Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

K.M. Knittel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317057789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

No-one doubts that Gustav Mahler's tenure at the Vienna Court Opera from 1897-1907 was made extremely unpleasant by the antisemitic press. The great biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, acknowledges that 'it must be said that antisemitism was a permanent feature of Viennese life'. Unfortunately, the focus on blatant references to Jewishness has obscured the extent to which 'ordinary' attitudes about Jewish difference were prevalent and pervasive, yet subtle and covert. The context has been lost wherein such coded references to Jewishness would have been immediately recognized and understood. By painstakingly reconstructing 'the language of antisemitism', Knittel recreates what Mahler's audiences expected, saw, and heard, given the biases and beliefs of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Using newspaper reviews, cartoons and memoirs, Knittel eschews focusing on hostile discussions and overt attacks in themselves, rather revealing how and to what extent authors call attention to Mahler's Jewishness with more subtle language. She specifically examines the reviews of Mahler's Viennese symphonic premieres for their resonance with that language as codified by Richard Wagner, though not invented by him. An entire chapter is also devoted to the Viennese premieres of Richard Strauss's tone poems, as a proof text against which the reviews of Mahler can also be read and understood. Accepting how deeply embedded this way of thinking was, not just for critics but for the general population, certainly does not imply that one can find antisemitism under every stone. What Knittel suggests, ultimately, is that much of early criticism was unease rather than 'objective' reactions to Mahler's music - a new perspective that allows for a re-evaluation of what makes his music unique, thought-provoking and valuable.

Chapter 1
Introduction: “Mahlers Metamorphosen”

In a Viennese cartoon from 1905 the composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) is shown dressed up as Wagner, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Schubert, Beethoven, and finally in peasant garb, “orchestrating a folk song” (see Figure 1.1 overleaf). Entitled “Mahlers Metamorphosen” [Mahler’s Metamorphoses], it suggests that Mahler lacks creativity and originality because his music is full of melodic reminiscences and borrowings from other composers. The caption jokes that Mahler will now make himself a cipher as well by dressing up and even acting like those he has imitated:

Nach der Aufführung seiner letzten Symphonie bemerken einige Kritiker daß Mahler sich von Erinnerungen an die von ihm verehrten Meister nicht freimachen konnte, und überdies auch Anleben beim Volksliede gemacht hat. Mahler gedenkt nun bei Wiederholungen seines Werkes auch in den Gesichtszügen und Attitüden jenen Vorbildern zu ähneln die ihn bei der Komposition jeweilig beeindußt haben.

After the performance of his last symphony, several critics noticed that Mahler could not free himself from the reminiscences of the masters he admired, and, in addition, also had written music in the style of folk songs. Mahler now intends at the repetition of his work also to resemble the features and attitudes of every model who has influenced his with their relevant compositions.

This cartoon is often reprinted in books about Mahler with little or no commentary because modern scholars now identify the use of melodic reminiscence or allusion as one of the hallmarks of Mahler’s style. For these scholars, the cartoon represents a straightforward reaction to a Mahler symphony, albeit not a particularly pleasant one.

The cartoon, however, is far from straightforward. By 1900 melodic eclecticism and imitation were thought to be specifically Jewish characteristics. Richard Wagner had written a famous essay in 1850, Das Judentum in der Musik [Jewry in Music], in which he claimed that Jewish composers, since they lacked creativity or originality, could only “hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master.”¹ The prevailing cultural stereotype also asserted that Jews were only mimics in other ways as well, such as in their language and behavior, emulating—but never truly understanding—German language and culture. The caricature thus makes a subtle reference to Mahler’s Jewishness in the guise of a purely musical critique.

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 1.1 “Mahlers Metamorphosen,” Theo Zasche, 15 January 1905, Wiener Caricaturen, p. 4. Source: Österreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv.²

It is worth stressing that the listening experience is not—and can never be—a neutral one: like any other perception, it is structured not only by our backgrounds and experiences, but also by our preconceived ideas. Recently, the American conductor leon Botstein expressed amazement that reviews of the early performances of copland’s Third Symphony were so “subjective”:

In the case of Copland’s Third Symphony, what is striking is how reliable the residue of criticism is in revealing commonplace social, political, and cultural prejudices of an unremarkable and commonplace nature well outside the realm of music. At the same time, reading through the generous citations … one is horrified by the flawed, primitive, and often nonsensical ways in which the music was described, judged, and written about. In the end, one does not even come away convinced that the critical legacy tells us much about what audiences heard or responded to. Once again, we are confronted with how marginal journalistic criticism actually is as historical evidence for musical culture. There are advantages to forgetfulness. When historians exhume the long-buried mass of criticism in the daily press, one is taken aback at what was once written, printed, and taken seriously, if only to satisfy the daunting demands of daily or even weekly, publication. Criticism is essential to history, but the subject may not be music as such but everything that sounds its appearance.

… In the absence of any recorded evidence, it would be hard to know even what these critics were writing about particularly in the cases of George Szell’s or Jascha Horenstein’s performances. One’s curiosity is piqued but not satisfied … The criticism itself is rescued from oblivion only by historians … Only a handful of critics survive as worthy of rereading, and most turn out to be composers or performers, such as Virgil Thomson, Vincent d’Indy, Claude Debussy, and, of course, Schumann and Berlioz … The narrowness and parochial agendas of critics are all the more reprehensible in a world in which new music of any sort struggles for a voice and recognition.³

Botstein’s indictment of Copland’s early critics is symptomatic of the misunderstanding of reception: he assumes not only that the listening experience is objective and recoverable and that it can be captured in words, but also that it should somehow reflect our own, modern evaluation and understanding of the work. Would we really know any more about Copland’s Third Symphony if we did have, as recordings, the same performances as those that the critics experienced? Could we therefore be more “objective” than they were able to be? To be “horrified” by what early critics wrote is to be confronted by history as “a foreign country.”⁴ Perhaps music’s immediacy lulls us into the mistaken belief that it will (that it should) mean the same thing to all who hear it—criticism, perhaps most particularly the “nonsensical” kind, forces us to confront that lie.⁵

Reception history can also be distorted into a longing after the “authentic” first experience of a work. Botstein seems troubled by the mundane aspects of the criticism, as if early reviews should offer a key to unlock the meaning of the music itself, as if the experiences of early listeners are “pure” in a way that ours are not or can no longer be. He is “not convinced” that the early reviews of Copland’s Third tell us anything about “what the audiences heard or responded to”—but this, I would argue, is true of any review: it always tells us at least as much about the reviewer as it tells us about the music. Writers (whether novelists, concert reviewers, or even musicians) will often reveal their cultural beliefs and values more freely as they attempt to ascribe meaning to musical works than they might in a discussion of more concrete topics.⁶ Rather than seeing this as a liability, however, I see it as an opportunity: the historian is thus granted an insight into each critic’s underlying belief system. In the case of the Viennese reception of Mahler’s works, listeners were bound to hear what they saw in Mahler himself—his Jewishness, his difference. To say this is not to indict those early critics; it is an attempt to see into the foreign country of the past. Nor can a reception historian pick and choose (and dismiss) those critics who are not “worthy of re-reading”: to do so is to commit the error of searching for what one wants to find—that is, a validation of one’s own opinion of the work in question. Reactions to Mahler’s music can illuminate the Viennese fin de siècle in ways that other writings do not—but we cannot begin to understand that culture until we understand how Jews were seen.

Perhaps this is the place to address the issue of Vienna—and Mahler—as a special case. Vienna was, of course, the city that in 1897 elected as its mayor Karl Lueger, a man who openly “relativized anti-Semitism to the attack on liberalism and capitalism.”⁷ Unlike Georg Schönerer, the head of the Pan-Germans, whose rabid version of antisemitism was too much even for the Viennese, Lueger was a consensus builder who used antisemitic feelings to unite “aristocrats and democrats, artisans and ecclesiastics, by confining the uses of racist poison to attacking the liberal foe.”⁸ While remaining mindful of Vienna’s peculiar history in relation to its Jewish population and its unusual place in the history of European antisemitism, I nevertheless oppose the notion that Mahler’s experience was an aberration that can be dismissed as irrelevant to the general history of antisemitism. True, Mahler was not just any musician, Vienna not just any town, and the Court Opera not just any theater. Even so, or perhaps even because of these special conditions, the combination of Mahler and Vienna gives us a glimpse of something that might otherwise—in a less public place, with a less prominent figure—remain hidden.

No one, of course, doubts that Mahler’s tenure at the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper) from 1897 to 1907 was made extremely unpleasant by the antisemitic press, and it is relatively easy to find scathing comments—for example, from 1897, when the Viennese daily the Reichspost wondered if “the Jews’ press” would still support Mahler’s appointment to the Hofoper once he began “his Jew-boy antics at the podium.”⁹ Henry-Louis de La Grange acknowledges in his biography of Mahler that “it must be said that anti-Semitism was a permanent feature of Viennese life.”¹⁰ Botstein, in his introduction to the volume Mahler and His World, goes further to suggest that “There were certainly anti-Semites who, following Wagner’s construct of a Jewish incapacity for creativity, disparaged Mahler as a composer for no other reason than his Jewishness.”¹¹ Edward Kravitt makes a similar point in his book on the late romantic lied: “In spite of Mahler’s remarkable skill as a conductor, reviews by Pan-German nationalists remained unremittingly negative. Their criticism was undisguisedly ethnic and often of such crudity as to sound ludicrous today.”¹²

Given that most modern scholars acknowledge that antisemitism is an aspect of Mahler reception that cannot be dismissed, why, then, a need for an additional study to focus on this situation? I believe that the shortfall of present scholarship on Mahler and antisemitism has three sources: a misunderstanding of the word “antisemitism”; a lack of consideration regarding how minority cultures find themselves implicated in the dominant discourse; and, finally, how blatant references to Jewishness have been fetishized and dismissed, obscuring the extent to which “ordinary” attitudes about Jewish difference were prevalent and pervasive yet subtle and covert. While all these issues have received subtle treatment outside the field of music, musical scholarship has tended either to ignore them or treat them only superficially and has thus failed to see how deeply it has misunderstood the culture in which Mahler worked and was judged.

To begin with the word itself: antisemitism. For readers in the twenty-first century, the term is forever bound up with the Shoah; it has come to mean hatred, to imply genocide, and to suggest an extreme revulsion that can only be described as a pathology.¹³ If we want to write the history of the nineteenth century, however, then we cannot be satisfied with the current usage and implications of the term. Indeed, as George Mosse and others have argued, one cannot understand how antisemitism caused the Holocaust without trying to understand how it was that educated, seemingly moral human beings allowed such a thing to happen.¹⁴ And, as he and others have stressed, it happened because people truly believed that the Jews were somehow different: different in body, in speech, in mannerisms, even in terms of their susceptibility or immunity from certain diseases. Once you believe that a group is essentially different from you (whatever the origins for this belief may be or whatever the attempts to justify it), it becomes easier to withhold empathy, to cease caring what happens to them. In the context in which I am using the term, then, it means just this: the assumption that the Jew was different from the gentile, that those differences were both racial (that is, biological) and visible. To be antisemitic did not necessarily mean one hated the Jews.¹⁵ To be antisemitic in fin-de-siècle Vienna meant to see the Jew as fundamentally different, as an outsider, as someone for whom true assimilation—the erasure of the bodily signs—was forever an impossibility.

The term “antisemitism” itself was invented only in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr as a political slogan, and its ambiguity is well known.¹⁶ However, for some time, many scholars have associated the existence of the new term with a “new” antisemitism, one that is primarily racial (rather than religious) and particularly virulent. The confluence of the supposedly “new” racial antisemitism with the rise of political antisemitism has caused many historians to treat the end of the nineteenth century as a turning point of sorts, and, given that the endpoint was the Holocaust, the emergence of the “new” antisemitism became a way to understand how it was that a political platform could eventually lead to the attempt to destroy European Jewry.¹⁷

Recently, however, historians have begun emphasizing the continuity of “Jew-hatred” rather than the invention of something new, calling into question the setting aside of the late nineteenth century for special treatment.¹⁸ Sander Gilman states that he uses the term anti-semitism “as the blanket label for all stages of Jew-hatred as a means of emphasizing the inherent consistency of Western attitudes toward the Jews.”¹⁹ By focusing not on a sharp divide but rather on the fact “that continuities do exist between earlier and later varieties of anti-Jewish mentality,” it is possible to understand antisemitism as “a real and ongoing category in Western culture which is transmuted from age to age and from location to location.”²⁰ Klaus Fischer and Joshua Trachtenberg both emphasize that the Jews were seen, from the Middle Ages onward, as fundamentally different, and that those categories simply came to be explained as “race” once that was an available concept. I will use the term “antisemitism” to refer to the long history and consequences of treating the Jew in European culture as “other.”

The more recent use and acceptance of the term without the hyphen is one way of emphasizing both this continuity of hatred, but also an attempt to get away from the fictive origins of the word. (“Semitic” and “Aryan” were originally language groups, and the “Semitic” languages included the Arab languages. “Anti-Semitism,” however, never assumes a hatred of Arabs.) As Shmuel Almog writes:

So the hyphen, or rather its omission, conveys a message; if you hyphenate your “anti-Semitism,” you attach some credence to the very foundation on which the whole thing rests. [That is, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: “Mahlers Metamorphosen”
• 2 Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler
• 3 Das Judentum in der Musik
• 4 Die Wiener Kritiker
• 5 Das Problem Richard Strauss
• 6 Eine musikalische Physiognomik
• Appendix I Mahler Reviews Consulted
• Appendix II Strauss Reviews Consulted
• Bibliography
• Index