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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2018
This article offers a solution to a long-standing mystery surrounding the identity of a melody by Carinthian folkloric composer Thomas Koschat used by Mahler in his Fifth Symphony. It first places such musical reference in the broader scholarly context of Mahler and the volkstümlich. Evidence surrounding the chronology and sketches of the symphony as well as Mahler’s intersection with Koschat and the latter’s reception is assessed. Musical materials are analysed in order to identify the source of borrowing in Koschat’s Liederspiel Am Wörther See (1880), and to understand the key structural and expressive roles it plays in Mahler’s work. The article concludes by reflecting on the possible socio-cultural meaning and significance of this case of Mahlerian allusive practice.
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2 Ulm, Renate, ‘Das “Gedudel der böhmischen Musikanten”. Mahler und die Volksmusik’, in Gustav Mahlers Symphonien. Entstehung, Deutung, Wirkung (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 71–76 Google Scholar; quotations, 73 and 76. See also Eggebrecht, , Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 3rd edn (Munich: Piper, 1992), 195 Google Scholar. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
3 Specht, Richard, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), 164 Google Scholar.
4 ‘The Influence of the Folk-Song on German Musical Art: From an Interview with the Eminent Composer and Director Gustav Mahler’, The Etude (Philadelphia) May 1911, 301–2; quotations 301 and 302.
5 Bauer-Lechner, Natalie, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 33 Google Scholar; Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ed. Herbert Killian and Knud Martner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner), 28.
6 Brod, Max, ‘Gustav Mahlers Jüdische Melodien’, Musikblätter des Anbruch 2/10 (1921): 378–379 Google Scholar.
Quoika disputes this ‘Zionist’ viewpoint on the grounds that Mahler’s roots did not in fact lie in Eastern Europe (‘Über die Musiklandschaft Gustav Mahlers’, 109). Vladimír Karbusický notes that itinerant East-European Jews travelled west from Tarnopol to Bohemia performing Hasidic music at the Purim Festival (‘Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness’, in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Jeremy Barham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 195–216; see 203.
7 Komma, Karl, Das böhmische Musikantentum (Kassel: Johan Philipp Hinnenthal, 1960), 175 Google Scholar.
8 See Finson, ‘The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder’, 101; and Franklin, ‘Mahler’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 15, 602–31; 615 Google Scholar.
9 Batka, Richard, Die Musik in Böhmen (Berlin: Bard, Marquardt & Co., 1906), 98 Google Scholar.
10 A comment reported by Mahler’s friend Josef Foerster; cited in Karbusický, Wie Deutsch ist das Abendland? (Hamburg: Von Bockel Verlag, 1995), 120.
11 Karbusický, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 54 and 55; Markl, Jaroslav and Karbusický, Vladimír, ‘Bohemian Folk Music: Traditional and Contemporary Aspects’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 15 (1963): 25–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation, 27.
12 de La Grange, Henry-Louis, ‘Music about Music in Mahler: Reminiscences, Allusions, or Quotations?’, in Mahler Studies, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122–68; 140 Google Scholar.
See Kravitt, ‘The Trend towards the Folklike’, 40–46, for discussion of this movement and the song competition.
13 Karbusický, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 70 and 88.
14 Adorno, Theodor, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 36.
15 See Duse, ‘Der volkstümliche Ursprung’ for further political diagnoses of Mahler’s folk influences.
16 See Schmidt, ‘Komponierte Uneinholbarkeit’ for further discussion of these socio-cultural complexities. See Kravitt, Edward F., The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 118–120 Google Scholar and de La Grange, Henry-Louis, Gustav Mahler Vol. 2. Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 228–230 Google Scholar for examples of this critical reception.
17 Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 152; Erinnerungen, 163–4.
18 Erinnerungen, 193 (my translation); Recollections, 172.
19 Erinnerungen, 192 and 193; Recollections, 172–3.
20 Reported in Mahler, Alma, Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner (London: Cardinal: 1990), 92 Google Scholar. See also Wilkens, Sander, Mahlers fünfte Symphonie: Quellen und Instrumentationsprozess (Frankfurt: Peters, 1989), 27 Google Scholar.
21 A. Mahler, Memories and Letters, 42.
22 Kubik, Reinhold, ‘Vorwort’, in Gustav Mahler. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Bd. V. Symphonie Nr. 5 (Frankfurt: Peters, 2002), i–xi Google Scholar; see ii.
23 Erinnerungen, 193; Recollections, 173.
24 See de La Grange, Henry-Louis, Gustav Mahler. Volume 2. Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 816–817 Google Scholar, and Mitchell, Donald, ‘Eternity or Nothingness? Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’, in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 236–325: 315–17Google Scholar.
25 See Krobath, Karl, Thomas Koschat: seine Zeit und sein Schaffen (Klagenfurt: Johannes Heyn, 1991 Google Scholar [first published Leipzig: Leuckart, 1912]), 119–20.
26 Whitman, Sidney, The Realm of the Habsburgs (London: William Heinemann, 1893), 207 Google Scholar.
27 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 81.
28 See Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 124–6.
29 1 September 1895, 614.
30 1 August 1895, 184.
31 Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2005; vol. VII, 1639. There was also some recognition of the centenary of Koschat’s death in 2014, in the media and concert life of the Klagenfurt area.
32 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1 September 1896, 202 and 207; quotation, 202.
33 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1 September 1898, 198–9; quotation, 199.
34 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1 August 1900, 172–3; quotation, 173.
35 Defending himself against (an unspecified) critique, Koschat denied that he ever ‘composed’ folk song. Rather, like ‘thousands of composers’, he ‘employed popular airs in fantasies and paraphrases’, and built his own songs on ‘popular foundations’ (cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 83–4).
36 See the Vienna Opera online repertoire archive at: https://db-staatsoper.die-antwort.eu/search/person/7207/work/681 (accessed July 2015).
37 Cited in de La Grange, Gustav Mahler. Volume 2, 182. Original source not supplied.
38 For the former, see Recollections, 155 and Erinnerungen, 165 regarding an occasion in Klagenfurt, summer 1900; and Mahler, A., Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, 135 Google Scholar, regarding an occasion in New York, 1907/8. Although Alma writes of Mahler’s inclination for operetta in Mahler-Werfel, A., And the Bridge is Love (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 35 Google Scholar, she also described herself and Mahler as too ‘highbrow’ to purchase the score of Léhar’s The Merry Widow, which they enthusiastically attended, and recounted an occasion in 1907 in Doblinger’s music shop in Vienna where presumably due to Mahler’s pride and status he had to distract the salesperson in order that she could look up a favoured part of the score on his behalf (Memories and Letters, 120).
39 Mahler may have been referring to either the ‘original’ Thuringian folksong with text by Alexander Rost, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, or the 1827 version by Friedrich Silcher with text by Helmine von Chezy. Both have regular periodic phrase structures.
40 Recollections, 128; Erinnerungen, 134.
41 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 85.
42 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 85.
43 I am grateful to Andrea Harrandt of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and Maria Fuchs for supplying me with copies of the Koschat manuscript and score materials; and I am grateful to The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, for providing copies of Mahler’s draft short score of the Scherzo, held in the Robert Owen Lehman Collection.
44 Am Wörther See. Kärntnerisches Liederspiel in einem Akt (Leipzig, F. E. C. Leuckart, n.d.). The subtitle of the ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’ translates as ‘customary alternating songs’ (that is, sung by lads and lasses in turn), and (lit.) ‘songs of defiance’. Interestingly the latter term, which had a long history, subsequently took on exclusionary fascistic and anti-Semitic overtones in songs of National-Socialist Germany. But here it most likely signifies a more localized pride in Austrian-Carinthian culture, the triumph of youth over the father who falsely and deceitfully tells his daughter that her soldier sweetheart is dead, and a defiance possibly in the face of interlopers from a nearby valley (for example, Stöfel, the hopeless son of a rich farmer from Gailtal and the intended but rejected husband of the innkeeper’s daughter).
45 Erinnerungen, 193 (my translation); Recollections, 173.
46 Am Wörther See. Kärntner Walzer mit theilweiser Benutzung von Kärntner Volksliedern op. 26 (Leipzig: Leuckart).
47 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 76.
48 Pamer, ‘Gustav Mahlers Lieder’, 136–7.
49 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 81. Koschat himself describes ‘Artifice, affectation, exaggeration, mannerism, obtrusiveness, pursuit of effect’ as anathema to Carinthian Lieder (Erinnerungs-Bilder. Gesammelte Feuilletons (Klagenfurt: Kleinmayr, 1889; repr. Memphis: General Books, 2012), 63).
50 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 95. Einfachheit could also imply the sense of homeliness that was at the core of Koschat’s musical outlook.
51 Cited in Kravitt, ‘The Trend towards the Folklike’, 43. The volumes were edited by Rochus Freiherr von Liliencron.
52 For a list of Koschat’s works and their published sources, see www.deutscheslied.com/en/search.cgi?cmd=composers&name=Koschat%2C%20Thomas (accessed October 2017).
53 Erinnerungen, 192; Recollections, 172.
54 Tovey, Donald, ‘Mahler Symphony in G Major, No. 4’ in Essays in Musical Analysis Volume VI (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 73–83 Google Scholar; quotation, 82.
55 See van der Merwe, Peter, Origins of the Popular style. The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 224–225 Google Scholar and 230–35 for analysis of the emancipation of the sixth as a crucial melodic and harmonic feature of what he calls the ‘parlour modes’ in a line of development from Mozart, through the Viennese waltz and Tchaikovsky, to Kurt Weill and music-hall.
56 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 63.
57 In addition to ‘zart’ in the second waltz of Am Wörther See, Koschat uses the marking ‘mit derber Zärtlichkeit’ (‘with clumsy tenderness’) in the first waltz, ‘derb’ being a word used by Mahler in his characterization of the folk-dance-inspired second movement of the Ninth Symphony: ‘Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb’ (‘somewhat awkward and very clumsy’).
58 He specifically mentions ‘Decker, Baron Herbert, Herbeck, Reiner, Metzger, Rader and others’ (Erinnerungs-Bilder, 61).
59 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 61–2.
60 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 62.
61 Similar ascending bass lines can be found in the final movements of the Third Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, as well as at the beginning of the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, where the resemblance to the above example is closest, although there Mahler pointedly retains the intervening dominant pitches in the bass. Given these family resemblances and the existence of many other related models for such part writing among the concert repertoire with which Mahler was familiar, it would be misguided to claim that Mahler simply derived this bass-line effect directly from Koschat. Nevertheless, there appears to be a persuasive musico-cultural allusion at work in the Ländler-Waltz sections of the Scherzo movement.
62 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 62.
63 For further discussion of this critique see Jeremy Barham, ‘Mahler and Socio-Cultural Nomadism: The Case of the Fifth Symphony’, in Beiträge z. symposium ‘Ferne Heimatklänge – Gustav Mahler und die Moderne’ Köln May 2010, ed. Arnold Jacobshagen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011), 57–68; also available at https://surrey.academia.edu/JeremyBarham.
64 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 91. Without revealing any specific sources, Krobath briefly alludes to criticism from some quarters of the ‘salon’-like nature of Koschat’s folk tone, its ‘false sentiment’ and even its ‘poisoning of the well of folk song’, all of which he attributes to ‘feeble envy’. Success among the salons was in any case for Krobath a measure of Koschat’s ability to be of wider value to the people whilst remaining unaffectedly faithful to his roots (Thomas Koschat, 79–81). Although such criticism does not seem to have been widespread in what was, after all, a pre-ethnomusicological era, in a mirror image of each other, Koschat is accused here of betraying the purity of authentic folk music, while Mahler is frequently rebuked for defiling the high-art sanctity of symphonic music with folk elements, ‘pure’ or otherwise.
65 See Barham, ‘Mahler and Socio-Cultural Nomadism’ for a more detailed account of this central, but latterly submerged, musico-cultural narrative.
66 Mitchell, Donald, Gustav Mahler. The Early Years, rev. and ed. Paul Banks and David Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 211 Google Scholar.
67 Johnson, Julian, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 100 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 See Dargie Music and Poetry in the Songs of Gustav Mahler, 128.
69 Voigt, Boris, ‘Das Scherzo der fünften Symphonie Gustav Mahlers als Reflexion auf die gesellschaftliche Moderne’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41/2 (December 2010): 195–239 Google Scholar; quotations, 213 and 217. Memories and Letters, 243.
70 Hugo Leichtentritt, Untitled review of concerts in Berlin, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 72/10 (1 March 1905), 206–7; quotation, 207.
71 Hanslick, Eduard, ‘Theater- und Kunstnachrichten’, Neue Freie Presse (16 January 1900), 8 Google Scholar, cited in Finson, ‘The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder’, 102–3.
72 A particularly strong example of this vein of criticism can be seen in Maximilian Muntz’s 1905 review of the Fifth Symphony in the anti-Semitic and pan-Germanist Deutsche Zeitung. For excerpts of the review, see Painter, Karen, ‘The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the “Fin de siècle”’, 19th-Century Music 18 (1995): 236–256 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 244–5. See Rosenzweig, Alfred, Gustav Mahler: New Insights into his Life, Time and Work, trans. and ed. Jeremy Barham (London and Aldershot: Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar for a little-known mid-twentieth-century political and cultural attempt to rehabilitate the Czech qualities of Mahler’s music.
73 Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘The Natural World and the “Folklike Tone”’, in Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, transl. Mary Whitall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 106–114 Google Scholar; quotation 107; see also 108.
74 ‘It’ll be all right in the end’. See Glanz, Christian, Gustav Mahler (Vienna: Holzhausen Verlag, 2001), 189 Google Scholar.
75 See Adler, Guido, ‘Gustav Mahler’, in Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship, ed. Edward R. Reilly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15–73; 42 Google Scholar, for a critique of the views propounded by Chamberlain in the context of Mahler’s diverse folk influences and his early reception.
76 Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 241–2.
77 Willnauer, ‘Das Triviale und das Groteske im Werk Gustav Mahlers’, 240.
78 An apparent reference, in reverse, to the Nicene Creed’s description of Christ: ‘begotten, not made’.
79 Reported by Georg Göhler in conversation with Mahler, in Göhler, ‘Programmheft zur Fünften Symphonie Gustav Mahlers. Uraufführung der neuen Fassung’ (Leipzig: Musikalische Gesellschaft, 9 January 1914), reprinted in Muziek & Wetenschap 7/1 (1999): 72–81, quotation, 73.
80 Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 256 Google Scholar.
81 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 2, 79 and 91.
