Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-Cycled Songs (review)

The large number of articles, chapters, and books on Mahler's music that have appeared in the past ten years proves that this—once—ambivalent area of scholarship has come a long way. It is possibly a testimony to the continuing ambivalent nature of the field of Mahler research that some of these first-rate studies are still available only in unpublished dissertations (see, for example, Elizabeth Abbate's "Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mahler's Early Symphonies" [Harvard University, 1996]; Morten Solvik Olsen's "Culture and the Creative Imagination: The Genesis of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony" [University of Pennsylvania, 1992]; and John R. Palmer's "Program and Process in the Second Symphony of Gustav Mahler" [University of California, Davis, 1996]). Although naturally indebted to the monumental work of pioneers such as Henry-Louis de la Grange, Donald Mitchell, Deryck Cooke, and Constantin Floros, these researchers also manage to imbue Mahler scholarship with a much-needed critical focus on interpretative issues beyond those commonly found in analyses of the music's programmatic elements.

In this light, Raymond Knapp's Symphonic Metamorphoses deserves a place among the most important recent contributions by a single author dedicated to the study of Mahler's symphonies. As the book's subtitle suggests, Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-Cycled Songs, Knapp focuses on Mahler's early symphonies, and more specifically on the diverse "metamorphoses" that earlier lieder underwent when Mahler "re-cycled" them in his first four symphonies. Knapp's insights into the music are informed by a single aim: to investigate the meaning of both original and recycled material, and what it is that Mahler responds to in the original that will—ultimately—help to inform the symphonic web with a series of meanings. The result is a quintessentially Mahlerian edifice that does not replace any existing scholarship, but rather expands with profound insights on previous readings of the topic.

Knapp devotes an entire chapter to each of the four symphonies discussed, but in reverse chronological order, starting with the Fourth Symphony and ending with the First. In a way, the Wunderhorn song "Das himmlische Leben" and the processes involved in its recycling by Mahler, becomes an ostinato pattern for the entire book. Having previously considered (and rejected) three different settings of the song, Mahler finally used it intact as the final movement of his Fourth Symphony. Knapp draws instructive parallels between these processes and the Kuleshov Effect, a film technique from the silent era in which "cinematic images were perceived differently according to context" (p. 13). Thus, Knapp considers the combination of independently created images as an analogue to Mahler's recycling of his songs into his symphonies. Consequently, the transplanted songs acquire new meanings in their new—symphonic—context. The contrasting and, occasionally, conflicting interpretations that involve Mahler's music—also regularly pointed out in the book's discussion—may act as an extension of the ambiguity with which Mahler himself viewed the incorporation of diverse elements into his music.

Knapp deftly navigates between traditional interpretations involving the use of preexisting songs in Mahler's early symphonies and astutely nuanced exegeses of extra-musical explorations. With a keen eye for solid musical analysis and informed socio-cultural readings, the author explores topics of alienation, subjectivity, childhood, absolute music, and religion. Knapp locates alienation in the implied narrative of the song "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" (another Wunderhorn setting transplanted in the third movement of the Second Symphony), which has profound implications for "absolute music as a topic." The latter topic informs the discussion of the scherzo of the Third Symphony: a contextual analysis reveals what Knapp views as the reinforcement of a "semblance of absolute music" through the absence of either text or vocal melody in the instrumental treatment of "Ablösung im Sommer." Whether this feature...