DQ for Watkins, 2-23
Please be prepared to respond in either seminar meeting or in "Comments" on the course blog. In all venues, you must be prepared to cite specific passages (by page, paragraph, line, and quotation) in support of your responses—and specific works.
The section explores reception and conception of certain Austro-German composers, principally Strauss and Mahler, in the final decade of the 19th-century, and uses observations about each of these composers’ stylistic development to both demonstrate the continuity of Romanticism-Modernism (Expressionism) and that of Beethoven-Wagner-Mahler (Schoenberg/Berg/1980s Neo-Romanticism).
(1) The conventional/received histories have suggested that the crucial threads of compositional experimentation and development are most legitimately traced through the radical methodological experiments of the Modernists (Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky before WWI) and subsequently the German serialists (Schoenberg & Webern) and their post-WWII disciples). Watkins, like Burkholder, wants to problematize the received histories, to suggest that composers like Wagner were more traditionalist—more members of than outcasts from the Austro-German tradition—than the histories have suggested, and that composers like Mahler were more modernist, and influential upon modernism, than the histories have claimed. Explain, cite pieces, describe both procedures and philosophies that rationalize Wagner as a lineage-member and Mahler as a modernist.
(2) Watkins begins his detailed discussion with Strauss, a composer who (with 100 years hindsight) is not conventionally regarded as wielding anywhere near the “lasting influence” of either Brahms (his senior) or Mahler (his contemporary). How does this “hindsight-view” match or contrast with the view of Strauss’s contemporaries? Have critical receptions of Strauss and Mahler shifted over that 100 years? If so, why? How can we know and demonstrate this? Finally, what factors might explain such shifts?
(3) It could be argued (and not only by Watkins) that Strauss was simultaneously a quintessential Romantic (in some works and periods) and a quintessential Modernist (in other works and/or periods)—and that there is not a strict chronological shift from one to the other. Why and on the basis of what works can Strauss be claimed as a Romantic? Why and on what works can he be claimed as a Modernist? Can we understand Strauss’s stylistic diversity, and can that in turn help us understand the questions, problems, or “new ways” that composers were grappling with in this period? [Observation: evidently Watkins thinks so: he begins his history with Strauss]
(4) What is the impact of “lyric”—and specifically “German lyric”—on Mahler and other late-19th-century composers? What are the roots of this literary influence? What Romantic motives does it reflect? What nationalist motives? Now turn these questions around: how does an emphasis on lyric or narrative song impact upon the musical parameters of harmony and form in this period? Cite specific pieces.
(5) Look closely at the texts of the various Wunderhorn songs Watkins transcribes, listen closely to the specifics of the settings, and be prepared to articulate the philosophical and aesthetic goals which underlie Mahler’s compositional choices.
(6) To go back to Question 1, and to our previous discussions: at the fin-de-siecle, who were the composers believed to be most effectively pointing the way to the future? What elements in those composers’ works shaped that reception? Contrarily, how does Watkins re-order and re-conceive the “Viennese succession”? What, in Watkins’s view, is the significance of the Beethovenian legacy (both stylistic and philosophical) at the fin-de-siecle? Does it impact on the Strauss/Mahler generation? Does it impact later Viennese composers? Did Mahler represent, for these later/younger composers, a model for coping with the issue of this succession?
2 comments:
From Lisa
Questions over the reading in Watkins pp.2-23, due January 23, 2007.
1) While both Wagner and Mahler saw themselves as continuations of the Beethoven tradition, and while Wagner in particular is often viewed as bringing tonality to the edge of extinction, I will propose a view here of Mahler as modernist versus Wagner as Romanticist: 1. A great deal of Mahler’s resonance for twentieth-century composers lies in their perception of and identification with his sense of societal crisis and insecurity answered by personal alienation, the sense of which was much shared by later composers not only before and after WWI, but even into the post-WWII, Cold War, and Vietnam War eras. (Theatrical writers known as “absurdists” ((1950s, e.g. Samuel Beckett)) had a similar sense.)) Watkins writes that “Mahler’s settings [of Das Knaben Wunderhorn texts] . . . appeal to a sense of alienation found in so many of its poems, which stressed the irony, uncertainty, and brevity of life.” (p. 5, lines 6-8). This sense of alienation is found in his soldier songs “The Sentinel’s Serenade” and “Reveille,” not just in the choice of texts, but in their settings, as well, especially in the “contrasting mood of march and lyric song” in “The Sentinel’s Serenade” (p. 5, 2nd full paragraph, lines 9-10). His musical expression of this sense by means of wry, witty, and sardonic juxtaposition of conflicted symbols, meanings, and implications, recognizable and understandable in greater depth perhaps by the few, but certainly recognizable enough to be uncomfortable for the many, as in the juxtaposition of a funeral march created from “Frere Jacques” with a dance redolent in its rhythm, modality, and instrumentation of Jewish music in his Symphony No.1, movement 3, might have appealed to later sensibilities as seen in Satie (e.g. Parade, 1917); Honegger’s “Funeral March” from the collectively-written Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel (c. 1920), the bass of which is the “Waltz” from Faust; Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, which depicts prostitutes in a cubist/primitivism-inspired parody of traditional nude painting; and Dadaist intentions. Wagner, on the other hand, seemed to perpetuate a more Romantic seriousness, lacking the irony and humor of Mahler, with ultimate redemption through love (The Flying Dutchman). (Although Mahler does give us "Resurrection" in his Symphony No. 2.) 2. Mahler could also be seen as modernist in his allusions to pre-existent materials from “within the tradition,” according to Burkholder’s definition of musical “historicism” as modern. The example of the funeral march given under (1) above in Symphony No. 1 are appropriate here. Watkins writes of this in terms of Mahler’s “Funeral Rite” (Totenfeier, Symphony No. 2, movement 1) with its “lineage that includes the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica” and Siegfried’s “Funeral March” in Die Gotterdammerung.” (p. 9, lines 12-13 from the bottom of the page). Watkins gives other examples, as well, including references to Wagner’s Die Walkure in Symphony 1, movement 1 and Schumann’s Dichterliebe in the second symphony, movement 3 (p. 10, lines 6-7 and 8-11). Wagner, on the other hand, did not utilize such musical appropriations and allusions, except for those to his own music, as far as I know. 3. Mahler’s chamber-like use of instruments (albeit often within a large orchestra), such as the oboe in the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde, foreshadows later interest in pieces such as Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie (1906) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912). Wagner, on the other hand, seemed to have preferred a more generally “lush” and blended sound. 4. Watkins writes that, while Mahler “for the most part eschews the brand of musical exoticism practices by French composers at the turn of the century” (p. 19, 1st full paragraph, lines 7-8), there is a “directly perceivable Oriental symbolism” that is “less superficial and more fundamental” in his use of pentatonicism in the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde (p. 19, lines 5-7 from bottom of the page). Efforts to appropriate music and philosophies/ sensibilities outside of one’s tradition (particularly Eastern music and philosophies/sensibilities by Western musicians) in a non-superficial or essential manner have intrigued Western composers throughout much of the twentieth century, for example, in the works of the Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw, who attributes the possibility of successful (i.e., essential and non-superficial) assimilation to the existence of the collective unconscious. Wagner, on the other hand, tended to look toward narrative examples from the earlier days (mythology) of his own culture and, as far as I know, did not allude to or appropriate non-Western cultures or music.
2) Watkins says (bottom of p. 2) that the "revival of the music of Gustav Mahler in the post-World War II period has somewhat obscured the fact that at the turn of the century Richard Strauss was a composer whose presige could not seriously have been challenged by any living composer other than Claude Debussy." Dr. Smith has said that Mahler, despite his success as a conductor, had a difficult time getting his own orchestra to perform his works, which were likewise unpopular with Viennese audiences. Watkin's comment would indicate that Strauss was highly respected as a composer in his own day, while Mahler has become much more popular since WWII. Thus there does seem to have been a shift in critical reception of these two composers over the past 100 years. I think this shift has to do with two issues. First, what seemed daring in Mahler's music to his audience seems much more tame to us, and in fact we can now see the influence Mahler's music had on the Second Viennese School and so we appreciate Mahler for his historical significance in a way that his contemporaries could not have anticipated. Second, the anti-semitism which Mahler faced in his own time no longer has any bearing on how his music is judged. Meanwhile, though Watkins makes an excellent case for the historical significance of Strauss's music as a precursor both to Schoenberg and to neo-classicism, in my observation this has not been as widely recognized by contemporary scholarship as the significance of Mahler has been.
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