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4 Aesthetics of Integration in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony The intertwining of song and symphony so characteristic of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn years did not end with his purely orchestral Fifth Symphony but assumed another form.Unlike the preceding three symphonies,which include both song quotations and texted movements, the Fifth Symphony contains no vocal setting; instead, an entire orchestral movement virtually stands in place of a song. The fourth of five movements, the Adagietto, bears a strong affinity to Mahler’s song on Friedrich Rückert’s poem “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I’ve become lost to the world).1 Through its use in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice (Morte a Venezia),based on Thomas Mann’s novella of the same title,the Adagietto’s popularity suddenly soared.As a result,discussions of the symphony have become curiously unbalanced.Visconti’s interpretation of Mahler’s music has affected the symphony’s reception even more than the report of the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg,who maintained that the Adagietto served as Mahler’s love offering to Alma Schindler at a formative stage in their courtship. Yet both have encouraged an isolated view of the Adagietto, which has tended to be lifted out of its original context in recent commercial recordings and some critical studies.2 In the symphony, the Adagietto leads directly into the concluding Rondo-Finale, with which it is bound thematically. Mahler himself designated these final two movements as subsections of the third part of the symphony.Both the intermovement connections and the Adagietto’s backdrop of “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”yieldanuncommonlyrichinterpretativefield,drawingtogetherformal as well as symbolic issues. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony 103 The questions of aesthetic meaning and biographical context raised by the Adagietto are complicated by the fact that the finale of the Fifth Symphony has generated its own share of controversy since the appearance in 1960 of Theodor Adorno’s classic study Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik.3 Translated into English in 1992,Adorno’s work continues to exert influence,and his comments on the Fifth Symphony have resonated widely in the secondary literature.For Adorno, “the Adagietto of the Fifth,despite its important conception as an individual piece within the whole, borders on genre prettiness through its ingratiating sound; the Finale, fresh in many details and with novel formal ideas like that of the musical quick-motion picture, is undoubtedly too lightweight in relation to the first three movements.”4 Adorno unpacks his critique of the finale as follows: The positivity of the per aspera ad astra movement in the Fifth . . . can manifest itself only as a tableau, a scene of motley bustle. . . . Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche’s, when he proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction,when he himself puts into practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses capitalize, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly jubilant movements unmask jubilation, his subjective incapacity for the happy end denounces itself.. . .His successful final movements are those that ignore the radiant path ad astra.5 The “radiant path” to which Adorno refers leads to a celebratory brass chorale in D major heard in mm. 711–49. Although a variant of the same passage in the second movement receives his endorsement, as a “chorale vision that saves the movement from circularity,” it is the quality of affirmation or “positivity” in the finale that Adorno rejects, quite apart from his accusation of its being “too lightweight .”For Adorno,Mahler’s “special tone”is that of “brokenness”: “Aberrations are of [the] essence” in his music as he “tracks down meaning in its absence.”6 In his dismissal of the chorale in the finale, Adorno’s judgment resonates curiously with Alma Mahler’s initial response.She related that when Mahler first played the symphony for her at the piano in the autumn of 1902, she told him the chorale at the conclusion was “hymnal and boring” and that he was “not . . . at his best in working up a church chorale.”7 This critical stance has been echoed more recently, notably by Bernd Sponheuer,but without becoming a dominant view.8 As Donald Mitchell writes,“Adorno’s notorious adverse judgement has already achieved wide currency,” yet “the assumption that Mahler was incapable of affirming a humane belief in humanity, that he was unequal to the task or uninterested in it . . . has the ring of ideological intolerance—an ideologically...

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