Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies by Julian Johnson

English | Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009 | 376 Pages | PDF | 6 MB
This book explores the idea of expression and meaning in Mahler's music by examining its plural voices—their tone, manner, and historical resonance. Ranging across all the symphonies and songs, it considers how these works foreground the idea of artifice and irony while at the same time presenting themselves as acts of authentic expression and disclosure.

While this music is shaped by strategies of calling forth its own mysterious voice—as if from nature or the Unconscious—at other times it reveals itself as something constructed, often self‐consciously assembled from familiar and well‐worn materials.

It plays constantly with different musical genres and styles, moving between them in a way that often bewildered audiences. The result is that Mahler's symphonies exacerbate to breaking point their own inherited ideals of symphonic unity, narrative struggle, and transcendent affirmation.

Their quality of radical self‐critique creates a link between the late‐18th‐century idea of romantic irony and the late‐20th‐century idea of deconstruction. But Mahler's music is not easily subsumed by either idea. While it acknowledges the conventionality of all its voices, at the same time, through the intensity of its tone, it speaks “as if” what it said were true. The urgency of this act, bound up with the Viennese modernism that Mahler prefigured, remains powerfully resonant for our own age.