Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (review)

On 29 March 1935 Arnold Schoenberg gave a speech in Los Angeles about his experience of growing up as an "Austrian-Jewish artist." Among the challenges faced by Jewish artists he singled out the lack of self-confidence, caused by Jews' acceptance of Wagner's philosophy: "[y]ou were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Music, 'Judaism in Music'" (cited from Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 503). In her book, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, K. M. Knittel sets out to show the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Viennese music criticism of Mahler's time. She is not the first to notice the anti-Semitic clichés frequently used by critics to condemn Mahler's work. Her project is not to point out the most blatantly anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler, but to show that even seemingly objective critics were culturally conditioned to judge Mahler not primarily as a musician but as a Jew. She consciously excludes from her discussion the most virulently anti-Semitic papers, focusing her attention on Vienna's leading critics: Julius Korngold, Robert Hirschfeld, Max Kalbeck, Hans Liebstöckl, Max Graf, and Theodor Helm. She is little concerned with these critics' backgrounds, ideologies, or aesthetic convictions (we learn only on page 131 that Hirschfeld himself was Jewish), only with their use of language, more precisely with parallels she finds between their writings and that of Wagner in his infamous Judaism in Music. She aims to demonstrate that the same language still permeates scholarship on Mahler today and suggests that we can free ourselves of its anti-Semitic implications only by acknowledging its presence and its origin.

In the six chapters of her book Knittel attempts to systematically deconstruct the language of Mahler's critics, devoting separate chapters to Alfred Roller's and Alma Mahler's descriptions of Mahler's body ("Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler"), to Wagner's poisonous essay and its resonances with old and new anti-Semitic tropes ("Das Judentum in der Musik"), to Viennese reviews of Mahler's symphonies ("Die Wiener Kritiker") and of Richard Strauss's symphonic poems ("Das Problem Richard Strauss"), concluding with the evaluation of Mahler scholarship in the present ("Eine musikalische Physiognomik"). Knittel reads descriptions of Mahler's body against Oskar Panizza's viciously anti-Semitic short story, "Der operirte Jud" (1893), in which a Jewish character, Itzig Faitel Stern, tries to erase his Jewishness by undergoing surgery. As expected, the counterfeit fails and at the end of the story Stern's real features become visible to the horror of his gentile bride. (One wonders why Knittel, while meticulously avoiding openly anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler, chose such a blatantly anti-Semitic text as a model against which she measures the much more subtle anti-Semitic language of Mahler's critics.) Knittel argues that in the introduction to his picture book Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1922), Roller, a visual artist with keen eyes, acknowledges Jewish stereotypes by actively going against them as he depicts Mahler's naked body as perfect and beautiful. In Roller's avoidance of describing Mahler's genitals (and hence addressing "the obvious issue of circumcision," p. 32) Knittel sees inadvertent emphasis on "its association with castration." One wonders what Roller could have written about the topic to escape suspicion. Much more convincing is Knittel's discussion of Alma Schindler's ambiguous relationship to Mahler's Jewish background. As her diaries attest, Schindler had to overcome her strong anti-Semitism in order to marry Vienna's most celebrated musician. Her attraction to fame and glamour trumped her bias...