Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in the Centre and on the Periphery (2024)

ABSTRACT

following the end of his tenure with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1901, Gustav Mahler conducted more concerts than ever outside the imperial capital and in increasingly diverse locations, from Rome to St Petersburg.1 Among these were two concerts of the Philharmonic Society of Lemberg’s first season in 1903, performed in the Galician capital of Lemberg—today, the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.2 The first performance included Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, which was met with such enthusiasm that it was performed in place of his Symphony No. 4 at the second concert two days later. Reporting to his wife, Alma, from the Hotel George, Mahler wrote: ‘The symphony, yesterday, gave a great impression. There was a general desire for a second hearing, and so I am giving it again at tomorrow’s concert.’ His continuation—‘So there’s a success for you’—was a phrase he did not often have occasion to use in his lifetime.3 Indeed, this reception of the symphony was in notable contrast to the responses it had largely received at its other local premieres, including the first performance in Budapest, followed by Hamburg, Weimar, and, above all, its reception in Vienna in November 1900, whose notorious reviews included its characterization as a ‘parody of symphonic composition’,4 ‘not music’,5 ‘grotesque cacophony’,6 a ‘disrespectful treatment’ of the listener, and the suggestion that the composer ‘totally failed in the high task he set himself’.7

While the Viennese critics bemoaned above all what they viewed as an absence of musical logic—abrupt shifts in emotional register, unexplained juxtapositions, narrative opacity—a study of reviews from Lemberg suggests a greater openness to Mahler’s music that may have had much to do with the composer’s modernist approach to the genre. In particular, Mahler’s use of plural voices, undermining traditional symphonic structures and narratives of singular heroism with a more subjective experience of the world, appeared in the critical discussion of the work. Indeed, multiple and diverse ethnic and social identities characterized not only quotidian but institutional life in Lemberg, especially among its cultural minorities. For the city’s inhabitants, known as Leopolitans, the simultaneous expression of multiple voices was an everyday phenomenon of urban existence, not a threat to an increasingly fragile hegemony, and this aspect was reflected in the overall receptivity of the provincial press.

In what follows, I compare the reception of Mahler’s First at the centre of the empire in Vienna with a study of press and audience responses on its periphery in Lemberg. While it is, of course, true that the reviews in either place do not represent the statistical diversity or even the majority of concert-goers, it is also true that these reviews were the voices sanctioned and empowered to speak for the public by the institutions whose task it was to establish and reinforce norms and priorities. I suggest that a common language of pluralities, which Mahler shared with Galicia’s commonplace heterogeneity and emerging modernist movements, allowed the Leopolitan public to be ahead of Vienna in their openness to the early modernist modes of expression that would soon dominate European culture. Finally, I offer some concluding thoughts on what this comparative reception might mean more generally for the study of music in places like Lviv.

critical reception in vienna and lviv

The early audience reception of Mahler’s First Symphony was often conflicted. Divisions along generational lines were especially stark. The work’s first performance in Budapest received a largely negative response from critics, ‘ranging from hostile to patronizing’, with a single positive evaluation written by József Keszler, who also noted that, in the audience, ‘a storm of applause also broke out at the end of each movement’.8 Four years later in Hamburg, the critics were ‘almost unanimous in their disapproval’, but the audience was enthusiastic and the musicians honoured the composer with the performance of a fanfare.9 In Weimar, Mahler reported that the symphony ‘aroused furious opposition on the one hand and, on the other, the most unqualified approval’.10 In Berlin, a lone approving review from Oskar Eichberg for the Berliner Börsencourier bobbed in the sea of ‘systematic malevolence and denigration’ for which the city’s critics were known.11

In Vienna, too, ‘sharp hissing sounds mingled with the thunderous applause’12 in the audience and the performance provoked both ‘a furious riot by Mahler’s followers, who form the majority in the Philharmonic concerts, and an energetic hissing of the opponents’.13 For this study, however, most significant is that critics were almost entirely aligned in their disapproval of Mahler’s now four-movement work.14 The reviews indicate that it was Mahler’s regular juxtaposition of plural voices and depiction of the internal and subjective struggles of the hero that were responsible for assessments ranging from bewilderment to indignation:

1. In the first movement, Mahler’s use of allusion to the separate musical worlds of song and nature created an ‘episodic character’,15 in which ‘motifs swing freely into one another’, lacked a conventional development,16 and ‘disdain[ed] all organic structure’.17

2. The intersecting dances of the second movement, which astutely depict the mixing of multiple ethnic and class identities,18 were criticized for being nothing more than a poorly veiled quotation from Der Freischütz19 and banal fugue material.20 Multiple reviewers described their combination pejoratively as ironic.21

3. The third movement’s interwoven funeral march, exotic band music, and tuneful ‘folk’ song22—described as ‘grotesque’ and ‘crass mood changes’23—was called a ‘farce’24 and declared unintelligible in nearly all the reviews.25

4. The uneven journey of the musical protagonist Dall’inferno al Paradiso, designed by the composer ‘to represent a battle in which victory is always farthest away at the exact moment when the warrior believes himself to be closest to it’,26 also created a series of episodes in which a triumphant arrival was undermined with returns of the stormy opening and interruptions by Naturlaute of earlier movements. The movement was referred to as the ‘parody of the finale’27 and the composer charged with ‘eras[ing] everything that could make [his] opinion halfway comprehensible to the listener’.28

These subversions of heroic univocity and traditional norms of formal coherence, in combination with the composer’s eventual decision to retract the original programme, led critics regularly to fall back on explaining the work in terms of irony, satire, sarcasm, and parody.29 Mahler’s use of these terms in the symphony’s description and performance directives is striking evidence that the reviewers had a somewhat accurate sense of what displeased them—and that the underlying disagreement was about the value of modernist variety and difference. Nevertheless, the specificity of Mahler’s comments does not equate with the overall categorizations of the work as an inauthentic imitation of the symphonic genre intimated, if not declared, by most of the Viennese reviews.

The title of Max Kalbeck’s review, ‘Gustav Mahler’s Sinfonia ironica’, encapsulates the reviewer’s summary verdict of the work. Kalbeck wrote: ‘Mahler was inspired by philosophical ideas and by a romantic instinct in his heart, and sought that auditory unity for the conflicting inner feelings in a third element alien to absolute music: irony.’30 Mahler himself had indicated in a letter to Max Marschalk dated 20 March 1896 that the third movement should be conceived in terms of Aristotlian ‘eironeia’,31 but the term pervades Kalbeck’s evaluation of the symphony as a whole: ‘The corrosive sharpness of irony seems to have given rise to the work’s episodic character, which is disconcerting in the two outer movements, especially in the finale.’ Despite finding the middle movements ‘understandable’ and ‘pleasing’, he wonders ‘where is the irony?’ in the second movement, and, writing of the third movement, demands to know whether ‘the artist’s supreme irony goes so far that he leads himself to his grave?’ Irony predominates his impressions one last time as he praises the final movement, in which ‘the irony gradually gives way’.32 Hans Geisler, who penned one of the harshest evaluations of the First’s performance in Vienna, opened his review by writing not only that the symphony does not want to be understood but that the composer ‘ironizes himself, the music, the symphonic form and ultimately the listener’.33

Similarly, Robert Hirschfeld employed the term ‘parody’ repeatedly in his review. Once again, Mahler included performance indications that sections of the third movement should be played ‘Mit Parodie’, but Hirschfeld’s reiteration goes far beyond the composer’s instructions. After characterizing the work as a ‘satyr play of the symphony’, Hirschfeld described the entire symphony as ‘Mahler’s magnificent parody of the symphonic spirit and the symphonic form’.34 The review speaks of the parody of the ‘rabble’ [Gesinder] that ‘ironizes’ the fugue, the ‘parody of invention’ in Mahler’s use of the ‘Bruder Martin’ canon, the parody of the finale that shows Mahler to be a ‘parodic composer’ who is even unfaithful to the final movement’s ‘parodic air’. The composer presents a ‘parody of symphonic composition … a parodic symphony’, whose first movement uses a ‘parodic form’, including ‘the parodic character of the cuckoo’ that develops into ‘completely satirical’ counterpoint. The composer’s parody is so extensive that it ‘points far beyond the symphonic realm and boldly moves against the merely decorative modern arts’. For Hirschfeld, even the instrumentation is parody in its effort to ‘deprive the individual instruments of their natural sound through unusual positions and manipulations of all kinds’. The author admits that ‘often enough, … serious art breaks through all the parody’, but this concession only positions the ‘parody’ of Mahler’s music that he discusses as a clear antithesis to the serious art of the symphonic genre. The tenor of these reviews amplifies the message of totalizing disapproval, with terms like ‘corrosive’, ‘disconcerting’, ‘alien’, and charges of the unnatural.

In Lviv, on the other hand, the reception was also mixed, but amongst reviewers, institutions, and the general audience the composer found relative success. While the Vienna Philharmonic would not play the First Symphony again until 2 March 1918,35 in Lemberg, a second performance of the First was given immediately, in lieu of a planned performance of the Fourth. Certainly not all the reviews in Lviv were positive, and some, of course, echoed the complaints lodged in Vienna. For example, while praising Mahler’s performance as a conductor, Stanisław Niewiadomski, writing for the Słowo Polski, the first modern daily published in Lviv from 1896 to 1934 and the organ of the Polish Democratic Party until 1902, when it became the organ of the National Democratic Party (SND, or Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne),36 reported that the symphony was lacking ingenuity and was too heavily dominated by music that was not serious or beautiful: ‘[I]t is impossible to find originality here either in ideas or in the fascinating use of themes; sometimes some more beautiful fragments just fly over the listener’s ear, quickly stepping aside to make room for details that often seem too bizarre.’37 However, the Polish composer, conductor, music educator, and critic who had studied with Karol Mikuli at the Galician Music Society and managed the Lemberg Opera for one season in 1886 before becoming a professor himself at the Galician Music Society from 1887 to 1914, was unique in his entirely negative evaluation of the work.38

Seweryn Berson, a composer who wrote the review for Lviv’s oldest official publication, Gazeta Lwowska (or Lemberger Zeitung), the official press organ for the Austrian partition authorities until 1918, 39 had a more mixed response to Mahler’s work. A long-time reviewer for the organ, which was already somewhat obsolete by the start of the twentieth century, the Polish lawyer, adviser to the Supreme Regional Court, and amateur musician, was a graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he had also been a composition student of Władysław Żelenski.40 According to Berson, Mahler’s symphony was ‘a generally hypermodern composition, often not even taking into account sound and purity. But there are places that are simply beautiful, especially in the third and last part, full of not only mood, but also sincere feelings.’41 Berson even asked to hear the work again in order to ‘learn more about [Mahler’s] creative properties and distinctiveness’—presumably submitting his review before the change in programming for Mahler’s second night in Lviv had been made known. In his review of the following night, Berson did not offer anything further about Mahler’s symphony, but devoted his word count to bemoaning the overall state of the orchestra.42

In a Polish-language review for Gazeta Narodowa, Leon Ludwik Gruder, a Lemberg-based attorney and music connoisseur,43 praised the symphony, writing: ‘The whole work is marked by wonderful melodies in certain themes (especially the second and third movements), transparency of form, and exciting, colourful instrumentation, which together make the work clear and accessible.’44 He also reviewed the contents of each of the movements, writing:

The first part tries to convey a pastoral mood, the second (scherzo)—which was once the third—has the character of a rhythmic dance, to which a gentle melody (in a trio) creates a refined musical contrast. Particularly interesting is the third—a sarcastic mourning march, in which the famous canon ‘Frere Jacques’ [is] elaborated with grace and parody in the form of a canon. The lightning-fast intrusion of the drums prepares a long finale, especially brightly instrumented with the help of brass wind instruments and with its contrasts makes a very strong impression.45

Gruder’s combination of ‘grace and parody’ in his description of the third movement suggests a wholly different reception of Mahler’s intentions than expressed by the Viennese critics. In his review for what Lidiia Melnyk calls ‘the most popular, large-circulation, and genuinely people-oriented newspaper’ in Lviv,46 Gruder also emphasized that ‘a large audience was very positive’ and Mahler was forced to return to the stage for six curtain calls following the performance.47 Mahler himself reported to Alma that the audience was ‘so breathlessly still and listened so intently’.48 Like Berson, Gruder’s review of the second concert in Gazeta Narodowa focused not on Mahler’s ‘wonderful symphony, which left an even deeper impression’ the second time, but rather on the performance of the orchestra under Mahler’s direction.49

In the German-language review for the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, to which he regularly contributed, Gruder called Mahler’s performances in Lemberg ‘the highest and most appreciated event of the entire music season’. While almost every review from Vienna lamented the incomprehensibility of Mahler’s programme-less music, in Lemberg, Gruder wrote: ‘Strangely enough, one expected that the composition would be very complicated and incomprehensible, but behold! Everything was clearly understood even without the usual technical analysis of the programme books!’50 While Gruder did refer to the third movement’s ‘grotesque, sarcastic, parodic death march’, taking his cue from Mahler’s own comments, he also described the first, second, and final movements as ‘extremely graceful’ and ‘idyllic’, ‘tightly executed’ with a ‘graceful melody’ forming a ‘pretty contrast’, and a ‘climax [that was] amazingly orchestrated’ respectively.51

Perhaps most important are the Ukrainian-language reviews that appeared in the journal Ruslan, written by Natal (Anatoliy) Vakhnianyn, a composer and one of the leaders of the Galician Music Society. An active community figure, Vakhnianyn has been called an ‘archetype’ of the Galician artist at the turn of the century who represented more amateur creators who were nonetheless moving towards a professional sphere of activity.52 After attending the University of Vienna in 1868, Vakhnianyn co-founded with the historian Yulian Tselevych the educational society Sich in Vienna, and following his return to Lemberg remained connected with the society, regularly sending the newest Ukrainian publications in pursuit of establishing a German-language outlet that would be dedicated to Ukrainian issues.53 Back in Ukraine, Vakhnianyn established the Ukrainian choirs Torban and Boyan while composing many popular choral works, and Kupalo, the first opera written in western Ukraine.54 He was also an important figure in the Ukrainian musical world as a result of his contact with the father of Ukrainian music, Mykola Lysenko.55

In his review, entitled ‘Gustav Mahler in Lviv’, some of Vakhnianyn’s comments recalled those from Vienna, particularly a critique of the composer’s use of quotation:

The [symphony’s] motifs—although the composer himself considers them original—reminded us of parts of at least other people’s melodies. And so we remembered in the first part of the symphony the Spanish mandolinata (which was once sung in Lviv by the glorious Arto). The second movement is based on a Ländler, sometimes with a mazurka rhythm. In the third movement we recalled the famous canon ‘Bruder Martin, schlaefst du schon’ and our song ‘You, the girl from Podil’. And in the finale we heard the refrain from the song ‘The girl stood at the entrance to the house’. Only three motifs seemed to us not specifically inherited. It is not crimen laesae maiestatis [treason, or ‘crime wounding the sovereign’] to base a symphony on folk melodies, but it does not indicate an inventive talent.56

Yet while the implications of Vienna’s comments on the composer’s musical borrowings were intertwined with antisemitic language historically employed in western Europe,57 Vakhnianyn only manages a feeble critique, mentioning the composer’s unoriginal use of the Ländler,58 as well as hearing in Mahler’s music Ukrainian folksongs to which the composer could not have possibly been referring. Even while claiming that the composer’s use of quotations was not indicative of ingenuity, Vakhnianyn nonetheless acknowledged that ‘The arrangement of the motifs in the aforementioned symphony deserves recognition. It is not classical—in the vein of Beethoven’s or Mozart’s treatment of the themes—but it is clever.’59 Granting certain standards typified by the Viennese canon, Vakhnianyn allowed other inherent qualities of Mahler’s composing not to be totally diminished.

What is most important about his review of the First Symphony is Vakhnianyn’s invocation of the revealing and important term ‘subjectivity’ to describe the First Symphony:

In that direction—with regard to the texture itself—Mahler can claim to be as original as all of Berlioz’s most important epigones, including Liszt and Richard Strauss, who strayed far from classicism in music and were essentially subjective. Under the weight of this subjectivism (I feel, I hear, I understand, I want), the form and the architectural line, which once defined the thing, breaks, whether in construction, in painting, or in poetry.60

Vakhnianyn’s definition of subjectivism combines an opposition to classicism, a weight under which conventional formal expectations collapse, and an expression of internal sensations (hearing, feeling, understanding, desire). Rather than merely dismissing this facet of the music as unintelligible, Vakhnianyn named and described it in a way that connects Mahler’s musical innovations to those of contemporary literature in western Ukraine, as I will show. The turn-of-the-century Ukrainian conception of ‘subjectivity’, as well as the meaning, and more importantly connotations, of the terms ‘irony’ and ‘parody’ in fin de siècle Vienna, must shape our understanding of the First’s critical reception in these respective cities.

irony, parody, and subjectivity

In 1900, Viennese associations of the term ‘parody’ were still rooted in the eighteenth-century aesthetics of genius, which emphasized serious and individual brilliance, in contrast to parody’s ‘common ridiculousness’.61 Goethe himself declared that he was a ‘mortal enemy’ of parody, accusing it of lowering ‘the high, great, noble, good, and delicate’ to the level of the plebian.62 Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s 1857 philosophical treatise Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen emphasized the inauthenticity of parody, as lacking any literary value of its own.63 An absence of authenticity was a frequent charge against Mahler’s works, as well as part of anti-Semitic musical discourse generally.64 Given the otherwise largely negative evaluations of Mahler’s First, particularly its deviation from convention, we can read the charges of ‘parody’ in the reviews of the Vienna premiere in terms of this long-standing aesthetic tradition, which viewed parody as an inauthentic lowering of the sophisticated and high-minded.

Friedrich Schlegel’s early concept of irony outlined in the Lyceum Fragments of 1797, that of the ‘lofty urbanity of the Socratic muse’,65 a means to ‘raise [poetic] reflection to higher and higher powers and multiply it, as it were, in an endless array of mirrors’66—in other words, a virtue—had, by 1900, been replaced with a scepticism towards irony as a poetic principle.67 Following the lead of Hegelian attacks on irony’s ‘infinitely absolute negativity’,68 an overall debate about whether irony was ‘too intellectual, sophistically Erasmic, deceiving, haughty, dandyish, and coldly Western’ ensued.69 Although irony continued to be developed as a subject of critical discourse, it took a pessimistic and melancholy turn that diminished its purpose to that of masking nihilism in the face of the transitory nature of life. The application of this species of irony to Mahler’s symphony reduces its contributions to comic distraction.

Yet Mahler’s own use of the term ‘irony’ was quite specific. About the third movement, the composer wrote: ‘the only concern is the mood that must be expressed, and out of which then suddenly bursts the fourth movement, like lightning from dark clouds. It is simply the outcry of a deeply wounded heart, which is preceded by the eerie and ironic, brooding sultriness of the funeral march. – Ironic in the sense of Aristotle’s “eironeia”.’70 Mahler’s instructions for the movement vis-à-vis the fourth movement point to its Socratic virtue, in which irony requires rather than mocks the finale, allowing the triumphant to negate the funereal. Zoltan Roman points out exactly this: ‘Aristotelian irony expressed in dialogue furthermore, contains inherently its own negation, which may remain implied, or may be asserted by the adversary.’71 As such, the irony Mahler identifies is not a mockery of the symphony, but a necessary means of preparing the sincerity of triumph communicated in the finale.

It is clear that the descriptions of ‘irony’ and ‘parody’ in Viennese reviews had less to do with the substantive musical employment of these techniques and their genuine differences: while irony, for example, seeks to communicate something without saying it directly, perhaps even by saying its opposite, parody says everything to the extreme, displaying every detail for ridicule. Rather, both were charges in response to Mahler’s subversion of what Julian Johnson defines as the conventions of the period’s ‘two widely cherished assumptions about art: that it should be original and that it should be sincere’.72 Yet, as Johnson also points out, this foreshadowed coming musical trends: ‘It is key to Mahler’s musical identity and the historical position of his music that what was at first heard in terms of lack of originality, false simplicity, and deliberate archaicism became, within a decade, hallmarks of a musical modernism shared by devotees like Alban Berg as much as more distant figures such as Igor Stravinsky.’73 Ultimately, Mahler’s irony did not merely subvert formal standards, rather his music offers another or new version of subjectivity and of formal cohesion, one that is not dependent upon the totalization of an attitude or an established norm, but that contains the variety and contradictions that make us whole.

As with Vienna’s employment of ‘parody’ and ‘irony’, Vakhnianyn’s use of the term ‘subjectivity’ should be placed in a historical and cultural context. In one of the first histories of Ukrainian music written by Mykola Hrinchenko in 1922, the author describes the means by which the nineteenth-century composer Mykola Lysenko established a unique Ukrainian musical language through the implementation of two parallel components.74 The first, according to Hrinchenko, was based on emotion and ‘subjectivity’, a kind of national character that listeners with similar experiences would recognize, while the second incorporated this character into a beautiful and objective musical form.75 For Hrinchenko, subjectivity was one half of a dialectic that characterized Ukrainian musical composition, by speaking to the essential character of a work and forming bonds with its listeners. Hrinchenko’s dialogical definition placed this subjectivity within but separate from the frame of established conventions, just as Mahler’s First Symphony utilized formal conventions to emphasize the subjective experience of its hero.

Similarly, the notion of subjectivity appeared in other modes of Ukrainian cultural discourse at the time. In particular, Mahler’s frequent centring of the musical subject against a narrative in which he does not see himself reflected—what Theodor Adorno described in terms of ‘the subject’ and ‘the world’s course’76—connects Mahler’s symphonic narratives to new means of story-telling found in early Ukrainian modernism. The employment of heroic subjectivity as a narrative strategy can be found in turn-of-the-century literature from the Habsburg regions of contemporary Ukraine among figures roughly contemporary with Mahler, including the feminist writer Olha Kobylianska and the Ukrainian national poet Ivan Franko, as well as Petro Karmansky, a member of the emergent Lviv-based modernist writers’ group Moloda Muza.

Of the themes explored in Kobylianska’s works, the individual experience of self-realization is particularly important and, contrary to more traditional narrative trajectories, the author sought to articulate her heroine’s inner travails.77 Raised in Bukovyna, a province neighbouring Galicia also under Habsburg rule, Kobylianska was largely self-educated. She was the daughter of a Ukrainian administrative clerk of noble heritage who was partially Germanized as a member of the intelligentsia, but also actively involved in the Ukrainian cultural community of their small town of Gura-Humora. After receiving only four years of formal education, Kobylianska did not attend gymnasium like her brothers, but turned to the holdings of the local library, where she became particularly fond of German late-Romantic poets, such as Nikolaus Lenau and Friedrich Rückert, both of whom were authors that also appealed to Mahler.78

According to Yuliya Ladygina, Kobylianska became a founder of Ukrainian literary modernism by introducing concepts such as ‘social Darwinism, feminism, elitism, irrationalism, and Nietzsche’s thought’ into Ukrainian literature. An example that resonates with Mahler’s use of narrative tensions can be found in Kobylianska’s second novel, The Princess. Natalka, the heroine, undergoes a journey of personal growth played out through the protagonist’s inner, psychological experiences, revealing the influence of Nietzschean perspectivism, ‘which dispels the dominant myth of totality and views human existence as a myriad of countless lost events without a point of reference, making them open to reinterpretation’.79 Kobylianska’s own resistance to the predominant populist politics of the era, against which she advocated the improvement of society through the cultivation of each individual’s personal intellect, meant that one of the recurring preoccupations of her writings is the tension between the individual and the group. Mahler’s narratives, also deeply influenced by Nietzsche, share in this way with Kobylianska’s the subjective experience of the protagonist, a consciousness often positioned against the world rather than represented by an objective tale of triumph.80

Other examples of subjectivity in western Ukrainian literature of the time are detected in what Alessandro Achilli calls the ‘forerunners of Ukrainian poetic modernism’.81 Specifically, Achilli refers to the poetry collections Withered Leaves (1896) by Ivan Franko and From the File of a Suicide (1899) by Petro Karmansky, the latter of which was published serially in Ruslan, the very organ for which Vakhnianyn reviewed Mahler’s First.82 In part through their dealings with the topic of suicide, both collections contributed to the foundation on which Ukrainian literature would begin to treat ‘the fraught relation between the self as a more or less autonomous and self-sufficient being constructing its own personal sphere, on the one hand, and society, or even the nation, as a superior and inescapable supreme goal, on the other’.83 Achilli specifically indicates how these works break from the more Romantic treatment of the hero in the works of the national literary hero Taras Shevchenko and contribute to ‘the modernization of subjectivity … showing the subject’s detachment from the collective’.84

Like Mahler’s, Karmansky’s works were characterized by the disjunction between the subject and surrounding society. According to Petro Liashkevych, Karmansky’s earliest poetry was already engaging in themes of decadence and alienation, featuring heroes with an ‘alternative-mystical perception of the world’ who created a new reality rather than reproducing the existing one. A central conflict between man and the world is realized through the ‘phantasmagoric’ images of evil and the triumph of cruelty and darkness, a characteristic Liashkevych attribute to the influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.85 Karmansky’s From the File of a Suicide, published in Ruslan in 1899, used the model of Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther but elevated the internal, subjective experience of the hero through ‘a seemingly “authentic, poetically unprocessed” diary’.86

Ivan Franko’s own epistolary tale of suicide in Withered Leaves also employs a subjective depiction of individual alienation. The ‘lyrical drama’ relays the subject’s ‘weak will and violent imagination’ through three poetic cycles that exhibit the range of feelings of the rejected lover, from longing to acute pain.87 In addition, Roman Golod uses the term ‘surrealism’ to characterize how Franko incorporated ‘chaos and mess into the compositional structure’ of many of his writings. In Franko’s novella Ostap’s Son, Golod writes, the ‘absolutization of chaos is revealed through the dynamic sequence of events, the kaleidoscopic piling up of images, the mixture of comic and strange situations’.88 A ‘kaleidoscopic piling up of images’ could equally be applied to moments in Mahler’s compositions, which the term ‘chaos’ and the juxtaposition of comic and strange have also been used to describe.89 The deployment of simultaneous, contrasting imageries allows both Mahler and Franko to illustrate multiple perspectives, underlining the subjectivity of the hero as well as the reader or listener.

By positioning subjectivism as a move away from classicism in his review of the First, Vakhnianyn perceptively identified how Mahler was abandoning more traditional, objective narratives of the symphonic genre and ceases to present a singular trajectory relayed from a sole univocal perspective. The ‘form and architectural line’ of the symphonic genre breaks. Instead, the music speaks from various points of view through the employment of plural voices and as a consciously multivocal subjective rather than a univocal objective narrative. I propose that the receptivity Mahler’s First found in Lviv, and Vakhnianyn’s (perhaps unknowingly) astute characterization of the music, is the result of the Leopolitan understanding that what the Viennese critics heard as low-brow imitation and nihilistic subversion was in fact something more nuanced and modern, a difference that had much to do with social coherence and voices of authority in their respective localities.

centre and periphery

At its greatest extent, the Habsburg Empire stretched from as far west as Milan to as far east as Chernivtsi, from as far north as Prague to as far south as Dubrovnik. During his rule Franz Joseph reigned over 51 million subjects of eleven different nationalities, seven different religions, speaking at least eleven different languages. And at the turn of the century, urbanization increasingly drove these diverse Habsburg subjects from the borderlands to the city of Vienna. Between 1870 and 1910, Vienna’s population grew 226 per cent, from 840,000 to 1.9 million (nearly the city’s present-day population). Most importantly, Vienna was characterized by an unusual ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity.90 While in Paris in 1910, the percentage of the population made up of non-Parisian natives was only 6.3 per cent, in Vienna, it was over 50 per cent and included immigrants from the Austrian provinces, Bohemia, Moravia, the Hungarian crownlands, Galicia, Bukovina, and other regions of the empire.91

As a German-speaking Jew who grew up on the border of Bohemia and Moravia, Mahler was acutely aware of complex identities and the means by which competing political and social allegiances could influence personal identity and one’s sense of place in society, as were many of his peers.92 Among his university peers was Siegfried Lipiner, a Jewish writer from contemporary Poland; Victor Adler, the Jewish leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, who was born in Prague, Richard von Kralik, the Austrian Catholic dramatist raised in what is now Czechia, and Heinrich Friedjung, one of Austria’s most important historians and a Jew born in Moravia. Moving in similar circles to Mahler was Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, raised in Pest before being educated at the University of Vienna, and Sigmund Freud, who was born to Jews from Galicia in the Moravian town of Freiburg.

Several men whose paths came close to Mahler’s own even came from Lviv. Martin Buber spent his formative years in Lviv, while the aforementioned writer Ivan Franko studied at the University of Vienna in the early 1890s. In addition to his modernist fashionings of subconsciousness and chaos, Franko’s literary output, written in Ukrainian, Polish, and German, also focused on the interchange among Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish culture and shared much with the writings of Karl Emil Franzos, who was made an honorary member of the university’s German Students Reading Society when members of Mahler’s circle were among the leadership. Each of these individuals negotiated a conglomeration of allegiances that, while characteristic of much of the Habsburg empire, did not align with the monarchy’s narrative of tradition and identity.

Although multifaceted identities were increasingly characteristic of large swathes of Viennese society at the turn of the century, the city’s cultural establishments were dominated by a monolithic identity based in the Germanophone, Catholic tradition of Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph. As a result, the music critics for the Neue Freie Presse, Neue Wiener Tagblatt, Wiener Abendpost, Deutsches Zeitung, Wiener Rundschau, and the Neue Musikalische Presse spoke in the voice of the largest and longest empire in European history and needed to protect the monarchy’s singular narrative from modernist rejections of tradition.93 The genre of the symphony aligned especially with political signalling in Austria and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and music criticism in Vienna resisted ‘diseased’, modernist trends by default.94 Rather, great symphonists were expected to uphold the ideals of a Germanic tradition and identity and to counter this encroaching malady with depictions of heroism, unity, and strength.

Sandra McColl’s study of the Viennese press in 1896 and 1897 shows that adherence specifically to the traditions of form and structure were at the heart of critical evaluations of new works and, in some instances, were directly linked to a work’s Germanness, a desirable attribute. The ‘successful construction of large-scale musical works’ was considered a feature of ‘Austro-Germanic classical heritage’.95 Mahler’s music, including his first foray into the symphonic genre, upended these ideals. The composer manipulated formal and structural expectations and his narratives undermined traditional tales of heroism and unity; the Viennese press answered him accordingly.

It is certainly conceivable that in Lemberg critics might have sought to appear more sophisticated by praising this new music from Vienna, even if they did not, in fact, understand or enjoy it, but the response of the audience and the decision to programme the work for the public a second time (as well as to tour with the repertory) suggests that the positivity in the Leopolitan press was more than simply posturing. The region was a notorious mixing pot in more ways than one. Lviv had long been defined by its role as a meeting point for various cultural currents. As early as the thirteenth century, it was inhabited by Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Jews, Armenians, Germans, Hungarians, Tatars, and Poles. By the middle of the sixteenth century the city’s make-up was 38 per cent Polish, 24 per cent Ruthenian, 8 per cent German, 8 per cent Jewish, and 7 per cent Armenian. According to Yaroslav Hrystak, ‘No other city in the [Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth] or perhaps in all of Europe, could claim five ethnic groups comprising over 5 percent of the population.’96

For most of its Habsburg history, however, Lviv was culturally dominated by Polish Catholics. The Austrian census of 1900 shows that 77 per cent of the population identified as Polish speakers, 10 per cent as Ukrainian speakers, and 13 per cent as German speakers, most of whom were Jews who ‘were not allowed to declare Yiddish as their “language of everyday communication”’.97 Aligning along similar ethnic lines, the city’s religious make-up was 52 per cent Roman Catholic, 18 per cent Greek Catholic, and 28 per cent Jewish.98 For Jews and Ukrainians, overlap with Polish culture was unavoidable and, as Robert Pyrah and Jan Fellerer have demonstrated, linguistic hybridity among these minority populations was commonplace for members of both the wealthy and working classes.99

Unlike Vienna, the city’s cultural institutions largely reflected its ethnic diversity, with institutions devoted to German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish cultural expression. As the capital of the largest Habsburg province, the Kingdom of Lodomeria and Galicia, certain Leopolitan cultural institutions were aligned with Germanic musical traditions. The Philharmonic that Mahler conducted in 1903 grew out of the establishment of the Society of St Cecilia, founded by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s son Franz Xaver in 1826 under the auspices of the Gesang-Institut. The Galician Music Society, founded as the Gesellschaft zur Beforderung der Musik in Galizien in 1838, financed the establishment of the music conservatory in 1870, several choirs, and an amateur symphony orchestra.100 The Philharmonic Orchestra regularly performed a repertory heavily dominated by canonical, mostly Germanophone, composers: Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Bruckner, as well as Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and Dvořák.101

But starting as early as 1795 under the direction of Wojciech Bogusławski, the Lemberg Theatre added Polish lyrical dramas, as well as translations of Italian operas into Polish, to what had been their largely German repertory.102 In 1809, Jan Nepomucen Kaminski established a permanent Polish theatre in Lemberg and in 1836 the first public theatre, founded by the Habsburg loyalist and Polish Count Stanisław Skarbek, was charged with the responsibility of performing both German and Polish works. Interest in German theatre declined over time, and in 1869 the Association of Friends of the National Theatre aimed to dissolve the German ensemble entirely and replace it with highbrow, Polish repertory. By 1875, the Polish Theatre in Lemberg was thriving.

During this time, Ukrainians in Lemberg became more aware of their national identity and sought to preserve and promote their own unique musical heritage. The Ukrainian theatre company Ruska Besida was founded in 1861 and maintained a professional touring company from 1864.103 Talk of building a dedicated hall for the performance of Ukrainian national theatre began to circulate in 1886 and an organization devoted to the project was formed in 1892.104 A plot of land for the new theatre was purchased in August 1903, just a few months after Mahler’s visit to Lemberg. Ukrainian choirs were also part of the city’s fin de siècle cultural tapestry. The choral society Torban was founded in 1870, followed by Boyan in 1891.105 The latter quickly became very popular in Lviv and throughout Galicia, reaching 180 full members by 1905. In terms of both size and level of government funding, Boyan was on par with the largest Polish societies of the time, many of which had existed for much longer.106

The Ukrainian musical community was, nonetheless, anything but isolated from other cultural groups and Polish–Ukrainian musical cooperation grew during the middle of the nineteenth century.107 Ukrainian musicians, including the famed soprano Solomiya Khrushelnytska, studied at Polish conservatories, including that of the Galician Musical Society. Ukrainian ensembles and singers performed on the stages of Polish theatres and Ruska Besida began almost immediately to programme Polish, German, and even French plays alongside their Ukrainian repertory.108

The presence of Jewish musicians in Lviv dates back as far as 1629, in which the city’s Jewish music guild reports a total of thirteen musicians.109 Klezmer bands appear throughout accounts of Galicia, including in one of Lviv-native Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Galician Tales from the 1860,110 and the famous American Klezmer musician Naftule Brandwein was born just outside Lemberg in 1884 into a musical family who performed extensively throughout the region. In 1889, Jakub Ber Gimpel left Skarbek’s theatre, where he was a chorister, to found Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre, the first permanent Jewish theatre in Lemberg and what would become the most popular Yiddish theatre in Europe before the First World War.111

Although both cities, like most of the Habsburg empire, were defined by multicultural mixing, the latter was a much more public and accepted part of Lemberg specifically and Galicia broadly. Not only does institutional representation of a variety of peoples and cultures in Lemberg attest to this, but in instances in which the region was able to dictate its own representation, such as the Galician General Provincial Exhibition in 1894, the ‘fundamental impetus’ was to display the variety of the ‘deeply diverse’ region.112

Evidenced in part by the aforementioned range of musical entertainment that defined Lemberg, the boundaries between serious ‘elite’ culture and a subservient ‘popular’ culture were also particularly malleable. According to Jolanta Pekacz’s history of music in the region, such dichotomies did not apply.113 Galicia historically lacked a rich bourgeoisie, with much of the Polish upper nobility preferring to reside in Vienna following the establishment of the Habsburg crownland in 1772.114 Cultural formation in the region was consequently tied to the utilization of various musical repertories and genres by institutions of education, theatre, community ensembles, and publications. As such, popular culture was dominant rather than ancillary. The role of a figure like Vakhnianyn, who attained an elevated cultural status despite working on the boundary between amateur and professional, testifies that value judgements based upon prestige narrowly defined in terms of education, class, and wealth were much less at work in Lemberg than in Vienna.

The traditional, sociological centre–periphery model attempts to explain the structural relationship between the ‘advanced’, metropolitan centre and its less ‘developed’, provincial peripheries, relying largely on the view that cultural innovation moves for the most part from centre to periphery. Yet this model has also provided a fertile site for challenging this dialectic and exploring culture’s movement from periphery to centre. Increasingly studies of modernism have explored the suggestion that peripheries were the birthplaces for the avant-garde. While Paris and Moscow might have been important centres, often the very groups that made their way to these capital cities to define artistic movements came first from more marginal spaces such as Vitebsk (Belarus), Tbilisi (Georgia), Kyiv and Kharkiv (Ukraine).

Vera Faber’s work on Ukrainian visual arts has amply demonstrated that the direction of artistic development does not always move from centre to periphery. Her research, which focuses on Kharkiv in the 1920s, uses theories of marginality and decentralization to reveal that it was exactly the Ukrainian Soviet capital’s position on the border that allowed it not only to avoid some of the harsher restrictions of the regime for longer, but to be a meeting place between East and West, enabling artistic exchange not just with St Petersburg and Moscow but to Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. In particular, it was the space on the periphery that permitted cultural and artistic borders to be more fluidly crossed and allowed their variety of cultural components to combine to produce entirely new products.115 As we see from the reviews of Mahler’s First in Vienna and Lemberg, while Vienna was searching for stable, reasonable, univocal classicism, Lviv was open to hearings of assertive, modern multiplicity that would soon appear throughout the cultural spheres of Europe.

Contemporary Ukraine, whose name is sometimes identified as derived etymologically from a term for borderland, has long occupied the space of geographic periphery. The division of the modern state across empires between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries further marginalized any internal centre by locating different regions on the borders of different empires. Yet rather than being entirely oppressed by the language, culture, and values of the imperial centre, these areas were sites where multiple currents met and mediated the circ*mstances of their surrounding powers—first between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Fig.1) and then between the Habsburg and Russian Empires (Fig.2).116 As Faber notes, the ‘manifold, multi-dimensional peripheral situation’ of the avant-garde in Ukraine was particularly important to its ‘cultural blossoming’.117

The First Symphony’s resonance in Lviv is important in its implications for the study of these kinds of peripheral spaces. The Hungarian-Canadian theorist Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek has developed the concept of ‘inbetween peripherality’ for thinking about certain regions of Central Europe, arguing that ‘while the center holds leverage [in central Europe], the margin can respond with “other affirmations and negations” owing to [its] relative sovereignty’.118 This relative sovereignty in fin de siècle Galicia allowed multiple cultures to interact and cross-pollinate in these spaces, to flourish as avant-garde artistic and philosophical experiments. Just as this form of intellectual flourishing can be observed among many leading cultural figures of Mahler’s generation who might have migrated to Vienna but were informed by a multi-ethnic identity cultivated in the borderlands, Lemberg’s geographic location on the periphery made a space from which modernist innovators like Mahler and his peers travelled to the centre.

The history of the symphonic tradition cannot be told without due consideration given to Gustav Mahler. Yet, in his day, he was often contrasted with more acceptable composers. Several of the Vienna reviews directly juxtapose Mahler’s symphony against the works of ‘great composers’. Eduard Hanslick wrote that the music of ‘our symphonic masters from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Dvořák’ did not need the ‘entrée ticket’ of a programme to ‘take us into their heaven’,119 something that Vienna found largely impossible to understand Mahler’s music without. Kalbeck referred to Brahms as ‘a greater man’ [‘einem Größeren’] even as he attempted to comfort Mahler with the knowledge that Brahms’s First Symphony also received a mixed response. Mahler has so much become part of music’s canonical history that sometimes one forgets that his music was once considered too long, too sentimental, too derivative, and populated by too many voices. Yet the challenges of this music eventually came to characterize the repertory of the centre to which audiences and critics alike would flock.

Historical musicology—and histories of culture, in general—has long focused on the centre, the empire, the majority. Yet this tale of two premieres reveals ways in which critical developments happen on the margins. Relieved to some extent of the inclination to preserve a singular national narrative and monolithic cultural traditions, unlike reviewers in the imperial capital of Vienna, the seeming inconsequentiality of peripheral regions like Lviv allowed them to become sites of unrestricted experimentation. Lemberg’s response to Mahler suggests a whole host of rich musical works and discourse about them await if we look to the periphery.

1

For a complete overview of Mahler’s conducting engagements, see Knud Martner, Mahler’s Concerts (New York, 2010).

2

I use both Lviv and Lemberg, depending on the context. As the city’s correct contemporary name, Lviv is used when referring to the city itself. Lemberg is used when speaking specifically about elements particular to the era in which Mahler was there.

3

Mahler’s letter to Alma, 3 Apr. 1903; Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell, trans, Basil Creighton, 3rd edn. rev. and enlarged (Seattle, 1975), 227.

4

Robert Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton: Philharmonisches Konzert. Gustav Mahlers D-dur Symphonie’, Wiener Abendpost (1900), 20 Nov., 1–2.

5

Eduard Hanslick, ‘Theater- und Kunstnachrichten’, Neue Freie Presse (1900), 20 Nov., 7–8.

6

Theodor Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst und Literatur: Zweites philharmonisches Concert’, Deutsches Zeitung (1900), 20 Nov.

7

Max Kalbeck, ‘Gustav Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, Wiener Tagblatt (1900), 20 Nov., 1–3.

8

Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest, 1991), 78–83.

9

Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler: The Arduous Road to Vienna (1860–1897) (Turnhout, 2020), 545–7.

10

La Grange, Gustav Mahler: The Arduous Road to Vienna, 569–70. [Letter to Berliner, 5 June 1894. MBRI, no. 119, MBR2, no. 128].

11

Ibid. 660–3.

12

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 1.

13

Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst und Literatur’ (‘einem wütenden Riotschen der Anhänger Mahlers, die ja in den philharmonischen Konzerten die Majorität bilden, und einem energischen Zischen der Gegner’).

14

The original second movement ‘Blumine’ was removed after the work’s third performance in Weimar.

15

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 2.

16

Max Graf, ‘Eine Erste Symphonie’, Wiener Rundschau, 415–16 at 416.

17

Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton’, 1.

18

See Leah Batstone, ‘A Dance from Iglau: Gustav Mahler, Bohemia, and the Complexities of Austrian Identity’, 19th-Century Music, 44 (2021), 169–86.

19

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 2, and Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton’, 1.

20

Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton’, 1.

21

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 3. Hirschfeld also writes that ‘the Gesinder parody ironizes the fugue’; ‘Feuilleton’, 1.

22

Mahler refers to this section as ‘…wie eine Volksweise’, but it is indeed a quotation of his own ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’ from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

23

Graf, ‘Eine Erste Symphonie’, 415.

24

Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst und Literatur’.

25

In addition to Graf and Helm’s comments, Hanslick asked, ‘what does the funeral march have to do with the old student canon “Brother Martin”?… The music itself would certainly not have gained or lost any of its attraction with a programme, but the composer’s intentions would have been clearer to us and the work would have been easier to understand’ (‘Theater- und Kunstnachrichten’). Kalbeck described, and even interpreted, the movement but concluded with the statement that ‘some poetic or pictorial source would have had to be there if the unprepared audience was to get the gist’ (wenn das unvorbereitete Publikum den Witz der Sache verstehen sollte). Hirschfeld called the movement ‘a merry funeral march on the death of all independent thought’ (Tod aller selbständigen Gedanken). ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 3.

26

Herta Blaukopf (ed.), Briefwechsel Mahler–Strauss 1888–1911 (Munich and Zurich, 1980), 39ff.

27

Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton’, 1.

28

Hans Geisler, ‘Concerte’, Neue Musikalische Presse (1900), 25 Nov., 351–2 at 352.

29

For a discussion of Mahler’s programmes, see Stephen Hefling, ‘Mahler’s Todtenfeier and the Problem of Program Music’, 19^th-Century Music, 2 (1988), 27–53; Constantin Floros, ‘Mahler and Program Music’, in Charles Youmans (ed.), Mahler in Context (New York, 2020), 110–17.

30

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 2.

31

Gustav Mahler Briefe, ed. Herta Blaukopf (Vienna, 1996), 169–70.

32

Kalbeck, ‘Mahlers Sinfonia ironica’, 3. See Zoltan Roman, ‘Connotative Irony in Mahler’s Todtenmarsch in “Callots Manier”’, Musical Quarterly, 59 (1973), 207–22 at 209.

33

Geisler, ‘Concerte’, 351–2. ‘Its creator ironizes himself, the music, the symphonic form, and ultimately the listener. The inclined listener does not forgive the latter. Irresolute about the disrespectful treatment, he hardens himself against the charming and again magnificent detail, rejects the unsuccessful whole as well as the successful parts and does not want to believe in naivety or pathos when he sees that the composer himself satirizes both.’ (‘Ihr Schöpfer ironisiert sich, die Musik, die symphonische Form, vollends den Hörer. Das Letzte verzeiht der geneigte Hörer nicht. Unwirsch über die respektlose Behandlung verhärtet er sich gegen das reizende und wieder prachtvolle Detail, verwirft mit dem verunglückten Ganzen auch die geglückten Teilgleider und will weder an die Naivetät, noch an das Pathos glauben, wenn er sieht, dass der Komponist selbst Beides persiflirt.’).

34

Hirschfeld, ‘Feuilleton’. The equation of parody and satyr play is in itself flawed and problematic. For an extensive discussion of the meaning of the satyr play and its applications to Mahler’s symphonies, see Leah Batstone, ‘“A Perfectly Self-Contained Tetralogy”: Mahler’s Tragicomic Inspirations’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 145 (2020), 351–84.

37

Stanisław Niewiadomski, ‘Przegląd muzyczny’, Słowo polskie, 157 (1903), 4 Apr., 3.

40

Lidiia Melnyk, ‘“Subyektyvist” i “hipermodernist”: Retseptsiia konstertiv Gustava Mahlera 1903 roku u Lvovi’, Chasopys Natsionalnoi Muzychnoi Akademii Ukrainy imeni P.I. Tchaikovskoho, 13.4 (2011).

43

For example, in 1909, still in Lemberg, Lars E. Laubhold reports that Gruder attended a lecture on Wagner’s Siegfried with the musician Eduard Steuermann, with whose father (also a lawyer) he was probably acquainted. See Laubhold, ‘“Musiker und gleichzeitig ‘Klaviervirtuose’ zu sein…” Eduard Steueremann—ein Porträt’, in Eduard Steuermann “Musiker und Virtuose” Symposiumsbericht (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2022), 17–66 at 22.

44

L. L. Gr[uder], ‘Filharmonia’, Gazeta Narodowa, 77 (1903), 4 Apr., 2 (‘Całość cechuje piękna melodya w poszczególnych tematach (zwłaszcza druga i trzecia część), przejrzystość formy i zajmująca, barwna instrumentacyj, co razem czyni cały utwór zrozumiałym i przystępnym.).

45

‘Pierwsza czȩść usiłuje oddać nastrój sielankowy, druga (scherzo)—niegdyá trzecia—nosi charakter rytmicsnego tańca, do którego schlebiająca melodya (w trio) tworzy wyborny kontrast musyczny. Nader interesująco przedstawia się czȩść trzecia—sarkastyczny marsz žałobny, w któryra znany kanon “Frere Jacques” z gracyą i parodyą opracowany jest we formie kanonu, błyskawiene wstąpienie instrumentów perkusyjnych przygotowuje długie finale, które nader jaskrawo przy pomocy dȩtych instrumentów blaszanych instrumentowane, wywołuje swymi kontrastami bardzo silne wraženie’ (ibid.).

46

Melnyk, ‘“Subyektyvist” i “hipermodernist”’ (найбільш популярної, великотиражної й скерованої справді до народу) Melnyk, ‘«Суб´єктивіст» і «гіпермодерніст».

47

Gr[uder], ‘Filharmonia’ (‘kompozytor musia∤ z rzędu sześć razy dziękować za oznaki zadowolenia i szczerego uznania.’).

48

Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler, 227.

49

L. L. Gr[uder], ‘Filharmonia’, Gazeta Narodowa, 79 (1903), 4 Apr., 2.

50

Dr. Gruder, Musikalisches Wochenblatt (1903), 25 June, 360–1 (‘Das höchste und das am meisten gewürdigte Ereignis der ganzen Musiksaison … Man hat merkwürdigerweise erwartet, die Komposition werde sehr kompliziert und unverständlich sein und siehe! Alles wurde klar verstanden auch ohne die übliche technische Analyse der Programmbücher!’).

51

‘als grotesker, sarkastischer, parodistischer Totenmarsch’; ‘überaus anmutiges’, ‘idyllische’, ‘ausgeführte’, ‘die anmutige Melodie’, ‘einen hübschen Gegensatz’, ‘den Höhepunkt bildete das lange, verblüffend instrumentierte Finale’.

52

Liubov Kyianovska, Halytska Muzychna Kultura XIX–XX stolytti (Chernivtsi, 2007), 119.

53

Y. Horak, ‘Rezentsii A Vakhnianyna na kontserty Lvivskoi filharmonii 1902 roku’, Ukrainske Muzykoznavstvo, 56 (2004), 18–34 at 19.

54

Kyianovska, Halytska Muzychna Kultura, 120.

55

Horak, ‘Rezentsii A Vakhnianyna na kontserty Lvivskoi filharmonii 1902 roku’.

56

Natal Vakhnianyn, ‘Gustav Mahler u Lvovi’, Ruslan (1903), 4. Apr., 3–4 (‘Мотиви — хоч сам композитор уважає ïх оригінальними — нагаду- вали частини нам принайменше не чужих мельодий. I так пригадалася нам в першій части сінфонïï іспаньска мандолïната (яку співала колись у Львові славна Арто). Друга часть основана на лєндлєрі, подекуди з ритмом мазуровим. В третій части пригадав ся нам звісний канон: «Bruder Martin, schlaefst du schon» і наша пісня «Ти дівчино з Подоля», а в кінцевім уступі чули ми зворот з піснï «Дівча в сінях стояло». Лише три мотиви видалися нам специяльно не наслïдуваними. Опирати сінфонïю на мельодіях народних не є crimen lesae majestatis, але се не сьвідчить о талантï інвенцийнім.’)

57

See K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Burlington, VT, 2010).

58

Some examples include the third movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 and the trio of the Scherzo in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4.

59

Vakhnianyn, ‘Gustav Mahler u Lvovi’. (‘Переведенє мотивів в згаданій сінфонïï заслуговує на узнанє. Не є оно клясичне — в роді Бетовенівских або Мозартівских обробіток тематичних — але умне.’)

60

Ibid. 4. (‘В тім напрямі — що-до самоï фактури — Малєр може почванити ся оригі- нальностию о стілько, о скілько всï визначнïші епігони Берлïоза, як Ліст і Рішард Штравс далеко відскочили від клясицизму в музиці і суть на скірізь субєктивними. Під вагою сего субєктивізму (я так відчуваю, я так чую, я так розумію, я так хочу) ломить ся форма і ся архітектонïчна лïнïя, що колись знаменувала штуку чи то в будові, чи в малярстві, чи в поезиï.’)

61

Wara Wende, ‘Parodie’, in Helmut Reinalter and Peter J. Brenner (eds.), Lexikon der Geisteswissenschaft: Sachebegriffe, Disziplinen, Personen (Vienna, 2011), 609–14. https://doi.org/10.7767/boehlau.9783205790099.609

62

Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter, 26 June 1824, in Max Hecker (ed.), Briefswechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, ii (1819–27) (Leipzig, 1915), 289. (‘Wie ich ein Todesfeind sei von allem Parodieren und Travestieren, hab’ ich nie verhehlt; aber nur deswegen bin ich’s, weil dieses garstige Gezücht das Schöne, Edle, Große herunterzieht, um es zu vernichten; ja selbst den Schein she’ ich nicht gern dadurch verjagt.’).

63

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (Stuttgart, 1857).

64

See, for example, Richard Wagner’s Der Judentum in Musik. K. M. Knittel also explores this and other facets of antisemitism in the language of fin de siècle critics of Mahler’s music in Seeing Mahler.

65

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler etal. ii (Munich, 1958–2002), 153 (No. 42): ‘die erhabne Urbanität der sokratischen Muse’.

66

KA ii, 182–3 (No. 116): ‘diese Reflexion immer wieder potensieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen.’

67

Ernst Behler, ‘The Theory of Irony in Early German Romanticism’, in Frederick Garber (ed.), Romantic Irony (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1988), 43–81 at 45.

68

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse in Jubiläumsausgabe VII (Stuttgart, 1965), 217–18: ‘unendliche absolute Negativität’.

69

Behler, ‘Theory of Irony’, 45.

70

Gustav Mahler, Briefe, 1879–1911 (Vienna, 1924), 185f. Translation from Roman, ‘Connotative Irony’, 209.

71

Roman, ‘Connotative Irony’, 213.

72

Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York and Oxford, 2009), 152.

73

Ibid. 149.

74

Ihor Sonevytsky, ‘Foreword’, in Mykola Hrinchenko, History of Ukrainian Music (New York, 1961), 5.

75

Mykola Hrinchenko, History of Ukrainian Music, 158. (‘Отже, це й натурально: самий звук має подвійну природу: з одного боку він є відгук людського серця, відгук його почувань, з другого – він носить в собі абсолютну музичну красу, без того чи іншого змісту нашого почуття. В елементах першої природи, між іншим, сховано й те, що дає нам художника-співця своєї нації. Перша половина природи звуку емоційна, суб’єктивна і тому зрозумілою буде вона остільки, оскільки взагалі суб’єктивні риси одного індивіда рідні й зрозумілі для другого. Друга ж частина природи звуку, та, що схована в чистій сфері абсолютної музичної краси, розкривається перед нами до тої міри, до якої закони музичної краси (а вони безперечно існують) вбрав у себе художник. Перша частина дає душу музичному творові, друга – прибирає його в гарну звукову форму.’ Emphasis original.).

76

Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1991), passim, beginning on p. 7. For a discussion of subjectivity in Mahler’s music in relationship to Adorno, see Leah Batstone, Mahler’s Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2023).

77

For an excellent and thorough history of Kobylianska’s life and works, see Yuliya Ladygina, Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (Toronto, 2019).

78

In addition to Mahler’s numerous settings of poetry by Rückert, the posthorn solo in the third movement of the Third Symphony has been linked to the poem Der Postillion by Lenau. See Floros, The Symphonies, 102 and Morten Solvik, ‘Biography and Musical Meaning in the Posthorn Solo of Mahler’s Third Symphony’, in Gunther Weiss (ed.), Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honor of Henry-Louis de La Grange on His Seventieth Birthday (Berne, 1997), 344–9.

79

Ladygina, Bridging East and West, 70.

80

See Batstone, Mahler’s Nietzsche.

81

Alessandro Achilli, ‘Four Decades of Modernist Revolution: Creating a New Subjectivity in Ukrainian Poetry, 1900–1940ʹ, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 38/1–2 (2021), 107–34 at 113–14.

82

For a discussion of how these collections relate to other movements of European modernism, see ch. 2 of Stefan Simonek, Ivan Franko und die ‘Moloda Muza’: Motive in der westukrainischen Lyrik der Moderne (Cologne, 1997).

83

Achilli, ‘Four Decades of Modernist Revolution’, 116.

84

Ibid.

85

Petro Liashkevych, Petro Karmansky: Narys zhyttia i tvorchosti (Lviv, 1998), 9–10.

86

Maksym Nestelieiev, ‘Intertexty v Ukrainskomu Dekadansi (“Ziviale Lystia” I. Franka yak pretext dlia “Z Teky Samovbyvtsi” P. Karmanskoho)’, Aktualni problemy ukrainskoi literatury i folkloru, 17 (2012), 143–50 at 148. Nestelieiev does not indicate whom he is quoting here.

87

Ibid. 145–7.

88

Roman Golod, ‘Franko and Modernism: Compatibility or Confrontation?’, Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, 4/2 (2017), 9–18 at 15.

89

On Mahler and chaos, see Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam, 1940); Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler, trans. James Galston (New York, 2013), 89, 109; Thomas Peattie, Symphonic Landscapes (Cambridge, 2015), 70; Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas (New York and Oxford, 2015), 214–15; Batstone, Mahler’s Nietzsche, particularly ch. 3, ‘The Gay Science’.

90

Federico Celestini, ‘Aesthetics of De-Identification’, in Jeremy Barham (ed.), Rethinking Mahler (New York and Oxford, 2017), 237–52 at 240.

91

Michael John and Albert Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel Wien – einst und jetzt: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung und Minderheiten (Vienna and Cologne, 1993), 15.

92

For a detailed discussion of Mahler’s multiple ethnic allegiances and their manifestations in his music, see Batstone, ‘A Dance from Iglau’.

93

This seeming avant-garde of the peripheries has, in fact, not gone unnoticed in the field of Mahler studies. Karen Painter’s study of early 20th-c. American press coverage of Mahler unearthed an oddly modernist enthusiasm in rural California compared to the wariness of the Viennese critics. She argues that the space between these two responses might be understood in terms of each place’s own aspirations. While listeners and writers in the United States, especially outside its own cultural centres, were eager to embrace—and be seen embracing—the newest, elite musical works of Europe, in Vienna the modernist experimentation of contemporary composers was perceived a threat to tradition. See Karen Painter, ‘Mahler’s Press from London to Los Angeles’, in Charles Youmans (ed.), Mahler in Context (New York, 2020), 162–70.

94

Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, 2008), passim.

95

Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–97: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford, 1996), 170 ff.

96

Yaroslav Hrytsak, ‘Lviv: A Multicultural History through the Centuries’, in John Czapicka (ed.), Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, xxiv (Cambridge, 2000), 50.

97

Robert Pyrah and Jan Fellerer, ‘Hybrid Cultural Identities in East-Central Europe’, Nations and Nationalism, 21/4 (2015), 700–20 at 708.

98

Österreichische Statistik, Die Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1900 in den im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreichen und Ländern (Vienna, 1902).

99

Pyrah and Fellerer, ‘Hybrid Cultural Identities in East-Central Europe’, 711 ff.

102

Philipp Ther, Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe (West Lafayette, IN, 2014).

103

Jolanta Pekacz, ‘Galician Society as a Cultural Public, 1771–1914ʹ, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 23/2 (1998), 23–44 at 43.

104

Hugo Lane, ‘The Ukrainian Theater and the Polish Opera: Cultural Hegemony and National Culture’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 24 (2000), 149–70.

105

Liubov Kyianovska, Halytska Muzychna Kultura, 106, 123.

106

Ibid. 107.

107

Ibid. 163.

108

Ibid. 160.

109

Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (New York and Oxford, 2016), 72.

110

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, ‘Pintschev and Mintschev’, in A Light for Others and Other Jewish Tales from Galicia, trans. Michael T. O’Pecko (Riverside, CA, 1994), 290.

111

Delphine Bechtel, ‘Le Théatre Yiddish Gimpel de Lemberg: Une Odyssée oubliée’, Yod: Revue des études hébraïques et juives, 16 (2011), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.4000/yod.659

112

Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA, 2010), 288–9.

113

Jolanta Pekacz, Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772–1914 (Rochester, NY, 2002), 9.

114

Ibid. 13–15.

115

Vera Faber, Die ukrainische Avantgarde zwischen Ost und West: Intertextualität, Intermedialität und Polemik im ukrainischen Futurismus und Konstruktivismus der späten 1920er-Jahre (Bielefeld, 2019), 117–18.

116

Maps reproduced from Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle, 1993), 21, 24.

117

Faber, Die ukrainische Avantgarde zwischen Ost und West, 78 (‘die mehrfache, mehrdimensionale periphere Situation’ … ‘die kulturelle Blüte’).

118

Stephen Tötösy de Zepetnek, ‘Configurations of Postcoloniality and National Identity: Inbetween Peripherality and Narratives of Change’, The Comparatist, 23 (1999), 92.

119

Hanslick, ‘Theater- und Kunstnachrichten’, 8 (‘nehmen uns ohne solches Entrée-Billet in ihren Himmel auf’).

Author notes

*

University of Vienna. Email: leah.batstone@univie.ac.at. I acknowledge funding support from the REWIRE programme at the University of Vienna under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 847693.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.