Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas by Seth Monahan (review)

In Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Seth Monahan explores the composer’s orchestral works by focusing on sonata structures instead of the all-too-usual treatment of their programmatic content. As with other investigations of this topic already taken up in the critical literature, the idea of sonata in this monograph encompasses both the form associated with first movements and the multimovement structure inherited from the nineteenth-century symphony. Monahan approaches the subject with the assumption that scholarship on Mahler has focused on the music from a large perspective (“transsymphonic storytelling,” as he writes on p. 2), without necessarily offering detailed analyses of individual movements. He challenges the commentators who pass over critical elements of the music, which are, in Monahan’s estimation, the domain of theorists. To address these lacunae, Monahan proposes to focus in detail on selected movements in order to scrutinize the role of the sonata in Gustav Mahler’s music and, implicitly, its relevance for modern audiences.

At the core of Monahan’s study are four movements, specifically the first movements of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, the first part of the Third, and the Finale of the Sixth. Mahler scholars will already be familiar with Henry-Louis de La Grange’s multivolume biography, which includes analytic articles in the appendices, and while these may not always offer the requisite depth, they point readers to explorations of Mahler’s music by various specialists. In this light, it is telling that the existing analyses do not always coincide, with differences emerging depending on the interpretation of sonata form and its application in specific movements by Mahler. While this problem is not unique to Mahler, it suggests the deeper need for intensive studies of the sonata in the late nineteenth century. This topic is not unknown in music literature, but its coverage is limited. Some scholarship is dated and narrow in scope, as with the last of William S. Newman’s three-volume study of the sonata (The Sonata since Beethoven: The Third and Final Volume of a History of the Sonata Idea, vol. 3 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1972]); or regrettably general, as occurs in the revised edition of Charles Rosen’s Sonata Forms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). While the understanding of sonata form has gone beyond Beethoven’s treatment, it often stops with Brahms and fails to take into consideration the ways in which later composers used the sonata. When it comes to the understanding of sonata form in Mahler’s works, even within Monahan’s correctives on the “generative” conception of the form, this study would benefit from further details, preferably with reference to choices that other contemporary composers made; such a perspective would allow for a more intensive exploration of formal parameters. Even without such a broad context, Mahler was a modern composer who consciously made reference to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century music, thus inviting multiple points of comparison. It is important to distinguish between the various models that his music could evoke, along with the possibility of multiple models that could be subsumed into his musical structures.

While it is possible to quibble with Monahan’s analyses, the book succeeds on the whole in shifting the interpretive emphasis away from the programmatic elements that unfortunately blur into biographical expressions of musical ideas. This is a significant shift that is necessary for understanding the composer’s intentions in his scores. Beyond the disputed—and sometimes arguably convincing—narrative elements of programs and personal stories ascribed to the symphonies, the musical narrative (that is, the innovative structures Mahler composed) relies on parameters beyond the thematic and tonal drama Monahan investigates, with the intersections of rhythmic, textural, and timbral dimensions creating scores that benefit from multiple interpretations and repeated hearings. Such considerations surpass the stories that are found in program notes, since they cannot be comprehended in any kind...