KM
Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the
Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Ashgate: Farnham and
Burlington, 2010), ISBN 9780754663720, pp. xiii + 201, £55.
 |
| Die Muskete, 10 January 1907 |
Gustav
Mahler’s time has come, the anniversary years 2010 and 2011 (150 years since
his birth and 100 since his death) having intensified the ubiquity of his
music. Orchestras and conductors treat it as a calling-card. Even Beethoven has
been eclipsed as the concert hall’s favourite symphonist. Yet, not so long ago,
things were very different. Mahler’s years in the doldrums have been
exaggerated, especially by those anxious to claim that Leonard Bernstein’s direction
of the New York Philharmonic catapulted Mahler into the spotlight, a dubious
proposition even in the Western Hemisphere. Mahler had numerous earlier,
influential advocates. Nevertheless, his music long faced ignorance and disdain.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, opined: ‘Intimate acquaintance with the
executive side of music made even [!] Mahler a very
tolerable imitation of a composer.’ Why might this have been? Did anti-Semitism
play a role?
A
study of Mahler’s early critics should have much to offer here. As KM Knittel
argues in her conclusion (p.168), ‘if there is even the slightest possibility
that we have taken over a way of thinking about Mahler and his music from a
culture that could not deal with his Jewishness … we owe it to ourselves to
rethink what makes Mahler’s music unique, thought-provoking, and valuable.’
Such rethinking, alas, lies without her study. No matter: we can rethink for
ourselves. The real problem with Knittel’s book, rather, is that it fails to
make a cogent case for anti-Semitic coding of early Mahler criticism: oddly,
given the endemic nature of anti-Semitism in Mahler’s Vienna and many of the
attacks he suffered as Director of the Court Opera. Despite occasional
disclaimers that texts may be read variously, the tunnel-vision of Knittel’s
readings counter-productively renders one suspicious of reasonable
interpretations in such a vein. She misses an open goal.
The
first chapter proper opens promisingly, surveying artist Alfred Roller’s verbal
portrait of Mahler. It is good to have Roller’s original German quoted in
footnotes, though Knittel appears throughout to have used Norman Lebrecht’s
existing translation rather than furnished her own. That may seem pedantic, but
when dealing with the nuances of linguistic transmission, reference to words actually
used will help. When interpretation commences, claims immediately become
questionable. Roller’s ‘failure to address the obvious issue of circumcision
inadvertently emphasises its association with castration’. Perhaps, but
assertion replaces argument. Moreover, it is odd, in discussion of the body, to
lack reference, explicit or implicit, to writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and Žižek.
An oft-acknowledged progenitor, however, is Marc Weiner’s ‘brilliant’ (p.160) Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic
Imagination. Weiner’s inability or disinclination, during discussion of Parsifal, to distinguish between
circumcision and castration does not augur well.
Moving
on to discussion of Mahler’s wife, Alma, it is doubtless revealing that she
writes (p.41), ‘So much irritates me: his smell, the way he sings, the way he
speaks,’ but failure to consider words such as ‘I don’t believe in him as a
composer,’ as possessing weight of their own or other possible justifications
almost renders one sceptical concerning anti-Semitism undoubtedly present. Alma’s
descriptions are surely more interesting when ambiguity is permitted, indeed
explored. That she decided to marry Gustav in order to ‘cure’ him of Jewishness
is asserted (p.43) without a shred of evidence. In its absence, many will
follow Mahler’s near-definitive biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange,
considering documented dedication of a performance of Die Zauberflöte to Alma and her mother’s attempted dissuasion to
have played some role. Roller’s positive physical descriptions most likely
betray (p.47) ‘his unconscious absorption of … cultural markers of difference’.
Such is lost, however, in a morass of implausible assertions. Doubtless a considerable
part of such work will have to remain highly speculative; it is not thereby
invalidated. Consideration of alternatives might nevertheless prove fruitful.
The
villain, bizarrely, is Wagner. Weiner et
al. at least make him the villain of his own story. Here, echoing Joachim
Köhler’s monocausal explanation of the Second World War (Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker), newspaper
critics err on account of, or at least in sympathy with, Wagner’s Das Judent[h]um in der Musik [not ‘Music’,
p.53], unhelpfully conflated by Knittel with his Oper und Drama, so that anything in the latter automatically betokens
anti-Semitism. Wagner’s criticism of Berlioz’s ‘mechanical means’ of
orchestration is read as anti-Semitic, though Berlioz was never thought to be
Jewish and Francophobia seems a better candidate – as well, perish the thought,
as misplaced cultural criticism. William Ashton Ellis’s outdated translation of
Wagner is employed, so that we have no opportunity to compare Wagner’s actual
words with the critics’. Is Wagner, even
if one takes the most hostile approach to him, the sole lens through which to
view musical critics’ anti-Semitism? Unlikely, to put it mildly. And yet, we
read (p.108): ‘The juxtaposition of surface versus depth, the implication that
Mahler has nothing to say, and the emphasis on noise or novelty rather than
music and ideas can all be traced to beliefs about the inferiority of Jewish
music, as articulated by Richard Wagner.’ And so, without presenting any
evidence that Max Vansca’s 1907 review of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was indebted
to Wagner or intended anti-Semitically – and both may well have been the case –
why should we heed the forthright ‘moral of Vansca’s review …: Mahler will
reveal himself eventually as a Jew – by writing banal or second-hand melodies’?
Something more than bald assertion is required. On the rare occasion when we
learn something a little more about a critic, Robert Hirschfeld, it is
illuminating, though I remain unconvinced that Hirschfeld’s likening Mahler to
George Bernard Shaw (p.135) in terms of technique and playing with irony
reveals anti-Semitism. More needs to be said about other critics: background,
influences, etc.
Racialist
theories languish unexplored, Knittel near silent even concerning Vienna’s own
leading anti-Semites. Georg Schönerer and Karl Lueger are merely name-checked, declining
comparison of their anti-Semitism with the critics’. When claiming, ‘in a
critical sense, anyone could be a Jew,’ Knittel neglects to invoke Lueger’s
celebrated claim to decide who was a Jew. She does not mention even in passing
the young Hitler’s fervent admiration of Mahler’s Wagner interpretation. Despite
repeated please for contextualisation, anything not incriminating Wagner is
excluded. Gustav Klimt is ignored. When dealing with cultural history and its
politics, other arts, other discourses, will not only provide important
material – no one would claim that music existed in a vacuum here – but also
suggest what may or may not have been unusual about music. Perhaps that helps
explain why strange claims abound, for example (p.49): ‘While Mahler’s Jewish
background may seem unimportant now – or indeed, something to be purposely
excluded from discussion…’. No evidence is given for unimportance or exclusion;
in reality, the contrary would seem to be the case. Knittel then footnotes a
few other studies on Mahler and anti-Semitism, enigmatically commenting, ‘I
will not dwell on the limitations of the other studies’, before confusing
‘infamous’ and ‘notorious’.
What
remains? An interesting selection of extracts from Viennese newspaper critics. An
expanded edited collection of such criticism might have been more helpful than
an argument that probably needed more time to be honed. We never approach the
nub of why Mahler’s (partial) decision to write programme music was understood
to indicate Jewishness, whereas undoubted resolutions to do so by Berlioz,
Liszt, and Richard Strauss were not. Must there not have been something more to
the matter, given that the genre’s foremost practitioners were certainly not
Jewish? Knittel’s reading is not necessarily invalidated, yet complexities
require consideration, not evasion. A chapter on Strauss criticism holds out promise,
but its argument turns out to be: Mahler was Jewish and Strauss was not,
therefore identical criticisms of Mahler and Strauss are and are not
anti-Semitic. As for the claim that Strauss turned his back upon modernism
because it was perceived as Jewish, it is arresting, but where is the evidence?
One can imagine the contrary being claimed, that he was returning to a
comfortable classicism akin to that of Mendelssohn.
It
is a tedious hallmark of reviews that they berate the writer for not having included
something else. I nevertheless cannot help but wonder at the exclusion of discussions
by composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky – Jewish, spurned by Alma – and Arnold
Schoenberg, and musicologists such as Guido Adler and Heinrich Schenker. Stefan
Zweig is dismissed (naïvely?): ‘it must be said, … a rather naïve and
self-centred man’. Such figures would, despite their exceptionalism, have
something to say about prejudices of ‘mere’ critics and reasons for hostility extending
beyond or illuminating anti-Semitism.
Mahler’s
time having come – he predicted to Alma that it would, when Strauss’s had ended
– might even signal acceptance, indeed approbation, of ‘Jewish’ aspects to his
music. Alternatively, even if they exist, that may have little connection to his
present esteem. Our view may depend upon preference for Bernstein’s Mahler as
agent of personal redemption or Pierre Boulez’s Mahler as modernist
godfather. We should not, however,
decide upon the outcome before conducting the investigation.
