Missing Love-scenes, Evasion, and the Inexpressible in Early Mahler

Abstract

Given the openness to ideas about sexuality, not least in music, in post-Wagnerian turn-of-the-century Vienna, Mahler’s outwardly rather guarded and seemingly conservative approach to sexual experience is examined in the light of more recent biographical research (as in the German edition of Mahler’s letters to Anna von Mildenburg). Discussion focuses upon a reconsidered approach to the evidence of his first two extended musical works: Das klagende Lied (a copy of whose score he gifted to von Mildenburg at the end of their relationship and to Alma Schindler at the beginning of theirs) and the First Symphony. Aspects of the critical reception of both works—presented in Vienna for the first time by Mahler, in reverse order, in 1900 and 1901—revealed the disapproval of more conservative commentators and their implicitly anti-Semitic interpretation of the works’ questionable audience appeal in terms of a kind of mass-culture critique. The link between the evasion of or indulgence in musical representations of sexuality and changing attitudes toward musical taste and reception might heighten our awareness of how the complex modernity of those works was tending in a quite different direction to that of the nascent modernism of Mahler’s younger contemporaries.