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- Perhaps the most obvious way to make a plausible case for the
Jewishness of Mahler’s music would be to focus on a passage
that actually sounds Jewish to many who hear it—not German
with a Jewish accent, but frankly and openly Jewish. In the funeral
march (third movement) of the First Symphony,
after the canonic, minor-mode version of “Bruder Martin”
that opens the movement, we hear music that has struck many listeners
as klezmer-like. This passage was, indeed, not only “Exhibit
A” in Bernstein’s presentation of Mahler as a “double
man,”15
but also the most likely point of reference for Louis’s vitriolic
dismissal of Mahler, situated as it is within his “Titan”
symphony and indulging what might well be taken, unsympathetically,
as “seamstress-like sentimentality.” Both Carl Schorske
and Theodor Adorno take note of the passage’s disruptive
quality, drawing attention to the ability of this “raucous
tune” to strip the funeral march of its earnestness (Schorske,
Gustav Mahler 12), and hearing the disruption as an “unmediated
contrast to the point of ambivalence between mourning and mockery”
(Adorno 52). Indeed, the interpolation not only conflicts with
the tone of the preceding canon, but also projects an internal
conflict, between an overt sentimentality (already undercut through
its own schmaltzy exaggeration) and the dance-band rhythms that
twice interrupt it. But even apart from its affective, gestural
qualities, the passage disrupts through its colloquial or popular
style; it is music spoken with dialect, as Adorno suggests, perhaps
as far as one can travel from the “learned” style of
the canon that preceded it (see
and hear Ex. 3) (Adorno 23).
- But is this passage Jewish? Although it has been taken to be
overtly and obviously Jewish, it has also been heard as Hungarian
or Bohemian, and many hotly deny that it is Jewish, or at least
specifically Jewish. And it is eminently possible in performance
to downplay its ethnic profile to a large extent, which some have
elected to do (hear
Ex. 4). The issue is, after all, fraught with historical and
emotional baggage. As Louis would have it, its Jewishness is involuntary,
the result of Mahler’s attempt to pass himself off as German.
And even if we find the Jewish quality deliberately contrived,
we are—given the history of Mahler reception and the legacy
of the Holocaust—understandably discomfited by its presence
here as an intruding element, ostentatiously out of place. Perhaps,
indeed, it is that we wish not or dare not to make sense of its
Jewish character, for this line of inquiry is disturbingly tainted;
we recoil from the pernicious essentialism of critics like Louis
to the point that we hesitate to engage at all with the possibility
of specifically Jewish elements in Mahler’s music. Nevertheless,
a strong—if not definitive—case may be made for this
music’s deliberately contrived Jewish profile, based solely
on its technical features.
- Most immediately striking is the instrumentation of the passage:
after the Bruder Martin canon concludes, the
reed instruments emerge into prominence, beginning with the oboe,
and continuing with the E-flat clarinet accompanied by bass drum
and high-hat cymbal.16
The choice of the E-flat clarinet in particular recalls the sound
of Jewish klezmer bands, as the clarinet was
perhaps the most easily identifiable “voice” in the
ensemble (after usurping prominence from the violin in the early
nineteenth century).17
Although the oboe is not normally associated
with the klezmer band tradition, it does have an affinity to Eastern-European
Jewish music, as it convincingly imitates the “sweet”
or nasal quality cherished in the voice of the hazzan, or cantor.18
And lastly, the alternation of bass drum and cymbal hits underneath
the clarinet melody provide the characteristic rhythmic “boom-chick-boom-chick”
accompaniment found frequently in klezmer dance tunes, replicating
as well the most common klezmer percussion ensemble (“puk”/“baraban”
and “tats” in Yiddish).
- The dotted march rhythm of the oboe melody
replicates another characteristic trait of Eastern-European Jewish
folk-music, a point emphasized by Max Brod when he argued that
Mahler was indeed a composer of “Jewish melodies.”19
In fact, the predominance of this rhythm is well-illustrated by
the only musical example given to illustrate Hassidic music in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Werner
642): this melody has the same rhythm as the one found in the
oboe melody and, as in the oboe melody, it is repeated several
times in succession (see
and hear Ex. 5).
- What is finally striking about the oboe and E-flat clarinet
melodies is the foregrounded interval of an augmented second,
between B-flat and C-sharp. The resulting modal
collection of these tunes, G–A–B-flat–C-sharp–D–E–F–G,
has been variously identified as the “altered Dorian,”
“Ukrainian Dorian,” and “Misheberakh” mode.20
Abraham Idelsohn has identified ways in which this mode functions
in Eastern-European Jewish music traditions: melodies
usually rise rather than fall, pivot around the third scale degree,
emphasize the fourth and seventh scale degrees, and frequently
feature an upward turn figure between the first and fifth scale
degrees (1–2–3–4–5–4–3–2–1);21
Ex. 6, a Jewish tune carried across Eastern Europe in the early
nineteenth-century by Polish synagogue singers, illustrates these
traits (see
and hear Ex. 6). As may be noted, parallels between these
characteristics and the oboe and E-flat clarinet melodies in the
funeral march are quite striking.
- To be sure, the altered Dorian mode also
commonly occurs in folk songs of Romania and Hungary, which may
explain why the oboe and clarinet melodies are frequently identified
as having a “Hungarian” flavor.22
But the treatment of the mode in Hungarian and Romanian folk-music
traditions is characterized by a modal wavering rarely found in
Eastern-European Jewish music (Idelsohn, Jewish Music 191–2).
A Romanian folk song from 1860 illustrates this wavering, as the
fourth scale degree alternates between C-sharp and C-natural,
and the third scale degree between B-flat and B-natural (see
and hear Ex. 7).
- At the very least, then, this passage blends Jewish musical
idioms with other Eastern European musics, and we may note that
doing this much alone would seem to be a bold statement, an assertion
that Jewish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Ukrainian musical
styles (in rough descending order of the generally perceived “presence”
of these elements) may plausibly join in the discourse of a symphony
otherwise specifically grounded in the Austro-German tradition.
But the statement the music makes is considerably more complex
than this, and might well be read as an even stronger claim of
musical and cultural viability.
- The movement in question begins with one of the most notorious
examples of Mahler’s penchant for grotesquerie: a funereal,
minor-mode presentation of a familiar children’s tune whose
words and sentiments seem wholly inappropriate, thus implicitly
asking, “steh’ schon auf?”—“Are you sleeping?”
in the well-known English version—at a funeral (hear Ex.
8). Early audiences were puzzled, even shocked by this movement,
with its juxtaposition of a school-yard song with the topic of
death, a situation exacerbated by Mahler’s refusal to
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Ex. 8: Mahler,
Symphony No. I, mvt. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Sir Georg Solti
© 1984 Decca 430 805-2
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provide extensive programmatic material for several early performances:
Ferdinand Pfohl reported the music to be “strange, grotesque,
and bizarre;” August Beer, after the Budapest premiere, characterized
the funeral march as having “a note of parody that…produces
a thoroughly strange impression;” and the audiences of the
Weimar and Berlin premieres, having received almost no prior programmatic
explanation, found the grotesque death march entirely absurd (Floros
39).
- In the rather sketchy programs that Mahler did provide early
on, this movement was titled “Todtenmarsch
in ‘Callots Manier’” (or some close variant) and
paired with the finale (“Dall’ Inferno al Paradiso”)
to form “Commedia humana,” the second half of a larger,
two-part structure for the symphony as a whole.23
Mahler’s purported inspiration for the piece—a woodcut,
Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis (“The Hunter’s
Funeral Procession”), by Moritz von Schwind (See Figure 1)—introduces
a mode of cultural critique that informs the movement’s narrative.
As Mahler writes in later program notes:
Funeral March “in the manner
of Callot.” The following may serve as an explanation:
The external stimulus for this piece of music came to the composer
from the parodistic picture, known to all children in Austria,
“The Hunter’s Funeral Procession,” from an old
book of children’s fairy tales: the beasts of the forest
accompany the dead woodsman’s coffin to the grave, with
hares carrying a small banner, with a band of Bohemian musicians,
in front, and the procession escorted by music-making cats,
toads, crows, etc., with stags, roes, foxes, and other four-legged
and feathered creatures of the forest in comic postures. At
this point the piece is conceived as the expression of a mood
now ironically merry, now weirdly brooding. (Mitchell 157–8;
original)
The woodcut to which Mahler refers comically inverts the structure
of power normally operating in the forest. Animals lead the body
of a hunter toward his grave: the hunter and the hunted, the powerful
and the powerless, have switched positions. Such satirical inversions
of domination—carnivals, as Mikhail Bakhtin calls them—enact
mock reversals of social power structures, temporarily liberating
marginalized social groups from the prevailing truth of an oppressive
social hierarchy (Bakhtin 1-58). Mahler, too, presents a carnivalesque
inversion; moreover, the blended Jewish/Eastern-European music
clarifies that the allegory has, in this movement, specific applications.
The third movement uses the carnival to address
the oppression of Vienna’s Jewish minority by its Catholic
majority—as well as, perhaps, the Eastern lands under her
dominion—constructing an inversion fantasy in which the culturally
oppressed Jew (or Gypsy, or Slav, etc.) surmounts the powers of
the dominant group.25
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Moritz von Schwind,
“The Hunter’s Funeral Procession”
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- Of course, such a narrative of confrontation and inversion requires
the presence of both the oppressed and the oppressor; the latter,
as it happens, has been hiding in plain sight all along, assuming
the guise of a children’s round perversely transformed into
a funeral march, against which Mahler has opposed the klezmer-like
melody. “Bruder Martin (or Jakob), steh’ schon auf?;”
“Frère Jacques, dormez vous?;” “Are
you sleeping, Brother John?”—regardless of the language,
the words of this song place it within a distinctly Catholic context,
with the morning bells ringing (Matins), calling the Catholic
faithful to prayer—even if a long familiarity with the song
as an innocuous children’s round has today rendered its Catholic
identity nearly invisible.26
Indeed, we may speculate that had this religious content been
any more overt, Mahler could never have placed the movement before
the public. And yet, despite the obliqueness of his presentation,
we may also speculate that there may have been a sharper point
to Mahler’s choice of this thematic basis for the funeral
march; thus, the song most likely originated as a form of religious
mockery (a legacy that Mahler might have either known or inferred),
childishly taunting those left out of the Catholic service, be
they Protestant (Bruder Martin Luther) or Jewish (Jakob).
- The opposition of this Catholic-song/funeral-march to the klezmer-like
music is stated with particular force late in the movement, when
an attempt to combine them results in musical chaos. But their
opposing characters are already obvious during their separate
presentations in the first part of the movement, when each is
allowed to inhabit its own musical space, for, in Mahler’s
treatment, the two themes occupy a shared structure of inverted
power relations. This movement (like much of
Mahler’s music) has been explained as an example of “low
art” intruding upon the “high art” of the stylized
“Bruder Martin” canon.27
In his reading of Salome, Sander Gilman argues that Richard
Strauss constructs a tension between the vulgar, unintelligible
“cacophony” of the Jews with the highly stylized world
of Salome and the firm diatonicism of Jochanaan. The “Jewish”
music here contrasts just as sharply, and even disrespectfully,
with the established tone of the movement. Mahler’s movement,
however, is better understood as turning this construction on
its head. Although the “Bruder Martin” melody assumes
priority by carrying the markers of high art
(i.e., imitative counterpoint), it is systematically undermined.
The canon and the Catholicism it represents are but caricatures
and effigies to be mocked within the carnival space, where the
relations of power are inverted, where—as Bakhtin points
out—the inversion is both signified by and celebrated through
the deriding laughter of the once-marginalized.28
- The movement begins with measured timpani strokes, establishing
a funeral-march rhythm; even in this we may hear a kind of cheapening
of the funeral topic, for the march rhythm has been reduced to
a simplistic alternation, eschewing the more elevated rhythmic
idiom of the funeral march in Beethoven’s Eroica (which
Mahler would reproduce in later symphonies, specifically in the
kleine Appell in the first movement of the Fourth and the
use of this motive, on a grander scale, to open the Fifth; see
and hear Ex. 9).29
After a muted double bass begins to play “Bruder Martin”
in the minor mode, other instruments join in canonically in the
lowest ends of their registers, at first at intervals of six measures,
then at four, and eventually at two. The accelerated entry of
instruments, along with the gradual increase in the number of
instruments participating in the canon, implies an intensification,
but a footnote at the beginning of the movement, “pianissimo
ohne crescendo,” directs that the seemingly inevitable
crescendo must not occur during the entire course of the canon.
Rather, the restrained music must continue, impotent, along its
monotonous course. Since, as noted, the canon aspires to the profundity
of a serious funeral march from its incongruous origins in a children’s
schoolyard song—well-known as one of the most banal canonic
constructions on offer—the gross exaggeration of the funereal
tone of the piece seems to reinforce the comic impossibility of
this leap to expressive and emotive significance, evoked as it
is through tediously low registers and dynamics (hear
Ex. 8 again).
- After four instruments have joined the canon, an oboe enters
with a sharp, punctuating counter-melody characterized by staccato
notes and leaps of a fourth (mm. 19-23; see
and hear Ex. 10). The more specifically Jewish melody has
yet to be introduced; however, the entrance of the oboe, which
will later play that music, here foreshadows the conflict. Within
the atmosphere of formality created by the canon’s funeral
march, the oboe transforms the dotted rhythms of the concluding
phrase of the funeral march into a lilting dance step, thus turning
from a gesture of apparent respect to open jeering, so that it
seems to dance flippantly alongside the ongoing march. The incompatibility
of these conflicting sensibilities becomes even more explicit
when the descending scale that concludes the dance figure shadows
the canonic melody in mockingly dissonant parallel seconds, a
paradigm of musically rendered laughter that is only partly muted
by the layered presentation. Unlike Mahler’s more characteristically
vital counterpoint, the canon remains static, undramatic and unimaginative,
consistently mocked by the counter-melody that registers as its
only claim to a more engaging musical profile.
- The klezmer-like music, on the other hand, develops thematically
and exhibits none of the tight constraints regarding tempo, rhythm,
and affect that govern the opening march. This difference is especially
marked when the two confront each other directly, later in the
movement (hear Ex. 11): as the “Bruder Martin”
canon continues to drone away as it has the entire movement, marked
“still soft,” the klezmer-like melody
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Ex. 11: Mahler,
Symphony I,
mvt. 3
Boston Symphony Orchestra,
Seiji Ozawa
© 1988 Philips Digital Classics 422-329-2
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transforms into a wild dance, marked “loud and extremely
rhythmic” and, perhaps most telling, “with parody.”
We have by this point in the movement long noted the irony of
the funeral march, with its mock-serious mood. With this eruption,
we may sense the exultation of the Jewish melody, moving from
mockery to an overt trouncing of its oppressor.
- But this reversal of power does not last. Ultimately, the third
movement conforms to the final convention of the carnival: the
carnival must end, and in Mahler’s piece, the canon speaks
the final word. The carnival atmosphere that dominates the movement
does not resolve the cultural oppression that Jews felt in fin-de-siècle
Vienna. As Bakhtin notes, the laughter of the carnival is always
also rendered self-mocking by the realization that the carnival
is never really an escape from social conditions (257–261).
Moreover, the movement yields directly to the anguished tones
of the finale, which lead eventually to Mahler’s version
of the “Hallelujah Chorus;” however we construe the
projection of cultural inversion in the funeral march, it takes
place within a larger scenario of Christian salvation. Thus, while
the funeral-march movement has much to tell us about how Mahler
positioned himself within a Christian/Jewish cultural conflict—of
which, more later—its carnivalesque inversions do not translate
simply into a celebration of Jewishness.
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Kassabian:
Ubiquitous Listening
Draughon and Knapp:
Mahler and the Crisis of Jewish Identity
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Masson:
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