Conference Agenda

“I hear a sob in this music… a strangled sigh that simply sounds Jewish. Not Judaistic, not Hebrew, not Israeli, but Jewish in the most universal sense.” This was Leonard Bernstein’s assessment, in the television essay The Little Drummer Boy (1984), of the music of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Given his strong self-identification with Mahler, Bernstein’s commentary invites an exploration of Bernstein’s own musical Jewishness. Even after the newly intensified interest in Bernstein since his 2018 centenary, Bernstein’s Jewish identity and his intense connection with Mahler remain poorly understood.

In this presentation, I argue that Bernstein’s quite public sense of Jewish identity can be understood with exceptional clarity, and across his entire career, through his advocacy of Mahler. Through published materials and written drafts, I trace the details of Bernstein’s lifelong relationship with Mahler as a window into Bernstein’s own evolving Jewish musical identity. From early on, Bernstein was primed to think about Mahler in terms of Jewishness, as a cluster of Jewish musicians — including Bruno Walter, Artur Rodzinski, Aaron Copland, and Serge Koussevitzky — shaped Bernstein’s introduction to Mahler in the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1940s, Bernstein referred to what he called Yiddish and Jewish elements of Mahler’s music, but he only listed them among other qualities. In the 1960s, Bernstein went a step further, positing Mahler as torn between Jewish and Christian identities and linking modernism to what he called Jewish characteristics. It was only in The Little Drummer Boy, however, that Bernstein’s thesis of Mahler’s music as essentially Jewish emerged fully.

In previous discussions of the Jewish identities of Bernstein, Mahler, and other figures, significant emphasis has been placed on locating and defining Jewish materials within compositions themselves. By demonstrating the close and dynamic connection between Bernstein’s Jewishness and his Mahler advocacy, this paper demonstrates that reception can play just as important a role as musical texts in shaping discussion of identity.

This paper surveys the varieties of modernism found in eighteen newspaper reviews of Richard Strauss's Feuersnot (prem. 1901, Dresden) as performed under Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Court Opera on 29 January 1902. Feuersnot, nowadays a forgotten curiosity but during Vienna's 1901-2 season a highly anticipated premiere, was the only complete Strauss opera that Mahler ever conducted. Here it triggered a flurry of revealing commentary on modernist iconoclasm, from leading figures such as Eduard Hanslick, Robert Hirschfeld, Max Kalbeck, Richard Robert, Josef Scheu, and a host of lesser-known critics.

Three distinct forms of "musical Secession" (their term) emerge in the reception. The first is registered by a scandalized response to the opera's graphic sexual content: the aural representation of a magical sex act necessary to restore fire to medieval Munich. Charges of "obscenity" permeate the reviews, with feuilletons by sophisticated critics even suggesting that cultural/artistic wellbeing may require intervention by the authorities. Another concern involves a perceived attack on Wagner, whose spiritual-artistic integrity is defended against the heir-apparent Strauss by critics from across the spectrum, including every prominent anti-Wagnerian. ("This first stab at a musical Secession could make one into a Wagnerian," wrote Kalbeck in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.) Finally, writers condemn the work for its irony, which drags the Court Opera down to the level of operetta and undermines dramatic seriousness in a way that threatens the very art of music itself. (Hirschfeld in the Wiener Zeitung: "Strauss's music is not music.")

For all these complaints, Mahler escaped almost unscathed, with his conducting universally praised but his judgment as Director questioned for enabling a grotesque avant-garde. The latter would soon be displaced by something even more revolutionary – Salome (1905), which sparked a controversy that earned Strauss a villa in the Alps even as it hastened Mahler's downfall in Vienna. The Feuersnot affair thus forecast the two figures' strengths and weaknesses in wielding notoriety to build their brands.

The centenary year of Luciano Berio (1925–2003) provides a unique opportunity to take stock of the composer’s place in the history of twentieth-century music, including how our understanding of his contribution to this history has been shaped by shifting attitudes toward the musical legacy of the postwar avant-garde. While scholarship on Berio has long reflected a decidedly formalist orientation, more recent studies have attempted to situate the composer’s music in the larger historical and political contexts of his time, including by addressing the fraught question of the postwar composer’s relationship to the musical past. In this paper I offer one such perspective by considering what remains the least explored aspect of Berio’s creative practice: namely, his debt to Romantic aesthetics. To this end, I revisit Berio’s “restoration” of Franz Schubert’s surviving draft materials for a presumed Tenth Symphony in Rendering (1988–90) with the aim of showing how the work’s newly-composed interpolations are in dialogue with a range of nineteenth-century nature topoi. Whereas Berio’s interpolations have often been heard as “neutral” and “inexpressive” voids (Metzer, 2009; Brodsky, 2017), they can also be heard as vibrant, if at times troubled, “dream spaces” that share important similarities with the celebrated evocations of nature in the music of the composer’s nineteenth-century forbears. More specifically, I trace Berio’s debt to Mahler’s radical reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century nature tableau in his Sixth and Seventh symphonies where the passages in question function less as illustrative episodes than as utopian spaces whose otherness troubles the established tradition of musical illustration on which they so openly draw. Given the striking similarities between the interpolated passages in Rendering and the nature tableaux of Mahler’s middle-period symphonies, it becomes possible to identify important connections between the critical dimension of Berio’s unique brand of postwar modernism and Mahler’s own compositional practice. At the core of this homage to Mahler’s nature evocations, then, is the idea of commentary itself, a strategy characteristic of Berio’s music that I suggest is borrowed directly from a composer who for Berio represented the “starting point of modern music.”