“I have tried to capture you …”: Rethinking the “Alma” Theme from Mahler's Sixth Symphony

Abstract

Abstract Since the 1940s, Mahler's Sixth Symphony has been transmitted with an informal “domestic” program centered on several claims first made in Alma Mahler's Erinnerungen. In the work, she writes, Gustav meant to depict their children (in the Scherzo), himself (in the Finale), and finally her, in the first movement's swooning secondary theme. Though critics have almost universally accepted Alma's anecdote, few have seriously asked the important question of what such a portrait would be doing in Mahler's most expressly tragic symphony. In this study I offer a hermeneutic perspective on the Sixth that concedes the possible truth of Alma's anecdote but which challenges the conventional assumption that such a spousal tribute should best be understood as a one-sided testament to Mahler's newfound nuptial bliss. After examining the theme's reception history and Mahler's domestic circumstances during the symphony's composition, I explore the ways in which the first movement's sonata narrative—a protracted conflict between (and reconciliation of) its two gendered subjects—suggestively mirrors the prevailing psychodynamics of Mahler's strained marriage. At the end of the essay I propose how this revised hearing of the opening movement might prompt a reimagining of the entire Sixth as a projected or imagined “domestic tragedy,” with special focus on the intertextual links between the work's outer movements and also between the cataclysmic finale and the penitentially anguished portions of the Third Symphony's “Armer Kinder Betterlied.”