According to the critical tradition, Gustav Mahler’s music is full of memories,
memories portrayed most frequently as being Mahler’s recollections of his own childhood.
My study interrogates this trope—that Mahler’s entire oeuvre is an autobiographical puzzle
waiting to be solved—using each of his first four symphonies as a case study. To accomplish
this, I offer interpretations of each symphony, which rely on an analysis of the musical
substance of the piece, and also refer to Mahler’s programs, potential allusions to preexisting
material, and critical reception.
Chapter 1 lays the theoretical foundation for these analyses, which draws on cultural
memory, nostalgia studies, and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. In Chapter 2, by
proposing connections between the Third Symphony and both the antisemetic political
climate in Vienna and Mahler’s hopes for a conducting career in the city, I suggest that
interpretation can make recourse to the composer’s biography without focusing on his
childhood. Moreover, I use Mahler’s biography to suggest new avenues for approaching his
music, rather than using his music to shed light on his life. In Chapter 3, I move interpretation away from details of the composer’s biography: I analyze his First Symphony
with Freudian repression as a theoretical framework, but I focus on how repression might
eludicate both the musical processes in the piece itself and the persistent recourse made to
the suppressed program in reception of the piece, rather than attempting to explain Mahler’s
own supposed neuroses.
After proposing several ways in which music processes might resonate with
forgetting in the form of repression, in Chapters 4 and 5, the Second and Fourth
Symphonies are discussed in terms of mourning and nostalgia respectively, defined as two
specfic types of remembrance. Turning in the final chapter to the later Seventh Symphony, I
unwind the implications of the standard image of Mahler as a figure obsessed with the past.
Mahler’s music grants us no access to his memories, but it does allow us to remember him.
Our memories are all that remains, and the Mahler that we hear has always been merely our own construction. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6537 |
| Date | 15 October 2009 |
| Creators | Kangas, Ryan R. |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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