Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (review)

In his 2009 review of Donald Mitchell’s Discovering Mahler and Jeremy Barham’s Cambridge Companion to Mahler, Julian Johnson wryly observed that in the wake of the celebrations surrounding the centenary of the composer’s death in 2011, the most fitting tribute might be to ‘play none of his music and write nothing about him’ (Music & Letters, 90 (2009), 703).While for many ‘Mahler-fatigue’ has inevitably set in, particularly for those still reeling from overexposure to the more cultish aspects that have come to characterize the composer’s recent reception, Johnson’s rich and provocative study Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies, serves not only as a welcome antidote but also as an open invitation to a renewed engagement with this all-too-familiar music in terms of what Johnson hears as its multi-vocal character.

Johnson’s study as a whole aims to illuminate the expressive force of Mahler’s songs and symphonies in terms of the broad category of voice, a category whose ‘slippery’ nature he acknowledges from the outset. Although he offers the requisite nods to Edward T. Cone, Carolyn Abbate, and Mikhail Bakhtin, he is concerned less with advancing a new theoretical account of voice than in using it as a flexible lens through which the multifaceted nature of Mahler’s own musical voice can be brought into focus with respect to its ‘definitive plurality, its resistance to the unity it nevertheless seeks, its fragmentary, recalcitrant, tangential, obtuse, polyphonic identity’ (p. 254).

Given the expansive nature of Johnson’s definition, it is not surprising that references to the idea of voice appear on virtually every page of the book. Receiving particular attention are those manifestations that can be identified by a single characteristic; the voices that populate Mahler’s works are described as, among other things, childlike, rustic, urban, absent, repressed, or expressionless. Of perhaps even greater significance for Johnson is the way in which voice can also be understood in a more active sense: namely, in terms of its potential to break, break out, dissolve, or be called forth. Indeed, it is precisely this disruptive force that for Johnson ultimately defines the voice’s expressive power. At the same time, he also hears an ambivalence that is crucial for understanding the basis of his broader interpretative claims. As he makes clear, ‘part of the specific expressive power of Mahler’s music derives directly from its own anxiety about that power’ (p. 4).

Over the course of the book, Johnson repeatedly directs the reader’s attention to those moments in Mahler’s music in which a given voice emerges as a direct consequence of the ‘suspension or dissolution of the collective orchestral voice’ (p. 7). What draws him to such moments is that they reveal a critical dimension that lies at the music’s very core. In his discussion of ‘Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen’ from the Kindertotenlieder, for example, Johnson shows how the work’s expressive voice ‘derives its intensity in part by breaking out against the music that attempts to constrain it’ (p. 6). What he calls the lyrical voice is shown to possess a similarly critical potential in that it frequently breaks out ‘in protest against its own silencing’ (p. 13).

For Johnson this critical potential is tied closely to the overtly self-conscious character of Mahler’s music. While it is not uncommon for music to frame its constituent voices, what is unusual, in Johnson’s estimation, is the way in which Mahler draws attention to these frames. In the Ninth Symphony this is taken a step further in that ‘the self-conscious, self-reflective critique of the musical voice persists right through to the closing bars’, a self-questioning that ‘defines the essential modernity of Mahler’s late works’ (p. 278). If Johnson hears the Adagio voice in the finale of the Ninth as...