Understanding Mahler's Central European Musical Identity: Literary Analogues in the Works of Joseph Roth and Gregor von Rezzori

Barham, Jeremy (2024) Understanding Mahler's Central European Musical Identity: Literary Analogues in the Works of Joseph Roth and Gregor von Rezzori. STUDIA MUSICOLOGICA, 65 (1-2). pp. 21-32. ISSN 1788-6244

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Abstract

The difficult task of determining Mahler's socio-political and ethnic-national identity within a larger Central European context is made no easier by recourse to biographical information. For every indication there is a counter-indication, for every claim a counterclaim. Similarly, his music shifts between or juxtaposes a relatively non-specific folk tone and a frequently subverted though nevertheless readily discernible mode of core Western European symphonism. These deeply meaningful creative processes offer both hyper- and hypo-eloquent testimonies to the complex culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial Habsburg politics. Overflowing with expressive suggestions, allusions, and oblique metaphors, Mahler's music nevertheless remains pre-linguistic, proto-conceptual, its text settings favoring parable and metaphysical poetic licence. Using the works of two great literary chroniclers of fin-de-siècle to WWI Central European life and manners – Joseph Roth (1894–1939; The Emperor's Tomb, Hotel Savoy) and Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998; Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; An Ermine in Czernopol) – I attempt in this study to recover through works of narrative verbal fiction a measure of what Mahler's music says, without being fully able to communicate, about his Central European world and identity.

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