Despite his canonic status, Gustav Mahler’s significance and legacy are still deeply contested. Mahler the individual is a subject of enduring fascination: one of the central cultural figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna; a patient of Freud’s, who considered him a genius; a Jewish artist in a society already turning toward fascism; a man obsessed with death, whose music eerily anticipates the tragedies of his private life. Yet Mahler the composer remains elusive. Condemned as a nihilist during his lifetime, he was dismissed as a throwback after his death. The disagreements about Mahler are not accidental, but are rooted in the contradictions of his music: In his symphonies and song cycles, the visionary sits side by side with the nostalgic, the sublime with the banal; vistas of rapturous beauty are interrupted by moments of jarring vulgarity. This dialogic, unresolved quality—unlike any music of the time—is central to the riddle of Mahler. Was he a prophet, ironist, or sentimentalist, or some strange combination of all three?
In this course, we will try to unravel that riddle. We will listen to Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles—including the First, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, as well as the Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde—in an attempt to understand their power and their strange contradictions. We will read the accounts of Mahler’s contemporaries, including Freud, Alma Mahler, and Jean Sibelius, asking how his music reflects both his own life, and the cultural and political turmoil of his age. And through the writings of later critics and admirers—including Leonard Bernstein, Theodor Adorno, and others—we will examine Mahler’s intellectual and artistic afterlife, both in the twentieth century and our own.
