"Breakthrough" as critique of form: The finale of Mahler's First Symphony

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 125-143

  Buhler, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61949180203     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/746904     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, vol. I (Garden City, N. Y. , 1973), p. 757.
2. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin, 1921; rpt. Tutzing, 1969), p. 61.
3. Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 56.
4. Mahler, letter dated 19 July 1894, in Gustav Mahler-Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888-1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1984), p. 37 (trans. modified).
5. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin (London, 1980), p. 31. It is somewhat strange that Mahler says that D major is "the principal key of the movement," since this moment marks the first appearance of the key in the movement. Of course, from the moment of its entry here, D major does control the overall trajectory of the movement.
6. Burnham presents a good discussion of the Beethoven exception to this formal norm in Beethoven Hero. A Beethoven recapitulation, he suggests, "is no mere return but rather another twist of the spiral; the emphasis is no longer on the syntactic business of sonata form but on the progressive trajectory of a linear history" (p. 51). As Burnham recognizes, this claim makes sense only when evaluated against the background of a normative understanding of sonata form, with its literal recapitulation.
7. Burnham is similarly ambivalent about the perorations of the Beethoven coda: "Regardless of the formal function we ascribe to the coda, the suspicion remains that the coda is in fact not the strictly necessary, organically and structurally inevitable continuation of that which precedes it, and that there is a willful aspect to Beethoven's codas that is of great moment precisely because it is supererogatory" (Beethoven Hero, p. 53).
8. By noting this, I do not disparage Tchaikovsky's Overture. At the same time, it seems undeniable that making sense of this compositional aesthetic in a way that does not denigrate it will necessarily involve developing an understanding of the function and significance of unmistakably bombastic gestures. In short, we need a theory of bombast capable of resisting the almost instinctive urge to consign such gestures to the realm of kitsch.
9. The brass, which serves as the usual orchestral guise of the chorale, is capable of crushing nearly all musical dissent. As Rose Subotnik notes, "brute force can never quite dispel the suspicion that its own ultimate basis is arbitrary" ("The Historical Structure: Adorno's 'French' Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music," this journal 2 [1978], 44).
10. For a comparison of the chorales of Liszt and Mahler along similar lines, see John Williamson, "Liszt, Mahler and the Chorale," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 108 (1982), 115-25.
11. The discussion here is very much indebted to Williamson's treatment of the subject. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1960), trans. Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago, 1992). Page numbers here and below in this article refer to the original German and then the English translation of the Adorno book (thus: 20-3/11-2).
12. Leonard B. Meyer makes a similar point to different ends in Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 213.
13. Likewise, Susan McClary argues that a program offers composers and listeners alike an "alternative metaphorical grid," which provides access to "a potentially infinite range of idiosyncratic formal designs. " As many critics of program music have indicated, the program never fully succeeds in supplanting formal criteria. This puts program music in a precarious position because the program can only substitute for formal principles to the extent that its symbolism in tones can be maintained, that is, to the extent that appeals to purely musical criteria are delegitimized (cf. James Hepokoski, "Fiery-pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated," in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam Durham, 1992], pp. 135-75, esp. 136-41).
14. But the status of absolute music is just as precarious. If a program does not ultimately displace formal musical principles, it is also true that, as McClary suggests, a program always "threatened to blow the lid off the metaphysical claims of [absolute music], for tone poems employed the same codes, the same gestural vocabulary, [and] the same structural impulses," while "acknowledging . . . what"- or at least that- "they signified" ("Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony," in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993], pp. 333, 334).
15. See, for instance, Wagner's defense of Liszt's symphonic poems where he argues that a "dramatic idea," rather than a "formal" alternation of thematic material, is responsible for the coherence of Liszt's compositions ("Über Franz Liszts Symphonische Dichtungen [1857]," in Richard Wagner Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer [Frankfurt-am-Main, 1983], pp. 8, 22-39, esp. 27-34).
16. Anthony Newcomb, "Once More 'Between Absolute and Program Music': Schumann's Second Symphony," this journal 7 (1984), 233-50, esp. 234. Likewise, McClary suggests that sonata form "adheres . . . to the most common plot outline and the most fundamental ideological tensions available within Western culture: the story of a hero who ventures forth, encounters an Other, fights it out, and finally reestablishes secure identity" ("Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music," p. 333).
17. Nineteenth-century composers found many elegant ways, of course, to circumscribe the problem by transforming it into a nonissue without actually solving it. The point here is that the potential arbitrariness of the chorale remained a powerful but unexposed tension within those compositions that used it.
18. See n. 11 above.
19. Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler II: Mahler und die Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts in neuer Deutung (Wiesbaden, 1977), p. 110;
20. see also Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker (Portland, Ore. , 1993), p. 35.
21. For Bekker's use of "breakthrough" in his analysis of Mahler's First, see Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien, pp. 44, 45, and 62.
22. For a discussion of how the category of breakthrough operates within Adorno's thought, see my review article on Adorno in Indiana Theory Review 15 (1994), 139-63.
23. Adorno, "Mahler" in Quasi una Fantasia (1963), rpt. in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1978), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), pp. 343/102-03 (all trans. from "Mahler" are mine). On turning-aside, Adorno writes: "The path of music as one of turning-aside, however, is much more compelling than the force of its open logic because turning-aside brings real experience to aesthetic language; it demonstrates that every life runs at right angles to its own premises. What is inescapable is turning-aside itself. "
24. Compare Hepokoski, "Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated," pp. 149-52.
25. See also the discussion of sonata deformation in Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 5-9.
26. As such, in musical works, the actual moment of breakthrough does not usually coincide with an arrival of a chorale. Rather, it precedes and prepares the appearance of that chorale. In this regard, Adorno's account of the breakthrough of the second movement of the Fifth Symphony is an exception to his more typical separation of breakthrough and chorale. "The fanfare of the breakthrough," Adorno writes of this movement, "assumes musical shape as chorale, no longer extraterritorially, but by thematically mediating the whole" (Mahler, pp. 20/11; all trans. from Mahler are mine). At least preliminarily, the first measures of the chorale (5, movt. II, mm. 464-65) are to be understood as fanfare and thus as the moment of breakthrough. Subsequently, these measures become so thoroughly incorporated into the chorale- in the process becoming an integral part of it- that they are transformed from fanfare into chorale. Breakthrough and chorale briefly achieve identity.
27. Following Adorno, I construe artistic logic here as the way in which a particular moment of a composition follows from earlier ones. In a sense, artistic logic is an implementation of the rules of the system and is thus the very definition of its immanence. See Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (2nd edn. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1973)
28. trans. C. Lenhardt as Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), pp. 205/197.
29. As used here, the terms immanent and transcendent are defined by two of the three forms of critique generally practiced by philosophy: the immanent, the transcendent, and the transcendental. Immanent critique is the evaluation of a system by the criteria it purportedly sets for itself. Inevitably, such a critique entails revealing internal contradictions within that system. Transcendent critique is the evaluation of a system by a set of criteria coming from outside of that system. Such a critique entails positing a new system and asserting its superiority over the system under critique. For Adorno, effective critique manages to retain moments of both transcendence and immanence: without transcendence, the possibility of real critique is thwarted because we would remain unaware that things could be other than they are; without immanence, the critical gesture is empty and repressive, arbitrarily forced onto the material from outside. For a discussion of this necessity of retaining moments of both transcendence and immanence within critique, see Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society" in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (1967, rpt. Cambridge, Mass. , 1983), pp. 19-34, esp. 31ff.
30. The third form of critique, namely, the transcendental, involves an investigation into the conditions of possibility of a system. The transcendental critique thus looks at what must be the case in order for a theory to be true. The transcendent, immanent, and transcendental forms of critique are often associated with foundationalist philosophy, Hegel and Kant, respectively. For a brief but useful overview of these three forms of critique, see Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass. , 1991), pp. xvii-xix.
31. The concept of breakthrough presented here has much in common with Adorno's ideas on dialectics in general: "Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. But since it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character: the ruse of reason would like to hold sway over the dialectic too" (Minima Moralia [Frankfurt-am-Main, 1951], trans. Edmund Jephcott [1974; rpt. New York, 1989], pp. 284/150).
32. Similarly, the notion of suspension is integral to Adorno's concept of dialectics. Lambert Zuidervaart writes: "[Adorno's] temporary suspensions [of dialectical logic] are philosophical attempts to acknowledge the presence and possibility of what escapes the net of logic. . . . There is a need to unite spontaneous experience and critical argumentation, even when experience threatens the consistency of an argument. " Thus, "Adorno's thought . . . aims for the conceptual rigor of dialectical logic even while it suspends dialectical logic in order to express what things would be like if freed of dialectic" (Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, p. 52).
33. "Was anders wäre" (Adorno, Mahler, pp. 11/5).
34. Burnham hears the trumpet call "as a truly narrating disjuncture, for it is motivated externally and sounds literally as an external voice" (Beethoven Hero, p. 178, n. 25). This externality is marked by the "impossible" key of the fanfare: the orchestral trumpets (in C) would be physically incapable of playing the passage in question without first changing crooks.
35. Burnham cites August Halm, Heinrich Schenker, and Robert B. Meikle as three analysts who have tied the new theme to the exposition material (Beethoven Hero, p. 171, n. 20).
36. Hans H. Eggebrecht notes that breakthrough usually assumes musical shape in a highly conventional thematic figure such as the fanfare. This is one of the primary reasons he prefers to call it a "signal," an instance of one of his musical Vokabeln. The deployment of conventional figures also offers a way to mark the suspension or neutralization of motivic development in thematic terms. See Die Musik Gustav Mahlers (Munich, 1982), pp. 82-91, esp. 87ff.
37. This example and the one from the scherzo of Beethoven's Seventh seem to suggest that for Adorno motivic neutralization is an important, perhaps even indispensable, element of breakthrough. It is not so much an emphatic arrival of something radically new as a suspension of motivic development that marks the crucial moment of breakthrough. In the third Leonore Overture, the arrival of a new theme therefore simply confirms a breach already opened by the trumpet call.
38. Wagner criticizes the "form" of the Overture on precisely this point: the traditional formal procedures, he says, remain unaffected by the revolutionary impulses of the dramatic idea. In particular, he writes that the recapitulation in this work "is a weakness that distorts the [dramatic] idea of the work into something almost incomprehensible" ("Über Franz Liszts Symphonische Dichtungen," p. 31). For Wagner, the recapitulation cannot take account of this revolutionary dramatic idea here because every recapitulation necessarily retains a formal residue from the dance, which is alien to that idea. For an extended discussion of Wagner's interpretation of the third Leonore Overture, see Thomas Grey, "Wagner, the Overture, and the Aesthetics of Musical Form," this journal 12 (1988), 3-22.
39. Bernd Sponheuer, "Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers," in Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers Instrumentalmusik, ed. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (Wilhelmshaven, 1980), pp. 117-64, 120 (all trans. from this article are mine).
40. Adorno, "Mahler," pp. 326/84.
41. The opposition between sonata form and the structure associated with breakthrough is further intensified in the finale because the F-minor exposition of this movement, with its sharply demarcated second-theme area, is clearly more indicative of a traditional sonata-form schema, at least by end-of-the-century standards, than is the more-or-less monothematic exposition of the first movement.
42. Sponheuer, "Durchbruch," p. 155.
43. Hepokoski, "Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated," p. 149.
44. "Sonata hybrids" are one of the classes of sonata deformations that Hepokoski discusses in Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, p. 7.
45. James Webster, "Sonata Form," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, vol. 17 (London, 1980), pp. 497, 498.
46. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London, 1990), p. 170.
47. Peter Brooks provides additional support for the account of return given here. Drawing on Freud, Brooks argues that a return to an event (say in a novel) is what releases that event from contingency and arbitrariness. See Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984; rpt. Cambridge, Mass. , 1992), pp. 90-112.
48. In a recent study, Anthony Newcomb explores some of the implications that follow from applying Brooks's Freudian framework to Mahler's Ninth. In particular, Newcomb finds Brooks's account of Freud useful in explicating the frequent recurrences of the main theme in the first movement of that piece. See Newcomb, "Narrative Archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony," in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 118-36, esp. 132ff.
49. It should be obvious that to say that the arrival of the chorale overwhelms the formal import of sonata form is not the same as saying that a sonata-form residue is not present. On the one hand, this section certainly does not entirely relinquish its recapitulatory function. There is a very real sense in which it "completes" the F-minor sonata form as a "recapitulation. " On the other hand, this section also bears unmistakably strong traces of developmental procedures. Its function is, in other words, less than unequivocal. Moreover, the recapitulatory function, already weak at the outset, becomes progressively weaker until it finally dissolves into the return of the unambiguous developmental material from the first movement. Ironically, the only element that returns verbatim in this whole section is thus clearly developmental rather than thematic.
50. Stephen McClatchie, "The 1889 Version of Mahler's First Symphony: A New Manuscript Source," this issue, pp. 99-124.
51. Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (Boulder, Co. , 1976), pp. 205-06.
52. My account of the original version of the second theme is based on the description in McClatchie, "The 1889 Version of Mahler's First. " According to McClatchie, Mahler shifted this material down to a C pedal rather late in the process of revising the section.
53. There are other functional parallels in formal structure between the first movement and the finale. Of these, the exposition of a new thematic material in the development and a later recapitulatory treatment of that material is perhaps the most significant.
54. Thus the structure of this finale somewhat resembles the finale of Schumann's Second, which Anthony Newcomb interprets as beginning like a sonata rondo and becoming more properly sonatalike only in the recapitulation ("Once More 'Between Absolute and Program Music': Schumann's Second Symphony," pp. 243-47), or Strauss's Don Juan, which Hepokoski hears as a rondo "deformed" into a sonata ("Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated," p. 160). In Mahler's First, however, everything takes place in terms of sonata form: breakthrough "deforms" an F-minor sonata into a D-major one deploying the principles of sonata form against itself.
55. Floros rather heavy-handedly links the main motives of the finale to Liszt's Dante Symphony and Wagner's Parsifal, a move that has the effect of reducing Mahler's compositional contribution in the movement to arranging Liszt's and Wagner's motives according to the plot of Dante's Inferno (Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, pp. 44-47;
56. see also Floros, Gustav Mahler II, pp. 247-59). In other words, Floros's reading implies that neither the form nor the motives are original with Mahler. Compositional originality is the steep price Floros's hermeneutics exact for allowing Mahler's music to become meaningful.
57. Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, pp. 45, 47.
58. Rose Subotnik discerns a moment of futility in Adorno's portrait of Mahler: "Mahler, clearly the nineteenth-century composer to whose work Adorno is most sympathetic, can do no more than confirm the greatness of the Beethovenian moment of synthesis by evoking its negative image, so to speak- an image of totality lost, of the negated or impossible masterpiece- by constructing enormous 'symphonic' patterns out of elements too discontinuous to effect any large-scale unity" (Subotnik, "The Historical Structure," p. 38).
59. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 80/50.