- Nor, really, is the situation so very different in the First
Symphony, in which the cultural conflict of the funeral march
detailed above gives way, in the finale (and again only after
a purging orchestral scream; hear Ex. 20) to an overt embrace
of
Christianity. Indeed, there is no better passage in Mahler to
illustrate a parodistic application of the “absolute”
music topic as it has been outlined here, nor to see it so indelibly
stamped as Germanic, than in the “Bruder Martin” canon
that opens the movement. In striking fashion, as well, that movement
offers both an extended escape from the conflict that governs
the movement more broadly, and a telling demonstration of the
absorptive capacity of the “absolute” music topic. In
the funeral march, as in the Scherzo of the Second Symphony, Mahler
reserves a trio-like section for his most intensely subjective
moment, offering a momentary escape from the cultural situation
altogether in the form of an extended quotation from the final
song of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, “Die
zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” (hear Ex. 21).38
The canonic droning and ominous D-minor character of the previous
material subsides, and we are enveloped in a place of respite,
with optimistic ascending melodic contours in G major. Opposing
neither side of the already-stated conflict of the funeral march,
the passage seems a moment apart from that conflict, independent
even of perplexing issues regarding which of the projected antagonists—hunter
or hunted, Catholic or Jew—is to be regarded most sympathetically.
- The first movement of the symphony also quotes a Gesellen
song, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld,” the
second in the cycle; significantly, the two songs frame the cycle’s
psychological chronology, in that “Ging heut’ Morgen”
confronts the present with a lost youthful exuberance and “Die
zwei blauen Augen” ends with a projection of a future blissfully
free from the pains of the present (i.e., within the sleep of
death). “Die zwei blauen Augen” is oddly configured
as a song, comprising three stages of decidedly different character,
each in its own key and with its own characteristic motivic basis.
Mahler sets these three stages with some degree of irony: while
only the last stage overtly embraces death as an alternative,
it is also the only one to offer sustained comfort, while the
earlier stages, each in its turn, projects a funereal tone with
a distinctive, obsessive motive derived from the general topic
of funeral march.
- Notably, these motives—repeated-note dotted figures and
the slow, steady beat of the timpani, respectively (hear
Ex. 22)—are precisely those that most clearly mark the
“Bruder Martin” canon as funereal. But there is a crucial
difference in how they are treated in the symphonic movement,
for the dotted figure has there been given an oddly nuanced secondary
role, entering originally as part of a stately counterpoint to
the ongoing “Bruder Martin” canon that then develops
an untowardly festive lilt along the way, as noted (see
and hear Ex. 10 again). The ambivalent relationship between
this counterpoint and the main theme is never adequately resolved;
while all its central elements derive audibly from the “Bruder
Martin” tune as Mahler presents it, including the dotted
figure itself and the upper-fourth lick (which literally doubles
the tympani strokes), it dances rather than marches, and seems
to have more affinity with the klezmer-like music
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Ex. 23:
Mahler, Symphony I,
mvt. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Sir Georg Solti
© 1984 Decca 430 805-2
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to come than with the Catholic “Bruder Martin” tune.
Yet, in the conclusion of the movement, during the last bars of
the funeral march proper, remnants of this tune are at least equal
partners with, and seemingly fused to, “Bruder Martin,”
the victim of the assimilative power of the “absolute music”
topic (hear Ex. 23).
- Thus, however mocking the countermelody may be, it shadows the
funeral march too closely to avoid getting caught up in its obsessively
absolutist flow. In fact, its absorption into the march becomes
so complete that, from the moment the counterpoint enters, its
association with the funeral-march topic gradually becomes closer
even than the “Bruder Martin” tune itself; unlike the
latter, the dotted-figure counterpoint plays out, intact, with
every recurrence of the topic. Even during
the fragmented conclusion of the movement, the dotted-figure tune
gets a full hearing; indeed, its mockery is by then so muted that
it can simply substitute for the “Bruder Martin” tune,
which, aside from the harp’s playing of the cadential bar
in diminution, is not heard at all.39
Perhaps this can be construed as the triumph
of the dance lick over the funeral march; given the more basic
presence of the funeral-march topic, however, it seems more the
reverse.40
- The sense of subjectivity in the quoted episode stems from its
separation from previously established realities, as in the song,
but here the separation is based on memory rather than on the
projection of an oblivious future within the dreamless sleep of
death. Thus, the serenity of the opening part of the quotation,
which clearly could not have come from anything we have heard
thus far in the movement, betokens the intimacy and familiarity
of a remembered past rather than a projected future. Then, in
the second part of the quotation, with its sagging chromatic lines
and “farewell” horn calls, the temporal status of this
serenity—its pastness—is clarified, as is its relationship
to the larger funereal setting. At the end of the quotation, when
the dotted figure is recalled, it is inflected with a tone of
mockery more pronounced than in the song, a foretaste of the return
to the objective present and the funeral-march rhythms that immediately
follow. Despite these critical differences, the song continues
to “speak” in all of this, for serenity, pastness, intense
subjectivity, leave-taking, even the exteriority of the dotted
figure, are all present in some form during the third stage of
the song, if sometimes in a kind of instrumental counterpoint
to the words.
- Structurally, too, Mahler exploits relationships already given
in the song, but applies them toward somewhat different ends in
the funeral movement. Built into the stages of the song is an
implicit circularity, as the recollection of the fundamental motive
from the first stage at the end of each of the later stages makes
feasible (if only abstractly) all possible orderings of the three
sections. In the song, this potential circularity is suggested
for the sake of denying it; neither the “progressive”
key scheme nor the psychological journey is in any way circular.
Thus, the middle, more march-like section wrests us from the moribund
first stage by shifting harmonically to a modally ambivalent flat-VI.
The march topic here is both funereal and—in part because
of the energizing harmonic shift at the opening, in part through
the words—a manifestation of a journey undertaken with a
sense of resignation and, perhaps, penitence (hear
Ex. 22 again). The recollection of the dotted figure at the
end of the march already points to something left behind, and
the subsequent stage confirms this as it settles into a comforting,
major-mode subdominant specifically as an alternative to harmonic
and psychological return.
- Mahler borrows the latter move, to the major subdominant from
the minor tonic, for the opening of the song-quotation in the
funeral-march movement, converting what was a transport to a comforting
oblivion into an escape to subjectivity and memory. At the end,
however, he exploits the potential for circularity by borrowing,
from the end of the first stage in the song, the move from dotted
figure to timpani strokes, which enter in the flat-VI. Within
the movement, this represents a structural thematic return, to
be expected after a trio-like episode, but unexpectedly a half
step removed from the tonic—just as, in the song, the concluding
key is F minor after an opening in E minor.41
But here there is a much greater impact, since the tympani strokes
in the funeral-march movement have been more centrally installed
as a marker of harmonic stability, fully in line with the traditional
symphonic deployment of tympani to reinforce the tonic. Within
the extended narrative of the trio, however, the move makes perfect
sense, as a reaction of the subjective presence to the mocking
entry of the dotted figure. Oddly, then, and
for the first time in the movement, the funeral march is thus
invested with a disconcerting subjectivity on its return, as if
the observed funeral procession has now been joined, with the
incremental rise in pitch registering as a correspondingly heightened
sense of reality.42
Odd, too, is how readily the absolute-music topic seems thus to
acquiesce to the established subjectivity of the trio; the lack
of protest may be taken as either a token of irresistible strength
on the part of the trio’s subjectivity, or the continued
weakened state of the funeral-march topic after the klezmer-like
episode, or both. Or, perhaps, its oblivious detachment—programmatically,
the self-absorbed lack of concern of the mourners for the world
beyond the funeral march—now extends to the matter of its
own key (hear
Ex. 21 again).
- For the remainder of the movement, the subjective element invests
briefly first in one side of the conflict and then the other.
As the E-flat-minor section winds down, the tympani drop out and
the violins take us back to D minor, playing col legno
as a group but with interspersed solos in what is clearly a gesture
of withdrawal (hear Ex. 24).
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Ex. 24: Mahler,
Symphony I,
mvt. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Sir Georg Solti
© 1984 Decca 430 805-2
|
Almost immediately, the klezmer-like music enters in direct opposition
to the “Bruder Martin” canon, brutally imposing a faster
tempo and more raucous sensibility on the sedate funeral march
(hear
Ex. 11 again). The implicit violence of
the passage makes it a clear precursor for the outcry late in
the Scherzo of the Second Symphony; as in the later movement (and
this is also true for a similar moment in the Scherzo of the Third
Symphony; hear Ex. 25), however, the violence that results from
the confrontation makes it clear that reconciliation is impossible.43
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Ex. 25: Mahler,
Symphony III, mvt. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Sir Georg Solti
© 1984 Decca 430 805-2
|
Yet this is not the only drama of the movement. As the music slows
to the original march tempo, we hear a distinct echo of the song-quotation
within one of the closing phrases of the klezmer episode (see
and hear Ex. 26). Although the phrase does not depart musically
from the earlier episode (notwithstanding a somewhat different
instrumental profile), the similar melodic contour within a suddenly
more intimate environment involving unusual string textures (solo
violin duet; violins doubled by cellos) enforces the connection;
in addition, the brief splash of the Neapolitan (E-flat) serves
as a striking marker of difference against the pedal D-A, recalling
the key of the subjectively inflected version of the funeral march
just heard. Within this brief moment of enhanced subjectivity,
with its easy blending of klezmer elements with the “Bruder
Martin” canon so soon after their recently demonstrated incompatibility,
and with its easy resolution of the dissonant tonality of E-flat
back into the D minor of the funeral march, we may find psychological
closure for the movement. Significantly, the resolution this passage
provides is wholly subjective, however, leaving the uneasy worldly
tensions to play out to an indecisive conclusion, and leaving
it to the finale, as noted, to achieve a more satisfying (and
specifically Christian) closure.
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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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