There Stands the Titan-Mahler and His Fight Against Antisemitism
I must have listened to Mahler’s 1st symphony over a dozen times at least, but it is only most recently, that I realised that he incorporates Jewish folk song in the third movement. Now that I know this, I cannot but help wonder if this was his way of culturally saying a big “fuck you” to the Viennese establishment. The usage of Jewish folk, and themes, appears in a number of his symphonies, such as the 1st and the third.
Austria-Hungary was late in industrialising and never really got round to establishing any overseas colonies. The paradox is that the empire was both stultifying conservative, yet became associated with the “Fin de siècle” such as “La Ronde“ a controversial play with provocative sexual themes, written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1897, Freud and what became known as the “Talking Cure”. So for many social, cultural and political conservatives, innovation, and progress became associated with decadence and being Jewish.
It is here that we return back to Mahler, in his Nov 8th 2017 article ‘ANTISEMITES AND JEWS AGREE: GUSTAV MAHLER IS A JEWISH COMPOSER’ Alex Weiser notes that “Mahler’s conversion is widely believed to be because of a ban against appointing Jews as the director of the Vienna Hofoper–a job he got shortly after converting. As poet Heinrich Heine said, “The certificate of baptism is the ticket of admission to modern culture” https://www.yivo.org/Gustav-Mahler-is-a-Jewish-Composer
Upon being appointed to the role of the head of the Vienna Opera house, Mahler’s relationship between both the board and the audience was initially cordial. That of sections of the media, less so, Alex Weiser in the same article above, states “In spite of his conversion, the antisemitic press lambasted Mahler’s work, asserting that his music “speaks German with a Yiddish accent.” In one feverish antisemitic review, Mahler is criticized for his bombastic “Jewish” orchestration” https://www.yivo.org/Gustav-Mahler-is-a-Jewish-Composer
The Austrian-Hungarian middle and upper class audience regarded themselves as being discerning and sophisticated. Yet, musically, they tended to prefer the more chocolate box selection from that other famous scion of Austria, Mozart. Beethoven, Webern, and Schoenberg were regarded as “difficult” music, especially as the former was open and unashamed at its revolutionary content.
David B Green, notes in Haaretz, 18th May 2016, concerning Mahler and being a Jewish convert to Catholicism that “His Jewish background was a source of much of the hostility he was subjected to.” He also says that in 1897, the year of Mahler’s conversion that “Karl Lueger became mayor of Vienna, and anti-Semitism was the born. Mahler went out of his way to prove his German credentials, scheduling works by Wagner, one of his favourite composers, and Mozart” https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1911-gustav-mahler-dies-young-and-scorned-1.5384178
Regarding the conversion, it has been said that for him, leaving aside the pragmatic aspects, it meant as nothing to him. This is a mistake and the facts available do not bear this out for the below reasons; (1) Mahler’s grandfather had been one of the founders of the synagogue in Iglau, where the family moved a half a year after Gustav’s birth. (2) He famously said that he was “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.”
(3) For both practical and also no doubt personal, moral reasons, he rarely openly discussed his conversion, Carl Niekerk, in his book Reading Mahler, sees Mahler’s relationship to text throughout his works as a “counter reading of the German cultural tradition” and a “critique of Wagner’s idea of German national culture.” (4) At the very time Mahler was writing these program notes for Dresden, William James was concluding his British lectures that became the great book, Varieties of Religious Experience. For James, conversion was one of the crucial experiences of the religious life — involving a sense of personal impasse, then self-surrender and the conviction of being born again. As Mahler himself, wrote to his Hungarian journalist supporter Ludwig Karpath, it “cost me a great deal.”
Daniel N. Leeson, in reviewing for Israel Studies in Musicology Online, Vol. 9–2011, ‘Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, by K.M. Knittel, states “He was thought to be inherently incapable of creating anything original, since that was the nature of Jews, and even conversion could not cure this assumed genetic defect.
In both Austria and Germany, some thirty years before Mahler’s time, the most influential antisemite in Europe was Richard Wagner, who posited the lack of originality as a singularly Jewish characteristic. It was in Wagner’s 1850 essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” that he detailed the characteristics that were exclusively Jewish, all of which, he asserted, were destructive to music” https://www.biu.ac.il/hu/mu/min-ad/11/Lesson-Knittel.pdf
Had Wager still been alive in 1889, when Mahler’s 1st symphony was premiered, he’d have used its first performance as ‘proof’. Mahler’s friend Fritz Löhr said “a considerable part of the audience, in its usual heartless way, had no understanding of anything formally new, particularly the dynamic vehemence of the tragic expression that was raging here; they were uncomfortably startled out of their thoughtless habit.”
For many of the late 19th/early 20th century audiences, what seems to have raised cultural hackles was the use of Jewish folk in the 3rd movement of the 1st symphony. Chamber Domaine, in ‘Mahler and Freud: Understanding Mahler’ 14th April 2010 says “This is affirmed later in the movement where the music is overtly Jewish and uses Klezmer style writing in the clarinet. There is a conflict between these different types of music and this is integral to the music rather than surface kitsch or pastiche. And that this movement has many layers and is more than just a funeral march”. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lecture/transcript/print/mahler-and-freud-understanding-mahler/
I do recognise that my conclusions maybe contentious and so in that respect, I welcome any challenges to what I’ve written. But the use of Jewish folk, in a symphony, that was meant to have ‘gravitas’ was done deliberately.
I see it as a counter provocation against those who saw Jews in the Germanic world as only capable of, “Maus Spiel”. I would also add, that the deliberate act, was one of cultural defiance to those who took it as a biological and cultural fact to be Jewish was to be sub human, in other words “Untersmensch.”
This is am important point to make because now in the early part of the 21st century, once again we see biological determinism being used in the front line of the “culture wars’ as part of MRGA (Make Racism Great Again). The “dual loyalty” slur, thrown at Jews, is now used against Muslims, but it can just as easily switch back. It is in that sense then, that we must make our war cry heard once again until it shakes the very heavens, of “Never Again…For Anyone”
