Pablo Massa writes:

>Excuse this criminal generalization, but there were two visions over the
>cultural history of Europe: a "pessimist" one (Nietzsche, Spengler & Co.),
>and an "optimist" one (the socialist utopia, which looked so innocent
>then...).

I hope this does not mean that all who are not 'cheerful' leftist
revolutionaries are nasty socially regressive pessimists.  I cannot help
but recall the expectations forced upon Shostakovich to write music which
represented 'the Happiness created by the Revolution in the Glorious Soviet
Republic' when really all he could see were people being butchered all
around him.

>Mahler, in part --at least in his social-political thinking-- was near
>to the second one (his contacts with Adler --brother to Guido Adler,
>the musicologist-- and the Viennese socialists were very assiduous).
>Of course, he was probably nearer to the Fabian socialism than to Adler,
>but this leads us to the following consideration:  he was in some degree
>a social optimist (ie:  an up-to-date socialist), or he was simply a
>deceived ingenuous.

Whereas Mahler read Nietzsche - again and again - I am unaware of him EVER
being influenced by either the Hegelian left (amongst whom I would place
Adorno), especially in its extremist historical-materialist guise which
was something of a fad around this time.Of course he even sets Nietzsche
to music in the 3rd Symphony.  However anyone even superficially familiar
with Nietzsche will see from the 3rd Symphony that he and Mahler are
ideologically light years apart.  Nietzsche should be read as a reaction
against Schopenhaeuerian (to whom the text of Wagner's Ring is dedicated)
pessimism:  a reaction which Mahler's music must be seen as a conflict
between accepting Schopenhauerian pessimism on the one hand and wanting to
replace it with a (very anti-Nietzschean) belief that the suffering of life
is a preparation for the happy afterlife on the other.

>If Mahler was only a nostalgic of "Pastoral and visions of Nature", then
>he wasn't fitted to express the cultural crisis of "fin de siecle", which
>was very far from being simply the death of an idyll.

Yes but this really is Mahler's biggest weakness.  Mahler's brand of
transcendentalism is so deus ex machina, an escape into Nature Mysticism
or into angelic clouds of the Everafter - even the words 'ewig...ewig'
with which das Lied end are but tacked on and as such fail to adequately
resolve the view of life as' meaningless suffering' (Schopenhauer's words)
presented in the first song from 'das Lied von der Erde' which climaxes
with words about the pitiful brevity of life and all its 'rotting trifles'.
Nietzsche's critique of religion was that it was an escape into
'Hinterwelten', an escape from the suffering of existence which failed
adequately to deal with suffering as the MOST fundamental fact of
existence.  Hence Nietszche accepts Schopenhauer's position that a God
who created this world and who could have 'seen it was good' must be mad.
Mahler's music thus similarly falls afoul of the Nietschean critique of
escapism from the most fundamental fact of existence.  As far as being a
response to some supposed cultural crisis concerning social relationships
goes, I think to interpret Mahler in such as way is really missing the
whole point.  I also certainly hope nobody is trying to suggest that social
relationships were idyllic before Mahler but thanks to the nasty industrial
revolution etc things got more lonely (Angst ridden, alienating etc,etc)
and this sort of Modernist self pitying carry on - although there is some
truth to this, it's just not the whole picture.

>Right, but Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were expressing much deeply the
>wreck of the "assumed social relationships that held up the 19th century",
>and they made it shaking directly the roots of established musical
>language, an attempt which Mahler only *seemed* to do.

I have written before on this but I completely disagree with this old
fashioned view of the Second Viennese School as being agents of cultural
revolution.  With this I find myself taking up a stance against Adorno
I am aware but anyone who reads Schoenberg will seen this view is a
distortion of his thinking which is more that of a moderate Hegelian
(rather than a leftist Hegelian) in that he saw the history of music as a
Geistesgeschichte, a product of historical necessity and as such existing
in continuum with that history."I am a conservative who has been forced to
become a revolutionary" said Schoenberg - forced by historical necessity
to create what he had to.  It is not as such a rupture with the past but a
process which deepens it's connection to the past.  I had written before
that I feel the model for docecophany were the late works of J.S.  Bach
such as the Art of Fugue where a whole work is created by the exploration
of the implication of a single musical Idea.  I have also alluded before
that the composer who really was to take up the reigns with respect to
questions of suffering and its transcendence (which are also central
questions in Schoenberg's 'die Jakobsleiter') left unanswered by Mahler
was Webern.  I think only he manages to resolve them.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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