde. Indeed, his claim
that the work was written under the shadow of death (sub specie mortis)
soon emerged as a sort of interpretive key that for later generations of
analysts and commentators allowed them to rationalize the stylistic change
it represented in terms of the composer’s biography.87 However, not
everyone has bought into this narrative. Drawing in part on Mahler’s
correspondence with Bruno Walter from the summer of 1908, Zoltan
Roman makes clear that during the composition of Das Lied von der
Erde, Mahler’s apparent state of mind hardly suggests a man who desired
“nothing more than death.”88 Indeed, Roman goes on to argue that in his
final years, Mahler had been entirely transformed and renewed by his
work. To illustrate this point, Roman quotes a crucial passage from a letter
to Karl Moll written in the fall of 1910: “This year I have literally not an
hour really to myself, but I am very well and full of energy despite – or
indeed, perhaps, because of – all this work.”89 Roman’s claim is that when
taken together, these letters suggest a clear path of “emotional healing.”90 It
is therefore significant – especially given the traditional embrace of the idea
that death casts a long shadow over these late works – that the view
espoused by Roman is corroborated in a number of early sources.
In his remarkable discussion of Das Lied von der Erde, for example, Paul
Bekker appears to bypass the conventional narrative entirely. While it
is true that he hears in the second song a “yearning for death,”
(Todessehnsucht) and, in connection with the cycle as a whole, a “farewell
message” (Scheidegruß) to humanity, Bekker also dismisses the idea that
the stylistic change registered in this work can be traced to external
causes.91 What is more, he goes out of his way to draw attention to what
he describes as Mahler’s renewed “hunger for life” (Lebenshunger).92
86
Quoted in Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 58.
87
Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler (Vienna: H. Reichner, 1936), 87.
88
Roman, “Between Jugendstil and Expressionism,” 301.
89
Mahler to Karl Moll, Undated. New York [November 1910]. Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler,
368.
90
Roman, “Between Jugendstil and Expressionism,” 301.
91
Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921; repr., Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 311.
92
Ibid.
Despite Bruno Walter’s later claim that Das Lied von der Erde was
written “under the shadow of death,” he also knew that Mahler did not
live in fear of dying.93 Walter’s assessment of Mahler’s general state of
mind was shaped in part by two letters he received during the summer of
1908 when the composer was at work on Das Lied von der Erde. In the first,
Mahler offers a deeply personal reflection in which he first broaches the
topic of his newly compromised mobility:
If I am to find the way back to myself again, I must surrender to the horrors of
loneliness. But fundamentally I am only speaking in riddles, for you do not know
what has been and still is going on within me; but it is certainly not that hypochon-
driac fear of death, as you suppose. I had already realized that I shall have to die. –
But without trying to explain or describe to you something for which there are
perhaps no words at all, I’ll just tell you that at a blow I have simply lost all the
clarity and quietude I ever achieved; and that I stood vis-à-vis de rien, and now at
the end of life am again a beginner who must find his feet [nun am Ende eines
Lebens als Anfänger wieder gehen und stehen lernen muß].94
This is made even more explicit in what immediately follows:

And where my ‘work’, is concerned it is rather depressing to have to begin learning
one’s job all over again. I cannot work at my desk. My mental activity must be
complemented by physical activity [Ich brauche für meine innere Bewegung die
äußere]. The advice you pass on from doctors is of no use to me. An ordinary,
moderate walk [Marsch] gives me such a rapid pulse and such palpitations that I
never achieve the purpose of walking – to forget one’s body.
Physical activity – and in particular the practice of walking – does not

simply encourage creativity; it emerges as its most important
93
Alma’s view on the subject is more complicated, as evident in Alfred Roller’s essay, “A Portrait
of Mahler,” which was published the following year: “Frau Alma relates that this resigned frame
of mind was replaced in his last years by a ‘crazed hunger for life and terrible fear of death.’
During his last illness in New York and Paris, he told her: ‘I have lived my life on paper. But
when I’m better again, we’ll travel to Egypt and do nothing but live – and be happy.’ He took
great care of himself in the last years with the intention of reaching a happy old age. That is Frau
Alma’s account. I can confirm that he often showed me on his bookshelves many volumes of
Goethe’s letters that he was saving up as reading matter for his old age.” Roller, “A Portrait of
Mahler,” in Kaplan, The Mahler Album, 24. Norman Lebrecht’s often-cited translation omits
this crucial paragraph. Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered. This paragraph is also omitted from the
most recent edition of Lebrecht’s book, which was published by Faber and Faber in 2010.
94
Mahler to Bruno Walter, Toblach, 18 July 1908, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 324. As
Stephen Hefling has pointed out, this could almost be a paraphrase of Goethe’s famous maxim:
“To grow older means to enter upon a new occupation; all relationships change, and one must
either entirely cease to act or consciously and deliberately take on a new role.” Stephen
E. Hefling, “Aspects of Mahler’s Late Style,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 200.
176 Wanderers
precondition. To emphasize the point, he continues by invoking the

figure of Beethoven:
Now imagine Beethoven having to have his legs amputated after an accident. If you
know his mode of life, do you believe he could then have drafted even one
movement of a quartet? And that can hardly be compared to my situation.
I confess that, superficial though it may seem, this is the greatest calamity that
has ever befallen me. What it amounts to is that I have to start a new life – and there
too I am a complete beginner.95
Like the protagonist in Walser’s The Walk, the task of artistic creation was
for Mahler inseparable from the practice of walking. What lends Mahler’s
account such poignancy is his appeal to the similarly peripatetic
Beethoven, who continued to loom large in Mahler’s imagination, not
just as a composer but also as a fellow walker.
As to the question of how Mahler’s creative abilities might have been
compromised by his hindered mobility, a second letter to Walter from the
same summer shows that he is clearly haunted by this question:
I have been trying to settle in here. This time it is not only a change of place but
also a change of my whole way of life. You can imagine how hard the latter comes
to me. For many years I have been used to constant and vigorous exercise –
roaming about [herumzuschweifen] in the mountains and woods, and then, like a
kind of jaunty bandit, bearing home my drafts. I used to go to my desk only as a
peasant goes into his barn, to work up my sketches. Even spiritual indisposition
used to disappear after a good trudge [Marsch] (mostly uphill). – Now I am told
to avoid any exertion, keep a constant eye on myself, and not walk much [nicht
viel gehen].96
When taken together, these accounts suggest that what Mahler ultimately
gained by walking was a sense of security. And whether the landscape in
question was urban or rural, by asserting his physical presence this crucial
form of mobility also emerged as a strategy of survival. It was thus less
95
Mahler to Bruno Walter, Toblach, 18 July 1908, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 324. The
connection between Beethoven and Mahler was made by at least one of Mahler’s
contemporaries. The critic and writer Samuel Chotzinoff provided the following description of
Mahler walking through the streets of New York: “He seemed always intensely preoccupied as
he walked, his body bent forwards, his hands clasped behind his back. He looked like the picture
of Beethoven walking in the suburbs of Vienna. At street crossings he would advance a few
paces before he became aware of automobiles and carriages rushing past him, dangerously
close.” Samuel Chotzinoff, Day’s at the Morn (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 126–27.
Quoted in Henry-Louis de La Grange, A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911), vol. 4 of Gustav
Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 619.
96
Mahler to Bruno Walter, Toblach, Summer 1908, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, 321.
about the traversal of a particular space or place than it was about the body
itself. At stake for Mahler was physical prowess, working, sweating, in
short, living. For as we have seen in the form of his mad dashes around the
Belvedere and the Ringstrasse to his solitary Blitzausflüge, walking served
not only as form of escape and as an aesthetic act but also as a sort of
intellectual exercise.
The extent to which Mahler made any significant compositional head-
way during the course of his walks may never be known. What we do know
is that he was fully aware of the possible connections between walking and
composing. Writing to Bruno Walter during the composition of the Third
Symphony, Mahler wrote, “those who enjoy good fun will find the prome-
nades [Spaziergänge] I have laid out for them very entertaining.”97
Whereas analysts have been largely reluctant to draw on the metaphor of
walking when discussing his works, its power was not unknown to
Mahler’s contemporaries. For example, in his account of the Seventh
Symphony, Paul Stefan compares the Finale to a “morning walk [Gang]
as the sun rises over the mountain snow.”98 And for Richard Specht, the
metaphor of walking took on a particular significance with respect to the
work’s perceived programmatic overtones:
As is known, Mahler did not like to give titles to his symphonies and their
individual movements, to avoid even a hint of programmatic meaning. Yet the
heading Nachtwanderung (“Walk by Night”), occasionally suggested by admirers
of the composer for the premiere in Prague, is not to be rejected as an indication of
general mood. It could be valid for the whole work or only for the first movement.99
In the absence of a programme for the Seventh, more recent commentators

have not shied away from using this metaphor as an interpretive tool.
Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht
revisits the image of the “nightwalk” in his discussion of the second
Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony, an image that takes on the function
of a narrative device in the context of a movement that has often been
97
Mahler to Bruno Walter, Steinbach am Attersee, 2 July 1896, ibid., 189. For Carl Niekerk,
characterizing the Third Symphony as a series of wanderings “seems to preclude the kind of
developmental and hierarchical reading proposed in the symphony’s programmatic notes.”
Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 103.
98
“Und dann ein Finale, das schon ein Gang in den Morgen ist, wenn die Sonne über Firnschnee
aufgeht.” Paul Stefan, Gustav Mahler: eine Studie über Personlichkeit und Werk, 4th ed.
(Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1912), 127.
99
Richard Specht, “Mahlers Siebente Symphonie,” Der Merker 2 (1909): 1. Quoted in
Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon and Jutta Wicker (Portland,
OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 191.
178 Wanderers
heard as a succession of fragmentary tableaux.100 But what if we were to

think instead about the traversal of landscape in more abstract terms?
Late style
Nowhere does the idea of a more abstract approach to the representation

of landscape emerge more clearly than in the six movements that
comprise Das Lied von der Erde. Here the very idea of landscape is a
stylized realm, which for Adorno gives rise to a composition that “has
colonized a white area of the intellectual atlas, where a porcelain China
and the artificially red cliffs of the Dolomites border on each other under
a mineral sky.”101 This oblique engagement with the idea of landscape
also reflects the fact that Das Lied von der Erde is most emphatically a late
work. Identifying it in these terms has long played an important role in its
interpretive history. And although this tendency can be traced back as far
as the work’s 1911 première, the stylistic shift it represented was not fully
elaborated until 1921 in Paul Bekker’s pioneering discussion of late style
(Alterstil). Whereas Bekker’s discussion tends to be cited for its influence
on Adorno’s more famous account of what he refers to in slightly
different terms as Spätstil, it remains compelling in its own right. Of
particular interest is Bekker’s apparent ambivalence about assigning a late
style to a composer who at the time of Das Lied von der Erde was only
forty-eight years old.102 Indeed, he goes out of his way to suggest that the
stylistic change represented by the work cannot be traced to any specific
biographical event:
He was healthy in body, as much as a man of his nervous constitution can be called
healthy. Resignation may be understandable from external appearance, from the
readjustment of his practical activity for the conscious secondary aim of earning
money, from the collapse of his Viennese plans. It is not, however, enough to
explain the change in the curve of feeling in his creative work.103
100
See Chapter 4, 147–48.
101
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 149.
102
Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 311–16.
103
“Körperlich war er gesund, soweit ein Mensch seiner nervösen Konstitution als gesund gelten
kann. Resignation mag aus den äußeren Erlebnissen, der Umstellung seiner ausübenden
Tätigkeit auf bewußten Nebenzweck des Geldverdienens, dem Scheitern seiner Wiener Pläne
erklärlich sein. Sie reicht aber nicht hin, um die Veränderung in der Gefühlskurve seiner
schöpferischen Arbeit zu begründen.” Ibid., 311.
Late style 179
To the modern reader, what is so striking about this passage is that

Bekker makes no mention of the “threefold crisis” of 1907. Only
Mahler’s resignation from the Vienna Court Opera merits attention as
a significant external event, something that is at odds with the standard
narrative that places so much emphasis on the diagnosis of his heart
condition and the death of his daughter. In what follows, Bekker turns his
attention to the characteristics of Mahler’s “newly blossoming musical
style” (neu erblühende musikalische Stilistik), which like that of every
great artist is full of “austere fantasy” (herbe Fantastik) and “presenti-
ments of the future” (Zukunftsahnungen).104
Despite the original publication of Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical
Physiognomy in 1960 and the reprinting of Bekker’s study of the symphonies
in 1969, the impact of these accounts was felt only gradually in Anglo-
American musicology. It was not until the mid-1980s that English-speaking
readers first encountered excerpts of Adorno’s Mahler monograph in
the writings of Donald Mitchell.105 Indeed, a complete English translation
did not appear until 1992. The following year also brought a translation
of Constantin Floros’s Mahler: The Symphonies (1993), the third volume
of a larger study that engages briefly with the concept of late style.106
Given Mahler’s famous claim that his first two symphonies contain the
contents of his entire life (“Meine beiden Symphonien erschöpfen den
Inhalt meines ganzen Lebens”), it is not surprising that analysts have
continued to draw attention to the potential links between biography and
musical style.107 In what remains the most comprehensive account of
Mahler’s late style, Stephen Hefling goes so far as to suggest that by the
time Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde, his “creativity had long since
become fused in a symbiotic union with his life.”108
104
Ibid., 313, 315.
105
Donald Mitchell, Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations,
vol. 1 of Gustav Mahler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 441–
45, 446, 451–52, 466, 492–93, 494. Mitchell’s exploration of the “growing preoccupation with
the potentialities of asymmetry and irregularity” is explored further in “Mahler and Nature:
Landscape into Music,” in Cradles of the New: Writings on Music 1951–1991, sel.
Christopher Palmer, ed. Mervyn Cooke (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 169.
106
Floros identifies a number of specific markers of late style, including an economy of con-
struction, the emergence of a “purely horizontal style,” the inclusion of passages “scored as
chamber music,” and the avoidance of a “glorifying, affirmative manner.” Floros, Gustav
Mahler: The Symphonies, 241–42.
107
Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 30.
108
Hefling, “Aspects of Mahler’s Late Style,” 199. Hefling further stresses the biographical
connection with the observation that “the seeds of Mahler’s late style were sown following his
brush with death in 1901” (p. 204).
180 Wanderers
Hefling begins by situating his discussion of Mahler’s late style against

the backdrop of the composer’s “three artistic forebears” (Goethe,
Beethoven, and Wagner), each of who were also “paragons of late style.”109
For Hefling,
[t]he late works of all three manifest an inward-looking maturity in an approach
to art that seems at times mystical, occasionally outrageous, and sometimes
sophisticatedly naïve, but always individualistic in ways that resonate with
Goethe’s maxim, “Old age: the gradual withdrawal from appearance.”110
But as Hefling observes, this was not the first time that Mahler’s composi-
tional style had been “fundamentally transformed by intimations of death”
pointing, by way of example, to “Der Tamborsg’sell,” “Um Mitternacht,”
three of the Kindertotenlieder, and especially “Ich bin der Welt abhanden
gekommen” as “harbingers of Mahler’s late style.”111 Hefling devotes the
bulk of his attention to the musical characteristics of Mahler’s late style
after 1907. He identifies a number of key features that include the diffusion
of tonal stability, linearity, the novel treatment of musical time, the pre-
sence of a gentle brand of nostalgic irony, and the practice of invoking the
memory of previous works. If these features complement those identified
by Bekker, Adorno, Mitchell, and Floros, they also remain rooted in a
typology of musical style that, while helpful in allowing us to come to terms
with the specifics of the composer’s shifting musical language, does not
capture the larger resonances at play in this music with respect to the
topic of wandering.
Departure
In his recent exploration of “Der Abschied,” John Williamson takes a

sceptical view of the extent to which Mahler’s late works might be con-
nected to the topos of wanderer – or even to the idea of wandering more
broadly.112 While he acknowledges the themes of travel and exile as central
aspects of Mahler’s life experience – above all in the obvious resonances
between the figure of the travelling journeyman and Mahler’s career as a
109
Ibid., 200. 110 Ibid., 200–201. 111 Ibid., 201.
112
Despite Williamson’s scepticism, he acknowledges the tendency toward abstraction that
characterizes the later works in general. As Williamson puts it so succinctly, “‘[w]andering’ is
yet another theme that is incorporated into ‘Der Abschied,’ as a fragment bereft of the
associations that usually circumscribe the subject.” Williamson, “Fragments of Old and
New,” 214.
Frugality 181
conductor – Williamson argues that these topoi are confined largely to the
early works. But whereas Mahler’s allusions to the wanderer in “Der Abschied”
are admittedly oblique, the listening subject cannot help but recognize the
resulting succession of stylized and ultimately abstract landscape tableaux.113
It is in this context that I return to my initial point of departure: namely, the
qualities identified by Massimo Cacciari to describe the “agony of the
departed.” For it is precisely these qualities of frugality, moderation, avoidance
of frenzy, and an attraction to the traditional elements that offer an alternative
vocabulary for coming to terms with the tendency towards abstraction that
characterizes Mahler’s late music. This tendency is particularly evident in the
work’s muted “farewell,” a sequence of two grand tableaux in which the
wanderer takes his leave against the backdrop of the movement’s newly
interiorized theatricality. For rather than taking centre stage, here the wan-
derer is almost completely subsumed into the movement’s stylized landscape.
Frugality
Given the vast orchestral resources at Mahler’s disposal, the movement as a

whole possesses a remarkable sense of restraint. Even in those places where
the music seems to bloom – the invocation of “die liebe Erde” offers only
the most obvious example – such moments almost always display a striking
economy of means. This is closely related to one of the work’s most
characteristic features: its frugality. At the motivic level, for example, the
smallest gestures are obsessively recycled and reused. This is reflected
above all in the pervasive use of ostinati that particularly dominate the
setting of Mong-Kao-Jen’s “In Erwartung des Freundes.” Here the air of
expectation that haunts this setting is intensified by what might be best
described as a waiting motif, a recurring gesture that consists simply of the
alternation of a single interval (most often a fourth but also seconds, thirds,
and fifths).114 Yet if this motif possesses any illustrative power, it does so
only in the most abstract sense. For it is almost never tied to the act of
waiting described in the text. Rather, it captures the quality of expectation
that pervades this remarkable poem. A prominent exception to this ten-
dency can be found eight before 31 at the line “I wander up and down with
113
Stephen Hefling has identified a number of musical procedures that contribute to these
qualities of stylization and abstraction. See, Stephen E. Hefling, “Das Lied von der Erde,” in
The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford
114
The gesture of the oscillating fourth was later adopted by Alban Berg in Wozzeck to make
reference to the idea of “Marie’s Waiting.”
182 Wanderers
my lute” (“Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute”).115 Particularly
noteworthy here is the use of the verb wandeln, which as John Williamson
has observed suggests a rather specific type of wandering: namely, the act of
“strolling up and down while waiting.”116 Given that the text is set to a
musical phrase alternately referred to by Paul Bekker as the “motive of life”
(Lebensmotiv) and the “theme of life” (Lebensthema), this suggests in turn
that walking in all its manifestations is itself a life-affirming practice.117
Whereas Bekker’s Lebensmotiv is not characterized by an oscillating inter-
val, it performs a similar function through repetition and expansion (one
after 23 in the flute and the pickup to nine after 30 in the voice). A similar
moment occurs in the context of Wang Wei’s “Der Abschied des Freundes”
where Mahler adds the line, “Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte!”
(I wander to the homeland, to my abode!). Here the idea of “wandeln” is
again reflected in the repetitive and harmonically static texture. Yet this
oscillating figure can also be heard to possess a more abstract function in
that it offers a steadying presence in the face of the movement’s frequent
moments of collapse. Whereas this subtle form of resistance is generally
confined to the orchestra, the vocal line occasionally adopts a similar
rhetorical function. At the moment when “[t]he world goes to sleep,” for
example, the stark simplicity of a slowly alternating third momentarily
halts the disintegration of the second “aria” (at 20).
The idea of frugality is also evident in the treatment of recurring
melodic figures. At the phrase “Die blumen blasen,” for instance, the
fleeting presentation of the movement’s pentatonic cell reflects the
ephemerality of nature with a breathtaking economy of means (at 10).
A final manifestation of the tendency towards frugality emerges on those
occasions in which previously heard material is restated in a radically
stripped-down form. The striking omission of the obbligato flute in the
recitative at the outset of part two, for example, leaves the voice almost
entirely exposed (at 48). Paradoxically, the addition of the basses as well
as a tam-tam only intensifies the sense of emptiness and isolation already
established at the outset. Whereas the bass adds depth and resonance, the
tam-tam creates an indistinct wash of sound that places the recitative
outside of time, heightening its sense of abstraction while offering an
115
Translations of the texts from “Der Abschied” are by Stephen Hefling. Hefling, Mahler: Das
Lied von der Erde, 128–31.
116
But as Williamson also observes in connection with Mahler’s expansion of the second poem,
the use of “wander” and “wandle” suggests “something more purposeful in its suggestion of a
journey to the mountains.” Williamson, “Fragments of the Old and the New,” 212.
117
Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, 334, 335.
Moderation 183
oblique illustration of Mahler’s conflation of the wanderer with the

figure of Death.118
Moderation
Despite its massive scale, “Der Abschied” as a whole is characterized by a

sense of moderation. Even on those rare occasions of heightened expres-
sivity (“Wo bleibst du? Du läßt mich lang allein!”), such moments are
always short lived. The expected culmination on the word “allein” is with-
held as the orchestra instead draws back revealing in turn the surprising
simplicity of the section’s initial texture (compare 23 with 30). Whereas for
many the idea of moderation and restraint is bound up with the very idea of
farewell, Adorno takes this one step further when he observes that “[i]t is
not merely through the tone of leave-taking and death that Mahler leaves
behind the affirmative excesses. The musical procedure itself no longer
complies, bearing witness to a historical consciousness that inclines
entirely without hope toward the living.”119 Yet Mahler’s version of
moderation is also characterized by a deep ambivalence. For it is clear,
pace Adorno, that “Der Abschied” possesses its own brand of affirmative
excess: one in which the wanderer’s paean to the earth is manifested as a
form of ecstatic contemplation. Such balance is already evident in the
movement’s first aria, “Oh sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt der
Mond.” (O see! Like a silver ship soars the moon). Although this passage
represents a momentary blossoming that foreshadows “Die liebe Erde”
(at 5), as this bright C-major phrase draws to a close, it seeks out an old and
familiar opposition in the minor mode (two after 5), first in the viola, then
completed by the voice.
Avoidance of frenzy
The “affirmative excesses” identified by Adorno, while not entirely ban-

ished from “Der Abschied,” have generally been replaced by a degree of
introspection and a decisive turn away from the theatrical use of space that
was such a characteristic feature of the earlier music. Even the processional
118
Even the instructions to the singer are slightly more compact than those that accompanied the
first recitative (erzählend und ohne Espressivo as opposed to the initial indication, in
erzählendem Ton, ohne Ausdruck).
119
Adorno, Mahler, 145.
184 Wanderers
character of the movement’s intervening funeral march has been almost

completely interiorized. All distance is imagined. The resulting avoidance
of frenzy is particularly evident in connection with the characteristic
Mahlerian gestures of collapse and disintegration. In the context of “Der
Abschied,” these moments have been largely stripped of the violent force
they so often carried in the earlier works. This is already apparent at the
outset where the emerging march topic is undermined by a succession of
fleeting chromatic flourishes in the flute and oboe (pickup to 2). Not only is
this collapse comparatively gentle, the momentary loss of stability is
immediately brought under control by the oscillating fourths in the harp,
a gesture referred to earlier as a waiting motif.120 Marked veloce, this
passage can be heard as a stylized reworking of those passages in his
early symphonies in which a single instrument is instructed to perform
without regard for the tempo.121 A similar if more concentrated gesture of
collapse can be found two measures before 20 where it serves as a gentle
bookend to Mahler’s attempt to document the anarchic sounds of the
natural world. Here, however, it is the voice that serves as a stabilizing
presence with its declaration that “Die Welt schläft ein!” (The world goes
to sleep!).
This is even more pronounced in the first “aria,” which begins to
disintegrate at the line “I sense a gentle wind’s drift behind the dark pine
trees” (Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Weh’n). The oscillating figure in
the vocal line resists the downward pull of the orchestra, steadying its
delicately unravelling strands. What is so striking about this moment is
that the act of steadying – the voice moving in lock step with the harp –
coincides with the moment in the text where the agency of the subject is
first exerted, a subject intent on resisting death.122 This tendency is even
more pronounced in the second strophe. At the line “die müden menschen
geh’n heimwärts“ (and the tired men go homewards), an allusion to the
tired heart of “The Lonely One in Autumn” – in turn a quotation of the line
“Mein herz ist müde” – the voice weary with experience reluctantly etches
itself onto a threadbare orchestral texture. As the bass clarinet pulls
120
This motif is part of a larger complex of gestures that Stephen Hefling refers to as “quasi-
ostinato motives.” Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, 107.
121
In the introduction to the first movement of the First Symphony, the clarinet is asked to play
ohne Rücksicht auf das Tempo I (six before 2 to four after 3). In the first movement of the Third
Symphony, the instruction reads ohne Rücksicht auf den Takt (four after 20 to six after 20).
122
In his discussion of Goethe’s second “Wanderers Nachtlied,” David Gramit has observed that
“it is the act of perception (‘spürest du’) that first announces the existence of the self-
contemplating subject and his separation from surrounding nature.” David Gramit,
“Schubert’s Wanderers and the Autonomous Lied,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1995): 158.
Avoidance of frenzy 185
downward, the voice calmly, and with uncanny restraint, holds its ground,
answering with a textual allusion to the wandering journeyman of the
composer’s unset “Jugendgedicht” of 1884.123
Whereas the sense of restraint characterizing the bulk of these examples
is a direct consequence of the heightened interaction between voice and
orchestra, at the outset of part two it is the orchestra alone that allows us to
sense the wanderer’s presence. What on the surface resembles a succession
of laboured steps leads, for the first time in the movement, to a succession
of gaping silences.124 Like Walser’s “rhythm of the step,” which for Cacciari
“cuts furrows in the brow of Mother Earth,” its steps taking “pleasure in
friction, resistance, and resonance,” the music of “Der Abschied” also
suggests the friction of the wanderer’s steps.125 By dwelling on the notion
of pleasure, Cacciari identifies in the gait of Walser’s wanderers a deep
attachment to the terrestrial, something that in the context of “Der
Abschied” too is not merely audible but also deeply felt.126
Finally, in what is perhaps the movement’s most extraordinary passage,
the orchestra momentarily loses its footing (at 53). But once again the vocal
line intervenes, a steadying presence to which the orchestra responds by
marking the ground (a reference to the movement’s central funeral march
or perhaps even a distant echo of the opening measures of the Sixth
Symphony). The sense of hesitation at the line “Wohin ich geh?”
(Whither I go?) is only further emphasized by a rare example of textual
repetition at the phrase “Ich geh.” And if the wanderer appears ready to
depart at the line “I go, I wander to the mountains,” this condition is only
temporary. It is here that the motivation of the wanderer is finally revealed:
“Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz!” (I seek rest for my lonely heart!),
an acknowledgement marked by a doubling of the vocal line in the violins
123
The passage in question reads: “Und müde Menschen schließen ihre Lider/Im Schlaf, auf’s
Neu’ vergess’nes Glück zu lernen!” (And tired men close their eyelids/In sleep, to learn anew
the happiness they have forgotten). Carl Niekerk refers to this figure as a night wanderer who
has lost his way and orientation. Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 63–64. For a discussion of the
poem, see Donald Mitchell, The Wunderhorn Years, vol. 2 of Gustav Mahler (1975; repr.,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 123–35; Hefling, Mahler: Das
Lied von der Erde, 109–10.
124
Adorno hears the echo of such laboured steps in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony:
“The whole movement is inclined to one-measure beginnings; in them the delivery is slightly
impeded, as by the constricted breathing of the narrator. The almost labored one-measure
steps of the narrative carry the burden of the symphony’s momentum at the start of the Funeral
March like a coffin in a slow cortège.” Adorno, Mahler, 155.
125
Cacciari, Posthumous People, 145.
126
By referring to this passage as a Zwischenspiel, Hermann Danuser draws attention to the
movement’s dramaturgical structure. Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der
Erde (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986), 100.
186 Wanderers
(also harmonized here at the third) in what stands out as among the least
heterophonic passages in the movement.127 But despite the added empha-
sis on the word Ruhe (rest) – the only other example of textual repetition in
the movement – the unexpected emergence of fragments from the
shadowy Scherzo of the Seventh gently but forcefully punctuates this
reverie (two before 55).128 What follows might represent a transfigured
journey to the “homeland,” but this journey has been unavoidably marked
by the Scherzo’s perpetuum mobile whose broken remains cast a long
shadow over everything that follows.129
Attraction to the traditional elements
Mahler’s attraction to what Cacciari refers to as the “traditional elements”

is evident throughout his symphonic works. In “Der Abschied,” this takes
on a particular potency through the alternation between recitative and a
succession of lyrical passages that aspire to, and eventually attain, the
character of arias. But while Mahler clearly adopts the rhetoric of these
“genres,” in the context of “Der Abschied” they tend in only the most
oblique way towards the operatic.130
As the work draws to a close, the music achieves a new intensity of
expression as the “narrator” invokes the beloved earth, which is described
here as “blossoming forth in Spring” and “greening up anew!” At the same
time, this closing tableau projects a remarkable degree of restraint through
its tempo (Langsam!), dynamics (ppp!), and the instruction to refrain from
any intensification (ohne Steigerung). Over the course of this final aria, the
major mode gradually gives way to a musical texture saturated with
pentatonicism. It is almost as if the wanderer now occupies a space that
lies just beyond the stage. Two sonorities in particular contribute to
the otherworldly quality of this passage: the celesta at 62 (whose entrance
coincides with a fragment of the last line of Mahler’s interpolated
127
The exclamation mark is Mahler’s addition.
128
These fragments already begin to emerge four before 54.
129
Yet, as Kevin Karnes has noted, Mahler “excised entirely those parts of [Bethge’s] verse that
convey any hint of Schopenhauerian resignation in the face of the singer’s approaching death.”
Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World, 173. This includes, rather significantly, the line “[m]y
feet are tired, and my soul is tired.”
130
It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the careful alternation of recitative aria in
this movement. One notable exception is Donald Mitchell whose lengthy analysis of the
movement remains one of his finest pieces of writing. Mitchell, Songs and Symphonies of Life
and Death, 327–500.
Landscapes of farewell 187
text – “blauen Licht, die Fernen”) and the barely audible sound of the
mandolin, which signals the start of the coda some sixteen measures
later. Yet the heavenly sounds of the celesta might also be heard as a
substitute for the more terrestrial sounds of the cowbells. In many respects,
the music here does not evoke the hereafter but rather the everyday. In
what follows, the seven-fold repetition of “ewig” gives rise to an increas-
ingly static texture that resists conventional resolution.131 While the first
two phrases resolve downward from D to C, the final three remain
suspended on the supertonic. This sets up the arrival of the work’s
much-discussed final sonority that features an “added” submediant in
the flutes and oboes. Whereas many have questioned the extent to which
this unusual sonority offers any clear sense of closure or resolution,
another way of hearing this moment is as a threshold. For while the
work’s final chord is left to die away completely (gänzlich ersterbend), we
also sense here that the wanderer has not yet fully departed.132 Perhaps
what we are offered instead is a sonic snapshot of the terrestrial wanderer
who has been caught mid-step. In this sense, then, Mahler’s depiction of
the wanderer is a curiously abstract figure whose practice of wandering can
nevertheless be read as an affirmation of a life still lived. Unlike the
restrained endings of his Fourth and Ninth Symphonies, “Der Abschied”
concludes not with a fermata but with two beats of silence. And in the space
of this silence that is quite literally composed into the work, we are asked to
imagine the steps that continue to take the wanderer forward.
Landscapes of farewell
The characteristics identified by Cacciari and the examples in “Der

Abschied” with which they resonate point to a music informed by a
theatrical sensibility that has nevertheless been almost completely
interiorized. This is manifested not simply in the conventionally accepted
blending of song and symphony but more crucially in the “opposition”
between aria and recitative. At the same time, these operatic traces reveal
only one facet of the work’s veiled theatricality. Indeed, as Zoltan Roman
131
John Williamson has observed that the coda possesses all the characteristics of a Klangfläche.
Williamson, “Fragments of Old and New,” 197–98.
132
A parallel can be drawn here with the marking immer schwacher that appears in the closing
measure of “Abschied” from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen. This is also related to the
musical topos identified by Stephen Hefling as music that is “dying away completely” (gänzlich
ersterbend). Hefling, “Aspects of Mahler’s Late Style,” 202.
188 Wanderers
has observed, this general tendency is also evident in the “strikingly

theatrical approach to the linking of the parts by means other than musical
ones.”133 Roman writes,
in the opening song, the exhortatory style indicates a narrator who is also one of the
actors in a play that is about to unfold; given the musical context, comparison with
an operatic prologue is readily made. Moreover, the ‘audience’ is segmented and
variously distanced from the singer: close up, and thus distinct, is the “lord of the
manor”; beyond the footlights and thus featureless, is the bulk of the audience, the
“companions”; and as an abstract idea (rather than a physical presence),
Man(kind) is evoked. Such a use of physical and psychological perspective is
characteristic of the entire cycle.134
Roman’s assessment of the individual songs takes this one step further.
Describing “Das Trinklied vom Jammer Erde,” he observes that following
the movement’s prologue “the curtain goes up on the first scene of
the ‘drama.’”135 In connection with “Von der Jugend” and “Von der
Schönheit,” he describes the effect of a carefully differentiated distancing
in which this protagonist is “fully behind the scenes in the third song, and
approaches closer in the fourth one when he addresses the audience
directly.”136
But it is in connection with the work’s final movement, “Der Abschied,”
that Roman’s appeal to a range of theatrical metaphors takes on particular
significance. Roman begins by examining the question of the work’s
personae, not from the traditional perspective of the individual songs,
but rather in terms of the work as a whole:
It is most significant that the total ‘cast’ in the first part of Der Abschied, and their
distancing from each other, are analogous with those in the opening song of the
cycle. The narrator-I of the first five songs, newly returned to the stage in Der
Trunkene, remains there; he calls on a distinct (though at the moment absent)
character, his “friend”; a general audience is addressed; and man(kind) is mentioned.
It should be possible, then, to ascribe a function to the closing movement that is
similar to the opening song’s with respect to the cycle – in other words, one that is
outside the ‘staged’ action of the drama. If one accepts that the climax and resolution
of Das Lied are found in the fifth song, then the finale is akin to a greatly expanded
epilogue – in fact, an epilogue on three levels and, thus, in three sections.137
Mahler’s wanderer as a figure of despair has long been coloured by

biographical readings that seek to emphasize the relationship between
133
Roman, “Between Jugendstil and Expressionism,” 304. 134
Ibid. 135
Ibid. 136
Ibid.
137
Ibid., 305.
Landscapes of farewell 189
life and works, or in the case of Adorno presentiments of a catastrophic

future:
The extreme points of its collective urge, as in the first movement of the Sixth
Symphony, are the moments when the blind and violent march of the many
irrupts: moments of trampling. That the Jew Mahler scented Fascism decades
ahead, as Kafka did in the piece on the synagogue, is no doubt the real source
of the despair of the wayfarer whom two blue eyes sent out into the wide
world.138
But it is the tendency of analysts to relate these works to the specific

landscapes in which they were composed that has further intensified this
question of the wanderer’s true identity. Unlike the more generalized
landscape of the “Abschied” in Schumann’s Waldszenen, that of Mahler’s
“Abschied” has acquired through its reception an unusually high degree of
specificity. Indeed, for Adorno it is rather specifically that of the Südtirol:
As the fir trees and stream of the Lied von der Erde belong to the landscape of
Southern Tyrol, the only song since Schubert to grasp the earth; as even the porcelain
glazes it describes could have been mined from the contrast of the red mountains and
the dense blue of the sky, whose late-afternoon encounter the brittle china would
preserve – so every gaze of Mahler’s observing, recognizing music holds fast to the
world that he painfully transcends. This says, above all, that Mahler wanted
to salvage the integrity of the very music to which he was bidding farewell.139
In his classic work The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau

asserts what seems to be a truism with respect to the practice of walking: to
walk, de Certeau writes, “is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of
being absent and in search of oneself.”140 Certainly in the traditional
accounts of Mahler as outsider, “everywhere an intruder, never welcomed,”
such a sentiment appears to align quite nicely. Against the backdrop of the
preceding discussion, however, de Certeau’s notion is at odds with
Mahler’s own practice. For as we have seen, his motivation to wander
arises not out of despair but rather out of an unbridled desire to live.
Despite the obsession with death shared by the fictional wanderers that
inhabit so many of his works, we would do well to remember the extent to
which the outlook of these marginal figures has been shaped by the idea of
walking. In each case, walking emerges as an unavoidably affirmative
138
Adorno, Mahler, 34. 139 Adorno, “Mahler Today,” 604–5.
140
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 103 [“Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. C’est le
process indéfini d’être absent et en quête d’un propre.”]. Translation emended.
190 Wanderers
practice, even if the paths of its imaginary characters have left us with only
a scattered and fragmentary trace.
It is tempting to think that Mahler would have identified with the
narrator in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain who at the end of the
novel invites the reader to contemplate those “situations in life on earth,
or circumstances of landscape . . . in which a confusion of obliteration of
temporal and spatial distances, ending in total dizzying monotony is
more or less natural and legitimate.” Mann writes: “You walk and walk,
and you never get back home on time, because you are lost to time and it
to you.”141 For Paul Bekker, on the other hand, these are songs “[s]een
from the perspective of the lonely wanderer who is getting ready to take
his leave.”142 Bekker goes on to suggest that Mahler “transformed himself
into a resident of the hereafter. What he creates is seen and felt from the
perspective of a spirit that already floats upon distant heights,”143 And it
is in this sense that we might think of this final meditation on the
wanderer as striving for the heavenly while finding itself inextricably
rooted in the earthly.
141
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995), 536.
142
“Gesehen aus der Höhe des einsamen Wanderers, der sich zum Abschied rüstet, waren sie
erfaßt aus dem Bewußtsein des Zusammenhanges mit dem Weltall.” Bekker, Gustav Mahlers
Sinfonien, 312.
143
Ibid., 316. “Es selbst hat sich in einen Jenseitigen verwandelt. Was er nun schafft, ist gesehen
und erfühlt aus der Perspektive eines bereits auf fernen Höhen schwebenden Geistes.”
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Index
Abbate, Carolyn 43n97 Barker, Stephen 130n37

Abrányi, Kornél 27n37 Barthes, Roland 125–26
Adler, Guido 107, 158–59 Batka, Richard 65n47
Adorno, Theodor W. 32, 43–44, 47, 65, 66, Bauer-Lechner, Natalie 29–30, 49n1, 52–55, 70,
67–68, 116, 136n45, 143, 146, 149, 179, 183 83n6, 87, 142, 158, 159, 164–65, 170–71, 179
on Das Lied von der Erde 189 Bauman, Thomas 56, 97n50
on late style 178, 180 Beckett, Samuel
on Symphony no. 1 28, 29–30, 43–44, 45, Molloy 47
140n55 The Unnamable 5
on Symphony no. 3 71, 71n63, 100 Beer, August 26–27
on Symphony no. 7 147, 149, 150–51 Beethoven, Ludwig van 2, 32, 39n79, 46, 47,
on Symphony no. 9 185n124 49n1, 98, 125n17, 136n45, 153n3
on the operatic element in symphonies 11, and late style 180
40–41 and walking 87n22, 170, 170n73, 176
Agawu, Kofi 64, 148n83 Fidelio 9, 24, 35–37, 38, 43, 45
Ahasver 160–61 Symphony no. 4 in B flat major (op. 60) 24
altitude 101–03 Symphony no. 6 in F major (op. 68) 24
Amato, Joseph A. 169n70 Symphony no. 7 in A major (op. 92) 67n52
Andraschke, Peter 96n47, 98, 104n69, 113 Symphony no. 9 in D minor (op. 125) 9, 24,
Andreas-Salomé, Lou 154 32–35, 43, 63, 146–47
Apponyi, Albert 37–38 Bekker, Paul 44n101, 52, 107, 109n91, 111, 112,
Aristotle 169 149, 174, 178–79, 180, 182, 190
“as if” (performance direction) Benjamin, Walter 154
immer wie aus weiter Ferne 68, 69 Berlin Childhood, 1900 127–28
wie aus der Ferne 9, 48, 58–65, 61, 72, 74 on the railway 127–28
wie aus einer anderern Welt 53 Berg, Alban 48, 73–74, 154
wie aus weiter Ferne 48, 63n38, 68, 69, 72 “Er klagt, daß der Frühling so kortz blüht”
wie aus weitester Ferne 68, 69–70 74
wie die Weise eines Posthorns 72n64 Lyric Suite 74
wie eine Fanfare 72 Three Pieces for Orchestra 74
wie ein Hauch 103 Violin Concerto 74
wie ein Naturlaut 27 Wozzeck 6, 181n114
wie fernes Glockengeläute 19n18, 59 Bethge, Hans
wie Gezwitscher 17 Die chinesische Flöte 156n18
wie Vogelstimme 146 Berio, Luciano
wie von Ferne 59, 63n39 and distant sound 74–75, 78–79
audibility 7, 22, 42, 46, 51, 55–57, 60, 69, 71, 77, and listening 1–2, 3, 7
99, 108, 111, 137, 185, 187. See also sound and the musical past 2, 3–4, 76, 80
Austro-German symphony 8, 31–32, 46, 83 and restoration 74
and transcription 1, 2–4
Bach, Johann Sebastian 2 5 frühe Lieder [Gustav Mahler] 1
Baedeker guide 91 6 frühe Lieder [Gustav Mahler] 1
Barham, Jeremy 13, 14n9, 20n22, 38n75, 134 Chemins I 3
213
214 Index
Berio, Luciano (cont.) continuity 1, 4–5, 10, 15n11, 66n50, 69, 79,
Chemins IV 3 134n42, 138–39
Rendering [Franz Schubert] 4, 48–49, 74–80 Cook, Nicholas 34n64
Sequenza II 3 Cooke, Deryck 150
Sinfonia 1–7 cowbells 10, 19n17, 53n12, 73, 81, 83–84, 97,
Berlioz, Hector 42n89 99–101, 102–03, 104–08, 109–14, 145–46,
and plein air music 65 187
and space 21, 30n47, 42n89
and the illusion of distant sound 63 Daffner, Hugo 104–05
Harold en Italie 30n47, 66n48, 67 Dahlhaus, Carl 41, 64, 97–98, 117
Symphonie fantastique 30n47, 33, 63, 65, 67, Daniels, Stephen 119–20
138, 144 Danius, Sara 127n24
Bienenfeld, Elsa 83n6 Danuser, Hermann 185n126
Blanchot, Maurice Darcy, Warren 24n27, 30n46, 40, 96n47,
The Space of Literature 152 110–12
Blaukopf, Kurt 42 Daumier, Honoré
Bloch, Ernst 107–08, 109 The Third-Class Carriage 118, 123, 123–24
Blumenthal, Carl 172, 173 Davison, Peter 146n75, 150
Boccherini, Luigi 2 Debussy, Claude 67n52
Bodley, Lorraine Byrne 77n76, 79 Feux d’artifice 67
Bonds, Mark Evan 33 Decsey, Ernst 13n4
Borio, Gianmario 25, 44–45 Del Mar, Norman 96n47, 108
Boulez, Pierre 11, 40 Derrida, Jacques 136
Brahms, Johannes 2, 4, 75 discontinuity 1, 2, 4, 5–7, 10, 139, 148n83, 150
and Beethoven’s Ninth 32 cracks 1, 2, 147
and symphonic tradition 31–32 disjunctions 117, 119, 136, 138–39
and the railway 126 disruptions 4, 6, 117, 118, 119, 148
and walking 126, 170 disturbances 10, 11, 17, 28, 84, 110, 122, 140,
Symphony no. 2 in D major 122, 135, 140 141–42, 147
Symphony no. 4 in E minor 24 fractures 1, 2, 6, 7, 101, 119, 137, 148
Brandes, Friedrich 104, 105 interruptions 18, 83, 95, 99n55, 122, 131,
Brendel, Franz 62–63 137, 139, 147, 151
Brinkmann, Reinhold 28, 31–32, 42n92, 122, intrusions 16, 19, 117, 119, 140, 141
135, 146, 170n73 distance 12, 16, 20, 21–22, 30, 34, 42, 47, 50, 53,
Broch, Hermann 54, 56, 58, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 64, 71, 105,
“Artistic Style as Style of the Epoch” 81 110, 112, 113, 184, 190. See also space
Bruch, Wilhelm 133 abstract 47
Bruckner, Anton imagined 9, 48, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70,
Symphony no. 4 29n43 71, 73, 74, 78
Brusatti, Otto 82n4 in Berg 73–74
Buhler, James 60n35 in Berio 74, 78–79
Busch, Günter 122n10 in Mendelssohn 64
in Schubert 63–64
Cacciari, Massimo in Schumann 62–64
Posthumous People 10, 154–57, 181–83, metaphorical 19n18, 56, 62, 64
183–87 Romantic 48, 57–62, 63
Caplin, William E. 24n27 distance (performance direction)
Cavell, Stanley 152–54, 157, 169 “always as if from a far distance” (immer wie
Certeau, Michel de aus weiter Ferne) 68, 69
The Practice of Everyday Life 128n30, “always in the distance” (immer in der Ferne)
189–90 108
Chotzinoff, Samuel 176n95 “as if from a distance” (wie von Ferne) 59,
Coen, Deborah R. 84n8 63n39
Index 215
“as if from the distance” (wie aus der Ferne) “Wanderers Nachtlied” 184n122
9, 48 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 161
“as if from a far distance” (wie aus weiter Gounod, Charles
Ferne) 48, 63n38, 68, 69, 72 Mireille 98
“as if from the farthest distance” (wie aus Gradl, Karlheinz 82n4
weitester Ferne) 68, 69–70 Graf, Max 38–39
“from a distance” (von Ferne) 19, 20n21 Gramit, David 184n122
“in the distance” (in der Ferne) 30, 83–84 Greene, David 68–69, 71
“in the far distance” (in weiter Entfernung) Grohman, Paul 89–90
30, 72, 73n65, 145 Gros, Frédédric 157n19
“in the far distance” (in weiter Ferne) 30, 72, Gülke, Peter
73n65 Three Symphonic Fragments 75–76
“placed in the distance” (in der Ferne auf- Günther, Hans F. K. 166
gestellt) 12, 113n110
“placed in the far distance” (in weiter HaCohen, Ruth 159n28
Entfernung aufgestellt) 50n2 Haller, Albrecht von
“placed in the very far distance” (in sehr Versuch von schweizerischer Gedichten 93
weiter Ferne aufgestellt) 30 Hamperl, Franz 172–73
Dolp, Laura 30n48, 71n63 Haydn, Franz Joseph
Draughon, Francesca 163n42 The Creation 24
Hayman, John 94n42
Edwards, Amelia 90–91 Hazlitt, William
Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich 58n29, 71n63, 110, “On Going a Journey” 164
147–48, 177–78 Hefling, Stephen E. 26n34, 41n85, 70, 175n94,
Eichendorff, Joseph von 125, 126, 128, 139, 179–80, 182n115, 184n120, 187n132
140n54, 144 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 146
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 169 Hein, Hartmut 148n83, 153n7
Heine, Heinrich 124–25, 128
farewell 10, 106, 152–53, 156, 173, 174, 181, Reisebilder 161
183, 187–90 Hélard, André 94n42
Feder, Stuart 87n20, 160, 164–65, 172n81, Hepokoski, James 24n27, 30n46, 31, 33, 45–46
173n85 Heuberger, Richard 39n77
Felsch, Philip 93n41 Hoeckner, Berthold 57n25, 62–63
Filler, Susan 166 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 63
Finscher, Ludwig 126 Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier 63n38
Fischer, Jens Malte 172n80 Huhtamo, Erkki 129–30
Floros, Constantin 26–27, 49n1, 51–52, 56n21,
59, 60n35, 70n58, 179, 180 idyll 26–27, 93, 98, 99, 122, 139–48
Frank, Alison 94n42 broken 139–43
Franklin, Peter 21n22, 28, 67n53, 68, 108n84, idyllic voice 111, 119, 139, 140, 143–44, 146,
134, 150 147, 149, 151
Freeze, Timothy David 66n49, 71n63 instrumentation 34, 75, 77
Freud, Sigmund 153, 165n53 Istel, Edgar 106–07, 145
Freund, Emil 13n4, 87n20, 158 Ives, Charles 18
Fried, Michael 121, 122n10, 124n14, 128 Symphony no. 4 56
Frisch, Walter 24, 32n55
Fuchs, Carl 82, 92n37 Jacobsen, Jens Peter
Gurrelieder 156n18
Gernsheim, Friedrich 114–15, 85n11 Jarman, Douglas 74
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 161n38, Johnson, Julian 12, 20, 23n24, 23n26, 40,
175n93, 175n94, 180, 184n122 59–60, 63n37, 100, 102–03, 109–10,
Faust 40 116n1, 117n3, 138–39, 162
216 Index
Joyce, James 148n82 Lockwood, Lewis 33, 153n3

Jülg, Hans Peter 96n47, 104n69, 109–10 Löhr, Friedrich, 157, 162, 163
Longyear, Rey M. 97n50
Kafka, Franz 189 Lumière, Louis and Auguste
Kalbeck, Max 39, 126 Panorama of the Arrival at Perrache Station
Kangas, Ryan 57 from the Train 10, 119, 130–32, 133, 134,
Karnes, Kevin C. 156n18, 186n129 135, 139
Kauders, Albert 106
Kierkegaard, Søren 169 Magris, Claudio
Kirby, Lynne 130n36 Danube 152
Klangfläche 97–98, 117, 187n131 Mahler, Alma 85n12, 93n38, 95, 132–33,
Klangraum 148 162n42
Knapp, Raymond 23n25, 24, 43n97, 110, 134, account of fireman’s funeral procession 73
162 on Das Lied von der Erde 171, 173,
Knittel, K. M. 33n61, 166 175n93
Kolm, Anton 167, 169 on Eichendorff and the Seventh Symphony
Korngold, Julius 106 140n54, 144
Kovacs, Friedrich 172, 173 on Mahler’s health 172
Kramer, Jonathan 136–37, 151 on Mahler walking 163, 165, 166, 171
Kramer, Lawrence 34n64, 63n37 Mahler, Gustav
Krenek, Ernst 32, 38n73, 65–66 and Bach 2
and plein air music 65 and Beethoven 2, 9, 24–25, 32–37, 38, 43, 45,
Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen 87n22, 136n45, 176, 180
66n48 and Berlioz 21, 42n89, 63, 137–38, 144
Krisper, Anton 160, 163 and farewell story 152–53, 156
Kubin, Alfred 154 and Goethe 40, 161, 175n93, 180
Kuleshov, Lev 134 and health 93, 173, 178
and Jewish identity 159–61, 162, 165–66, 189
La Grange, Henry-Louis de 54n13, 115n113, 144 and landscape 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 22, 55, 57–58,
Lachner, Vincenz 122n11 62–63, 73, 81–103, 116–35, 139–40,
landscape 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 22, 55, 57–8, 62–63, 144–48, 151, 154, 156–57, 163–71, 176–
73, 81–103, 116–35, 139–40, 144–48, 151, 78, 181, 187–90
154, 156–57, 170, 176, 178, 181, 187–90 and mobility 8, 10, 22, 23, 34–35, 36–37, 42,
alpine 10, 55, 81–115, 144 43, 46, 48, 66, 68, 72, 108, 118, 126, 129,
nocturnal 127, 140n56, 147 157, 171, 175–77
pastoral 100, 144 and Mozart 38
stylized 157, 178, 181 and operatic tradition 14, 22, 38, 45
traversal of 118, 125–26, 129, 140n56, 147, and programme music 12, 14n9, 21,
163–71, 176–78 22, 23, 26–28, 29, 41, 46, 51–57, 62,
urban 92, 131, 147–48 67, 68, 83, 100, 104–10, 113–14, 138,
late style 10, 152–53, 156, 157, 178–81 140n54, 147–48, 177–78
Lebrecht, Norman 159, 175n93 and the railway 10, 85, 86, 89, 93, 116–19,
Lee, Sherry 11n1, 16–17 126, 132–33, 134, 135, 139
Leppert, Richard 100 and Rossini 28
Lichtenfeld, Monika 97 and Schoenberg 103, 149
Ligeti, György and Schumann 2, 24, 62–63, 153, 189
Lontano 74n70 and symphonic tradition 9, 22–25, 31–33,
Lux aeterna 74n70 38, 45, 137, 150
Lipiner, Siegfried 87, 158 and theatrical conception of symphonic
Liszt, Franz 60n35 music 9, 13–16, 21–35, 38–39, 44–46,
and plein air music 65 47, 49–50, 73, 102, 111, 183,
Années de pèlerinage 66n48 187–88
Index 217
and walking 10, 54–55, 87, 106, 116–17, Doctor Faustus 146–47
147–48, 153, 155, 156–77, 168, 169, The Magic Mountain 190
181–82, 189–90 Marschalk, Max 13n4, 49n1, 162n41
and Wagner 9, 14, 17, 18, 24, 38, 40, 41–42, Markovic-Stokes, Katarina 34n62
49n1, 60n35, 97, 153, 180 Mason, Emma 170
and Weber 2, 38, 55n15 McClatchie, Stephen 27n38, 28n40, 29n43
and Webern 102–03, 113n110, 149 McColl, Sandra 39n79
on plein air quality of symphonies 65–66 Mendelssohn, Felix 75
as conductor 24, 31, 37, 56, 66n50, 164, 180–81 Die erste Walpurgisnacht 24
as opera conductor 9, 22, 24, 35, 37–38, 42 Lieder ohne Worte 64
as outsider 87n20, 160, 162, 164, 189 Symphony no. 4 in A major 33
works Menzel, Adolf 135
5 frühe Lieder [arr. Luciano Berio] 1 Moving Train 128
6 frühe Lieder [arr. Luciano Berio] 1 The Balcony Room 122
Das klagende Lied 9, 11–21, 38, 40, 46, 47, 48, The Berlin-Potsdam Railway 118, 120–23, 121
49, 58, 59, 63n39, 65, 159, 162 Travelling through the Countryside 118–19,
Das Lied von der Erde 7, 10, 73, 83, 102, 156, 124, 127, 132
157, 162, 171, 172n81, 173–75, 178–90 Metzer, David 4n11, 5, 7, 77n78, 78, 79
“Der Tamborsg’sell” 180 Meurer guidebook 91
“Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” 7 Meyer, Hans 160n29
“Hans und Grete” 60 Michelet, Jules 125–26
“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” 180 Micznik, Vera 41n85, 152n2
Kindertotenlieder 104, 180 Mildenburg, Anna von 115n113
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen 153, 159, mise en scène 23, 47
161, 161n35, 162, 164n49 Mitchell, Donald 13, 18, 23n25, 25–26, 42n89,
“Maitanz im Grünen” 48, 59–60 51n5, 52n9, 102, 109, 140n56, 141n60,
“Um Mitternacht” 180 148n81, 179, 180, 186n130
Symphony no. 1 7, 9, 12, 14, 21–31, 33, mobility 8, 10, 22, 23, 34–35, 36–37, 42, 43, 46,
35, 35n66, 37, 38–39, 43–46, 47, 48, 49, 48, 66, 68, 72, 108, 118, 126, 129, 157, 171,
50n2, 60–62, 61, 65, 66, 72–73, 118, 175–77
140n55, 147, 158–59, 179, 184n121 Monahan, Seth 40, 95n45
Symphony no. 2 1–7, 18, 21n22, 23n24, 33, Monelle, Raymond 29n43, 66n49
39, 48, 49–57, 59n30, 65, 66, 72, 97n51, 99, Morgan, Robert 56
118, 146, 159, 179 Morris, Christopher 102n63
Symphony no. 3 7, 9, 19, 21n22, 27, 33, mountains 81–83, 87, 90–91, 93–94, 98, 102,
43n97, 48, 52n7, 62, 65–73, 78, 82n4, 83, 115, 124, 176, 182n116, 185, 189
99, 101, 118, 135, 141, 159, 177, 184n21 Alps 53n12, 86, 94n41, 97n49, 103, 107–08
Symphony no. 4 33n60, 85, 93, 110, 111–12, Eastern Alps 10, 85
132, 187 Dolomites 82, 84, 85, 87–93, 88, 94, 178
Symphony no. 5 39, 144, 159 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 2, 38, 67n52
Symphony no. 6 7, 10, 17n15, 19–20, 39, 40,
73, 79, 82, 83–84, 93, 94–115, 140, 141, nature 10, 22, 25, 27–28, 55, 58, 84, 86, 87, 95,
143, 144, 145, 145n70, 145n72, 147, 150, 98, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 122,
185, 189 125, 127, 140–43, 144, 146n75, 147, 155,
Symphony no. 7 7, 10, 50n3, 73, 82, 83, 158, 167, 182, 184n122
102–03, 104, 106, 109, 111, 117–18, 119, Neitzel, Otto 104
134, 135–51, 159, 177–78, 186 Newbould, Brian 75–76
Symphony no. 8 23n24, 40, 101–02, 103, 150 Newcomb, Anthony 64n46, 152n2
Symphony no. 9 152n2, 153n4, 185n124, 187 Newlin, Dika 22n24, 149
Symphony no. 10 38, 73 Nicholson, Geoff 169–70
Mahler, Justine 87n19, 89, 91 Niekerk, Carl 160, 161n35, 177n97, 185n123
Malin, Yonatan 170n73 Nietzsche, Friedrich 81–82, 92, 94, 154, 169
Mann, Thomas Also sprach Zarathustra 81
218 Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich (cont.) as depicted by J.M.W. Turner 118, 119–120,

Ecce Homo 81 120, 123
Human, All Too Human 94, 116 as depicted by Adolph Menzel 118,
Nodnagel, Ernst Otto 96 120–21, 121, 123, 124, 127, 128,
Nono, Luigi 132, 135
Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto 154 as depicted by Honoré Daumier 118, 123, 124
Notley, Margaret 32 impact on health 125, 136n45
in the films of Auguste and Louis Lumière
Offenbach, Jacques 119, 130–31, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139
Orphée aux enfers 137 passenger’s perspective 10, 116–18, 119, 124,
offstage instruments 8, 9, 14n9, 15, 16–24, 127–29, 131, 132, 135, 139
25–26, 29n43, 30–31, 34, 36, 47, 48, 49–51, Ramond, Louis-François
54, 55–56, 59, 72, 104–05, 144 Observations faites danes les Pyrénées, pour
offstage instruments (performance directions) servir de suite à des observations sur les
auf dem Theater 36 Alpes, insérées dans une traduction des
immer in der Ferne 108 letters de W. Coxe, sur la Suisse 93
in der Ferne 30, 83–84 Ratz, Erwin 96n47, 145n72
in der Ferne aufgestellt 12, 113n110 Redlich, Hans 96n47, 108n85, 114n111,
in sehr weiter Ferne aufgestellt 30 140n55, 149–50
in weiter Entfernung 30, 48, 50n2, 72, 73n65, Reilly, Edward R. 13, 38n75, 55n16, 109
145 Reményi, Ede 126
in weiter Ferne 73n65 Revers, Peter 143n66
isoliert postiert 101–02 Revill, George 129n31
Orledge, Robert 170n74 Richter, Jean Paul 58n27, 68
opera assoluta 11, 40–41 Rilke, Rainer Maria
operatic conventions 9, 12, 14, 15, 21 22, 23, 24 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
37–38, 42, 46, 57, 109 Brigge 115
orchestration 4, 80, 103, 104, 138 Ritter, William 83n6
Osmond-Smith, David 6n17, 77 Robertson, Alexander 88, 90
Roller, Alfred 38, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166–67,
Paddison, Max 44n102 170–71, 173, 175n93
panorama 117–19, 126, 128–31, 132, Roman Zoltan 23n25, 25, 26n34, 38n71, 171,
133–39, 148 174, 187–88
moving panorama 118–19, 129–30 Rosen, Charles 63–64, 64n37
panoramic perception 128–29, 134, 139, 151 Rossini, Gioachino 38
Panorama Transsibérien 130 Rott, Hans
Parejo Vadillo, Ana 129n31 Symphony no. 1 in E major 63n39
pastoral 50, 96, 96n47, 98, 100, 104, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 93, 169
108, 110, 112, 114, 141, 144, 144–45 Lettres de deux amans, Habitans d’une petite
broken 72, 101, 113, 142, 143 ville au pied des Alpes 93n40
“Wagnerian” 17 Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire 161
Pecker Berio, Talia 164n51 Ruskin, John
Pfitzner, Hans 97n50 Modern Painters 93–94
Plato 169 Ruzicka, Peter 150
Plunkett, John 129n31 Ryan, Judith 115n114
processions 65–71 Rychetsky, Jiři 159
Proust, Marcel
and the railway 127–28 Saba, Umberto 154
Within a Budding Grove 126–28 Samuels, Robert 17n15, 111
Purcell, Henry 2 Satie, Erik 170
Schaeffer, Pierre 16
railway 85–6, 89, 93, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120–35, Schama, Simon 93
139 Scherzinger, Martin 136–37, 151
Index 219
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 128–29 space. See also distance

Schmidt, Leopold 39 abstract 12, 21–22, 23n26, 29, 30, 51–52, 55,
Schnitzler, Arthur 83, 104–09
Lieutenant Gustl 148n82 mapping of 8, 30–31, 47, 48, 51, 72,
Schoenberg, Arnold 103, 149, 156n18 118, 148
and walking 170 offstage 9, 14, 22, 24, 25–26, 28, 31, 36, 43,
Gurrelieder 156n18 47, 49, 51, 65, 72–73
on Mahler’s Seventh Symphony 149 on theatrical conception of 9, 11–12, 14, 15,
Six Little Piano Pieces 103 16, 21, 23, 29
String Quartet no. 1 170n73 symphonic 21, 23, 35, 43, 47, 102
Schopenhauer, Arthur 186n129 traversal of 58, 62, 176–77
Schubert, Franz 2, 4, 13, 189 Specht, Richard 105n73, 107, 109n91, 140n58,
and Mahler 75, 76, 78, 80, 161–62, 161n38 143, 177
and plein air music 65 Sponheuer, Bernd 60n35, 113
and the wanderer 152, 155 stage directions 23, 28–31, 36
Die schöne Müllerin 161 “stage music” 12, 14, 15, 21, 36, 42, 47,
“Suleika I” 64 57, 109
“Symphony no. 10” (D. 936A) 48–49, 74–80 Stefan, Paul 177
“Unfinished” Symphony 75 Steinberg, Michael P. 40
Winterreise 64, 66n48, 161 Steiner, Joseph 57–58, 160
Schumann, Robert 2, 63, 126 Steward, Jill 85n13
and Romantic distance 57n25 Strauss, Richard 75
Carnaval 64 Alpine Symphony 66n48, 97n49
Davidsbündlertänze 62–63 and plein air music 65
review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique 33 symphonic dramaturgy 12, 22
Symphony no. 1 in B flat major 101 symphony after Beethoven 31–33, 46
Symphony no. 2 in C major 64
Symphony no. 3 in E flat major 33 Taubert, Wilhelm 101
Symphony no. 4 in D minor 24 Thayer, Alexander Wheelock 87n22
Waldszenen 153, 187n132, 189 theatrical conception of symphonic music 9,
Shattuck, Roger 170 13–16, 21–35, 38–39, 44–46, 47, 49–50,
Sheinbaum, John J. 44 73, 102, 111, 183, 187–88
Simmel, Georg theatrical conventions 12, 22, 24, 46
“Alpine Journeys” 85–86, 87, 92, 115 theatricality 9, 36, 48–49, 75–76, 128n30, 154n9
Sinigaglia, Leone 89n27, 91–92, 94 abstract 23, 73, 157
Solie, Ruth 125n17 interiorized 9, 157, 181, 187
Solomon, Maynard 63, 153n3 latent 1, 35
Solvik, Morten 58n28, 71n63 Thoreau, Henry David 169, 170
sound 29. See also audibility Tibbe, Monika 23n25
abstract 19, 21 Tilson Thomas, Michael 134n43
aus der Höhe 101 thresholds 1, 21–24, 46, 60, 76, 78, 99, 111, 187
coming nearer 30, 34, 36, 51, 55, 56n21, 68, timbre 5, 6, 20, 43–44, 106, 113–14, 137, 140,
70, 71, 72, 78, 108, 188 142–43, 144
concealed 42 Toliver, Brooks 97n49
events 47, 49, 54, 55 tourism 55, 84–95, 100, 116, 165
from afar 9, 42, 43, 64, 70n58, 78, 101 travel 10, 84–86, 90–93, 116–19, 120, 123–33,
distant 9, 12, 14–21, 37, 42, 47–48, 134, 136n45, 159, 161–62, 164, 169,
49–51, 53, 55–56, 57–60, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74 175n93, 180–81
dying away 42–43, 51, 60, 69, 70, 108, 187n32 Turner, J. M. W.
illusion of distant sound 48, 49–51, 55, Rain, Steam, and Speed 118, 119–20, 120,
59–60, 63, 69–70, 72 123
of Nature (Naturlaut) 27–28, 110, 117
tableaux 21, 55, 145 urban culture 84, 92, 116
220 Index
Vancsa, Max 105–06 Weber, Horst 42n88

Varèse, Edgard 100 Webern, Anton 4, 65, 154
Verdi, Giuseppe and plein air music 65
Aïda 98 and Mahler 102–03, 113n110
and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony 103,
Wagner, Richard 4, 14, 14n8, 18, 38, 40, 41, 149
49n1, 97, 108, 180 Five Pieces for Orchestra (op. 10) 66n48,
Das Rheingold 112 97n49, 103, 113n110
Die Walküre 98 Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (op. 6)
Lohengrin 18 113n110
Parsifal 60n35 and Mahler’s Seventh Symphony 149
Siegfried 17, 98, 112 Weigl, Karl 53n12, 96, 97, 107,
Tristan und Isolde 9, 18, 24, 41–43, 109n91
101, 153 Wellesz, Egon 103n66
Walser, Robert 81, 154, 185 Williamson, John 13–14, 18, 19n17, 40, 82,
The Tanners 81, 154–55 138, 139, 140n57, 164n49, 180–81, 182,
The Walk 155, 164, 176 187n131
Walter, Bruno 34, 82n4, 174, 175–76, 177 Willnauer, Franz 22n24, 38n72
walking 10, 87, 116–17, 125–26, 148, 153–57, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 154, 169
157–77, 181–82, 189–90 Woolf, Virginia
urban 92, 147–48, 157, 163, 167–69, 168, Mrs. Dalloway 148n82
169, 170, 176 Wordsworth, William 164,
wanderer 86, 87n20, 93, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 169–70
157–63, 164n49, 180–81, 183, 185, Woźniakowski, Jacek 93n40
186–87, 188–90 Wundt, Theodor 89
wandering 10, 18, 86, 153, 154–56, 157–63, 177,
180, 182, 185, 187 Youens, Susan 161
“wandering Jew.” See Ahasver
Weber, Carl Maria von 2 Zenk, Martin 11n1, 59n31
Der Freischütz 55n15 Zoppelli, Luca 36n69
Die drei Pintos 38 Zychowicz, James L. 150–51

Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes - Thomas Peattie

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Gustav Mahler's Symphonic Landscapes - Thomas Peattie

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Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes

In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler’s

thomas peattie is Assistant Professor of Music at Boston

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of ﬁgures [page viii]

Introduction: Hearing Mahler [1]

1 Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1, fourth movement, rehearsal 26.

Western Ontario, who graciously allowed unrestricted access to the

[T]he different degrees of understanding, even the experience of “not quite

In the hundred or so years since the death of Gustav Mahler, perhaps no

“embittered, jostling expressive ‘objects’ that populate Mahler’s world . . .

Copying and transcription

If the notion of transcription provides a useful point of entry for coming to

disappears, then comes back again.”12 Although this skeleton is “accom-

In Mahler’s original Scherzo, the imminent arrival of the passage that

(ﬁve before 47). At the analogous point in the third movement of

in the third movement of Sinfonia, Berio momentarily suspends the

Berio’s “analysis” of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony serves

the origins of Mahler’s fractured teleology are considered in terms of the

In Chapter 3, “Alpine journeys,” I challenge the conventionally accepted

[T]here is often the suggestion of an imaginary theatre in Mahler’s works.

Midway through “Der Spielmann,” the second movement of Das kla-

marks the composer’s ﬁrst prominent use of such an explicitly theatrical

Before coming to a discussion of the First Symphony, it is necessary to

This opening tableau culminates in a frenzied outburst that suddenly gives

In her recent exploration of narrative discourse in Das klagende Lied and

The distinction Williamson makes between combination and juxtaposition

texture. Here, then, the listener is offered a ﬂeeting encounter with a

differentiation is particularly notable in that it establishes the possibility of

formal characteristics, instrumental assignment, and spatial deployment,

his career as a symphonist in such a bold fashion, I explore these issues in

The First Symphony opens with a clear nod to symphonic tradition.

so openly with the symphonic tradition, Mahler was ultimately recasting

Although Mitchell offers an eloquent and, in its own way, pioneering

have motivated Mahler to fashion such a complex musical tableau in the

Perhaps the most well-known aspect of the introduction is the presence of

forest idyll” (poetisch gedachtes Waldidyll) that possesses a “true spring

nachzuahmen (Imitating the voice of cuckoo) – was also a later addition,

If I want to produce a soft, subdued sound, I don’t give it to an instrument which

Despite Adorno’s admiring quotation of this passage as an example of

establishing a scenario in which a succession of variegated fragments

served as a yardstick by which all symphonic works were measured. Robert

Indeed, the theatrical reinterpretation of the march offers a particularly

Leonore: Ah, you are saved! Praise to God Almighty!

with this seemingly mobile utterance, Beethoven thus creates a scenario

Mahler in the opera house

Mahler’s intimate familiarity with operatic conventions was acquired over

Similarly, an anonymous review in the Neue Freie Presse referred to the

The tendency to refer in passing to the presence of an operatic element in

John Williamson has made reference to the “ﬁnal Wagnerian apocalypse”

Isolde’s hunting horns

Once we sense in Mahler’s symphonies an operatic impulse, it is tempting

writing in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.88 As Kurt

There is little doubt that during rehearsals and performances of Tristan

events, the explosive conclusion of the development is a little like breaking

In most accounts of the late-nineteenth-century symphony, the theatrical

otherwise superb discussion of the symphony after Beethoven, James

I seemed to hear, at a certain moment, a distant music. I stopped, the

As I suggested in the opening chapter, the bold treatment of offstage

The carefully calculated approach to the manipulation of offstage space in

Following a caesura, half-remembered fragments from the conclusion of

Mahler’s detailed description offers an overview of the movement’s

Thanks to the widespread reliance on the symphony’s programme as an