This article is an expansive development of a thesis presented in my book The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven and London, 1996), chapter 7, ‘Pan-German Nationalism’. I wish to express grateful thanks to the Mahler scholar Edward R. Reilly for critical advice in the formulation of this article.Google Scholar

1 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron (New York, 1977), 495. For the Kaiser's opposition to Lueger, see note 25 below. K. M. Knittel, ‘“Ein hypermoderner Dirigent”: Mahler and Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna’, 19th Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 257–76. Sandra McColl, in her otherwise serviceable study Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897 (Oxford, 1996), is another specialist who, in dealing with ‘Mahler and the Jewish Question’ (pp. 100–7), concludes that it is ‘necessary to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of music critics’ (p. 106) reviewed without politics. Yet her discussion concentrates on Mahler's anti-Semitic critics; thus it also lacks the necessary balance.Google Scholar

2 Knittel, in Part I of her article (see note 1 above), advances Jewish stereotypes and, in Part II, shows that they were applied to Mahler. Her evidence for the puzzling anti-Semitic stereotype, the femininity of the male Jewish body, is drawn from Otto Weininger and Walter Rathenau (see below) who call the male Jewish body ‘soft’ and ‘unsoldierly’. She concludes that ‘the linking of [male] Jews to women is a common theme throughout the period’ (p. 261, note 14). Yet Karen Painter, in another article in the same issue of 19th Century Music, also discusses ‘feminine artifice’ in Mahler but, as we shall discover (see note 49 below), with entirely different consequences. Our puzzle is solved finally by Ritchie Robertson's splendid study, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford, 1999). He explains (pp. 296ff.) that the stereotype in question did not involve German anti-Semitism, but Jewish ‘Self-hatred and Masculinity. … It was a 19th century commonplace that “the Jew” (always imagined as male) was in some way less masculine than the Gentile male.’ Otto Weininger and Walther Rathenau were Jews who expressed anti-Semitism, but dissimilarly, for they had radically different objectives. Weininger's was to arouse anti-Semitism through his frenzied monograph Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna, 1903); shortly after its publication he committed suicide. Rathenau's objective, in ‘Höre Israel!’, Die Zukunft, 18 (1897), 454–62, was to impel the Jews to adopt ‘Teutonic virtues’ of masculinity, honesty and nobility in order to assimilate themselves visually within the German population. After World War I, Rathenau, then a statesman and eminent industrialist, sought democratic and international resolutions for crises in Germany. He was assassinated in 1922 by an extreme nationalist because he was a Jewish internationalist. Peter Berglar, Walther Rathenau: Seine Zeit, sein Werk, seine Persönlichkeit (Bremen, 1970); Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 1880–1918 (New York, 1973), passim.Google Scholar

3 Arthur Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie (Munich, 1968), 78; trans. Catherine Hutter as My Youth in Vienna (New York, 1970), 63. Schnitzler (My Youth in Vienna, 7) mentions that his teacher, ‘a moderately gifted man, Wagnerian, very German-national, pronounced all Jewish names with derision but not unfair in his behavior towards Jewish pupils. Marries a Jewess’. It was a delegation from the Philharmonic that, ‘to Mahler's amazement’, invited him to become their director. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge, 1980), 118. The personnel of the Vienna Philharmonic ‘was (and remains) a self-governing body that elects its own conductors’ (ibid., 213).Google Scholar

4 Steven Beller presents his contrary view in Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938 (Cambridge, 1989), 190–1, 75. Knittel (note 3) cites Beller's book, pp. 188–206. Knittel's major source on anti-Semitism is Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore, 1986), who provides the surprising information that Wagner ‘was the son of his mother's Jewish lover’ (p. 210). But Ludwig Geyer, the ‘Jewish’ lover, long shown to be of Protestant heritage, married Wagner's mother after her husband's death. See note 9 below for other details by Gilman that are dubious.Google Scholar

5 Sheehan, James J., German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978), 156. Other historians include Stern, Gold and Iron; Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism; Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1975); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford, 1989); and Ruth Gay who, in The Jews in Germany (New Haven, 1992), 215, identifies the new anti-Semitism as ‘Modern Anti-Semitism’.Google Scholar

6 Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 3, specifies these historians: Lucy Dawidowicz, Paul Lawrence Rose and Daniel J. Goldhagen. Goldhagen, in Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York, 1996), 488, note 17, admits: ‘My understanding of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism emphasizes the underlying continuity of German anti-Semitism and asserts its ubiquity.‘.Google Scholar

7 See Stern, Gold and Iron, 498–9, 494 and 477 on Bleichröder's rise to ‘eminence’ during these ‘halcyon days’. Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven, 1957), 241. And see Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 68, on the great banks of Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, founded in the 1850s by Jewish entrepreneurs and intimately connected with the economic explosion of the 1870s.Google Scholar

8 Stern, Gold and Iron, 498, 495. George E. Berkley, ‘A New Kind of Anti-Judaism’, Vienna and its Jews (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 63–7. Mahler's conversion took place on 23 February 1897 – while he was still in Hamburg – to assure his imminent appointment (on 8 October) as director of the Vienna Court Opera.Google Scholar

9 Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 211, charges that Marr was ‘the son of a baptized Jew’. His main evidence, decades old, is Simon Dubonow, Die neueste Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (Berlin, 1920), 23. Gilman also cites Pulzer on this charge, though Pulzer (The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 47) is unsure of its validity, as are others. Further, Gilman's date (1879) for Marr's radical tract is actually that of its sixth, not the stormy first, edition. Reinharz, in Fatherland or Promised Land, 13, ‘credits Wilhelm Marr for coining the term anti-Semitism’; he recommends Alex Bein's study, ‘Der moderne Antisemitismus and seine Deutung für die Judenfrage’, Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte (October 1958), 340ff., for details on the origin of this term. A more recent study is Thomas Nipperdey and Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation and Antisemitismus: Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen, 1975).Google Scholar

10 Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe (2nd edn, London, 1985), 99. Pascal's informative From Naturalism to Expressionism provides a long list of ‘forgotten’ authors, some slightly better known: Felix Dahn, Karl May and Arno Holz.Google Scholar

11 Even ‘men of independent and humane minds’ such as Georg Brandes and Christian Morgenstern, and the liberal Freie Bühne and Der Kunstwart, were favourably disposed towards Langbehn. Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 40.Google Scholar

12 Friedrich Jahn (Deutsches Volksthum, Lübeck, 1810) introduced the term Volksthum as a German equivalent of ‘nationality’: see Trübners Deutsches Wörterbuch (Berlin, 1939–57) and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1965–90). Völkisch has become a term used even in English by specialists in several disciplines for the nationalist ideology under discussion; see, for example, William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974). Herder coined the terms völkstümlich and Völkstümlichkeit to indicate folkish popularity. After Herder, Völkstümlichkeit evidently came to mean the commonality of the people, their inherent attribute.Google Scholar

13 See Stern, Fritz, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1961), 45, who also provides a comprehensive bibliography on Lagarde (pp. 337–40). Lagarde, a professor of classical studies at Göttingen University, wrote studies on Greek, Latin and oriental (e.g. Syrian and Arabic) literature. His Deutsche Schriften (Göttingen, 1886) is a collection of political articles in which he isolated political problems perceptively, though his solutions were often ‘intuitive, unsystematic and intensely personal’ (Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 20).Google Scholar

14 On Heitmatkunst, see Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 40.Google Scholar

15 Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. xxvi. Stern's Gold and Iron, 181ff., speaks of the ‘speculative fever [that] gripped Germans of all classes’. The stock-market crash of 1873 and the great depression that followed proved portentous factors that provoked attempts to reverse liberal reforms. ‘Many a hopeful investor fell victim to fraudulent stock manipulation’, Dorpalen emphasizes in Heinrich von Treitschke, 242. ‘For unscrupulous agitators it was easy enough, then, to associate the Jews with the economic hardships of the petty bourgeoisie, and latent feelings of anti-Semitism thus burst into full flame.‘Google Scholar

16 According to Kemp, Germany's rapid industrialization wrought enormous social and economic upheavals: ‘Industrialization was destroying something precious in the old Germany’ (Industrialization, 105 and passim). The conservative revolution is discussed by Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair (p. xxiii) and by John Weiss in Conservatism in Europe 1770–1945 (New York, 1977). Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke, 180. Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1, 186.Google Scholar

17 Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 182, 183, 186. He adds (pp. 196ff.): ‘Jews founded the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (the CV, Central Society of German Citizens of the Jewish faith)’ to ‘resist anti-Semitic libels by legal challenges. … The CV succeeded in obtaining prosecutions for anti-Semitic propaganda: between 1893 and 1915 at least 537 persons of anti-Semitic affiliation stood trial, earning prison sentences that totalled 135 years; the CV continued this policy under the Weimar Republic, and succeeded in having Nazi agitators Theodor Frisch and Julius Streicher sent to prison.’ James J. Sheehan, ‘A People Apart?’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 December 1999.Google Scholar

18 McGrath, Dionysian Art, 177, 213. Austria's landed aristocracy of at least two dozen families ‘controlled over 250,000 acres apiece. … Nearly 60 per cent of the active labor force worked the land’. The inner circle of the highest aristocracy remained ‘closed to new ideas and [new] blood right down to the fall of the Habsburgs’ (Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York, 1980, 27, 109). Kemp (Industrialization, 79) records that in Germany ‘the lords were, on the whole, not great proprietors on the scale of those of the Habsburg Empire’. Industrialization developed much later in Austria than in Germany. Advancement into the aristocracy through ennoblement was greatly restricted (see James J. Sheehan, Imperial Germany, New York, 1976, 25 and passim).Google Scholar

19 McGrath, Dionysian Art, 89ff., 166, 237, 59ff. In Alte unnennbarer Tage! (Vienna, 1936), Friedrich Eckstein includes an eyewitness account of the student life of Wolf, Mahler and Viktor Adler. Eduard Castle, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in Österreich-Ungarn im Zeitalter Franz Josephs, ii: 1890–1918 (Vienna, n.d.), 1559ff., is a fine source on Mahler and other members of this student group. Schönerer was anti-Habsburg, anti-Catholic and anti-Austrian. Teutonic paganism attracted this fanatic. He even tried to resurrect old Germanic names for the months of the year; on Schönerer, see Andrew G. Whiteside, Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley, 1975), and Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1999), 33–4. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 309. Though less well-known than Schorske's book, Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime also presents important observations on Germany and Austria in the fin-de-siècle period. Both books appeared in the same year.Google Scholar

20 See Wistrich, The Jews in the Age of Franz Joseph, 226ff., on the sin of ‘Americanization’, and Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 164ff., for further information on the ‘United Christians’. Incidentally, earlier acts of tolerance for Jews were usually soon reversed: an act in Austria (1781), for example, was almost completely rescinded in 1815, as was one in Prussia (1812) in 1822. However, the full legal emancipation laws mentioned – Austria (1867), Baden (1862), Württemberg (1864) and Prussia (1869) – remained in effect, despite action against them, until Hitler rescinded them.Google Scholar

21 Hermann Sagl, ‘Wiener Tageszeitungen 1890–1914’, Zeitungen im Wiener Fin de siècle: Eine Tagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Wien um 1900’ der Österreichischen Forschungsgemeinschaft, ed. Sigurd Paul Scheichl and Wolfgang Duchkowitsch (Munich, 1997), 268–75. Berkley, Vienna and its Jews, 73ff. The sketch mentioned is printed on the second page of a series of unnumbered pages that begin after p. 126. Schnitzler (My Youth in Vienna, 128) discusses his experiences with the Students’ Associations: ‘Anti-Semitic street fights’ and ‘provocations between individuals in lecture halls’ in the 1880s ‘were daily occurrences’; ‘duelling became frequent, … Jewish students [were] expert and dangerous fencers’. The Waidhofen manifesto was the consequence: the Jew, ‘ethically subhuman’, ‘cannot therefore demand satisfaction for any suffered insult’ through duelling, Schnitzler chaffed. His complete diary is now available: Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch 1931, Gesamtverzeichnisse 1879–1931, ed. Peter Michael Braunwarth (Vienna, 2000).Google Scholar

22 Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf (New York, 1968), 217–18, discusses pan-Germanic demonstrations in the Vienna Wagner Verein.Google Scholar

23 On Wolf, see Walker, Hugo Wolf, 217; Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 41, considers Bartels, who labelled the Mann brothers as Jews, ‘the most unbridled and unscrupulous anti-Semite’.Google Scholar

24 Walker, Hugo Wolf, 55 (note) and 53ff. The Goethe text reads: ‘aber ach! da kommen Juden mit dem Schein vertagter Schuld’. Goldschmidt's secular oratorio Die sieben Todsünden was successfully performed in Berlin, Vienna and Hanover, and was published in 1880. Goldschmidt had engaged Wolf, then (1877) in financial need, to correct the score for its performance in Vienna.Google Scholar

25 The Kaiser, as guarantor of equal rights for all his citizens, opposed Lueger's anti-Semitic platform and ordered a new election. Four elections were held over two years, each with increased pluralities for Lueger. The Kaiser, in the end, was forced to yield ‘his magisterial authority in this tug-of-war’ more than ‘anyone had originally anticipated’, as Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien (Munich, 1996), 405–6, astutely observed, and ‘suffered serious damage’. As mayor, Lueger soon acted directly against Mahler. He ‘did not want the Philharmonic's yearly benefit concert [15 January 1899] for the poor of Vienna’, Bauer-Lechner notes (Recollections, 122), ‘to be conducted by the “Jew” Mahler’. And he objected to Mahler conducting a concert (1 February 1899) honouring Empress Elizabeth, assassinated in 1898. However, Lueger had no authority over Mahler at the Court Opera.Google Scholar

26 Knittel, ‘“Ein hypermoderner Dirigent”‘, 267.Google Scholar

27 Julie Dorn Morrison, ‘Gustav Mahler at the Wiener Hofoper: A Study of Critical Reception in the Viennese Press (1897–1907)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1996), 122, an accurate and balanced contribution on Mahler with important detail. An earlier fine study is Franz Willnauer, Gustav Mahler und die Wiener Oper (Vienna, 1993). Theodor Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst und Literatur: Hofoperntheater’, Deutsche Zeitung (12 May 1897), 7. The writer of the letter to Mahler, signed ‘An Old Musician’, had often heard Wagner himself conduct; see Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 90–1. Max Graf, Legend of a Musical City (New York, 1945), 210. Strauss called Mahler ‘one of the few [musicians] … who understands tempo modification’; see Edward F. Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven and London, 1996), 180ff.Google Scholar

28 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (New York, 1946), iv, 487 and passim. Wagner's negative comments about Richter were made at Bayreuth, at rehearsals (1875) and performances (1876). Graf, Legend of a Musical City, 209. For Mahler's letter to Mildenburg (17 May 1897), see Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner (New York, 1979), 226.Google Scholar

29 Wilhelm Jahn directed the Court Opera from 1 January 1881 to 15 October 1897. Richter became a chief Kapellmeister in Jahn's regime. Erwin Stein, who witnessed Mahler conduct, reports in ‘Mahler and the Vienna Opera’, Opera, 4 (1953), 4–13 (p. 4), that ‘there was more and much harder rehearsing [under Mahler] than anybody had dreamed of or had thought necessary’. Bauer-Lechner outlines Mahler's criticism of the Court Orchestra in ‘Spieljahr 1897/1898‘, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie, ed. Herbert Killian with notes by Knud Martner (Hamburg, 1984), 97–100 (p. 97).Google Scholar

30 Stein indicates in ‘Mahler and the Vienna Opera’, 4, that Mahler ‘was a tyrant. … if you were a second late you were not admitted until the act was over’. Theodor Helm cites in ‘Fünfzig Jahre Wiener Musikleben (1866–1916)’, Der Merker (1915–20), ‘1878–1879’ (July 1916), 445–6, the fascination of late romantics with vivid stage effects, including the ‘pistol shots’ mentioned. Helm provides another surprising example (ibid., ‘1870–1871’ (June 1915), 433) this time from Munich: ‘In order to render vividly the magic fire music [in Die Walküre] they conceived the idea of filling pails … with inflammable liquid and lighting them. The flames leaped towards the ceiling, hissing and crackling so loud, that the magic fire music could not be heard.’ See Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ‘Spieljahr 1898/1899: Der Ring des Nibelungen (Aufführung im September 1898)’, Gustav Mahler, ed. Killian, 121–3 (p. 123), for the discussion of the final scene of Götterdämmerung.Google Scholar

31 Franz Jauner, director of the Court Opera (1 May 1875 to June 1880), had offered the Ring operas separately, in the 1877–8 season. The première of the entire Ring occurred only a year earlier (1876) in Bayreuth. Helm, ‘Fünfzig Jahre Wiener Musikleben’, ‘1878–1879’, 446. There were other cuts in Götterdämmerung. Mahler declared the extensive one in the Prologue, between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, ‘scandalous'; it made Brünnhilde ‘appear to be a harlot who resisted Siegfried's wooing for a moment at most before flinging her arms about his neck’. Wagner had, to the contrary, carefully developed, in this scene, the emotional transition between the two characters. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 101.Google Scholar

32 From Morrison, ‘Gustav Mahler at the Wiener Hofoper’, 272–307, who quotes in detail reviews by Viennese critics of Mahler's uncut Ring cycle performance of 1898. Further, she disagrees that contemporary evaluation of Mahler, as director, was as a rule negative. ‘Critics in the mainstream press’, she states, ‘praised his performances throughout his career’ (ibid., p. iv and passim).Google Scholar

33 Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 38–42. Among Viennese critics were some of the most distinguished in musical journalism: Eduard Hanslick, Julius Korngold and Max Graf, to mention just three. On Mahler in the coffee houses, see Graf, Max, Die Wiener Oper (Vienna, 1955), 77–80.Google Scholar

34 Knittel, ‘“Ein hypermoderner Dirigent”’, 269–70. In Legend of a Musical City, Graf depicts Strauss's ‘nervousness’ on the podium and his ‘stabbing arm movements which resembled the sallies of a fencer’ (p. 201), Wolf's stinging glance (p. 137) and his nervous tempo (p. 135). For Graf, Mahler was the essence of ‘a modern musician with the temperament of his period’ (p. 206). He called Josef Kainz ‘the greatest of the new “nerve” actors’ (p. 194). Drama critic and playwright Hermann Bahr concurs in Buch der Jugend (Vienna, 1908), 82–3: Kainz's speech is an ‘intense whirlwind’, a style ‘that young actors now echo’.Google Scholar

35 Knittel, ‘“Ein hypermoderner Dirigent”’, 270. Her point – that ‘despite Mahler's obvious talent, his nervousness hindered him from being an effective conductor’ – runs contrary to Graf's evaluation of Mahler in Die Wiener Oper, 79. And in Legend of a Musical City, 205, he stressed: ‘in the first half of Mahler's directorship, what was accomplished corresponded exactly with the ideal. … Each opera was a dramatic work of art.’ In these books, written in his maturity, Graf is an ardent liberal, a modernist, a friend of Schoenberg and of his followers. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, as the Nazis marched into and ‘destroyed’ Vienna (Legend of a Musical City, 3–9).Google Scholar

36 Arthur Laser, Der moderne Dirigent (Leipzig, 1904), 7. Hans Emge discusses Wüllner and Zur Mühlen in his ‘Liebe zum Bel canto’, unpublished manuscript, p. 4; see Kravitt, The Lied, 193.Google Scholar

37 Ferdinand Pfohl, Arthur Nikisch (Hamburg, 1925), 70. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 120–1.Google Scholar

38 The article in question, on the front page of the Deutsche Zeitung, 4 November 1898, is entitled ‘Die Judenherrschaft in der Wiener Hofoper’ (‘Jewish Rule over the Vienna Court Opera‘) and signed E. Th. The anonymous writer, referring to Jericho, specified trombones rather than trumpets, apparently for their thunderous impact.Google Scholar

39 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, ii: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford, 1995), 121ff., provides an informative summary of critics' and public response to the concert on 6 November 1898.Google Scholar

40 Theodor Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst and Literatur’, Deutsche Zeitung, 29 January 1900, 3.Google Scholar

41 For Hans Liebstöckl's review in Reichswehr, 22 February 1903, see Mahler: A Documentary Study, compiled and edited by Kurt Blaukopf with Zoltan Roman, trans. Paul Baker, Susanne Flatauer, P. R. J. Ford, Daisy Loman and Geoffrey Watkins (New York, 1976), 234. The Secessionists, young Viennese artists who protested against tradition, included the ‘wild’ radical Gustav Klimt, their first chairman, in 1897 and Roller, chairman elect, in 1902. Roller remained Mahler's stage director and continued his work at the Court Opera until 1909. His productions with Mahler have long been internationally admired.Google Scholar

42 Hermann Bahr, ‘Fidelio, Dezember 1904’, Buch der Jugend, 19–27 (pp. 21, 26). Bahr (p. 20) is piqued by Viennese journals that simply mock Mahler–Roller innovations. ‘For many years, certain artists searched for a scenic décor that is in accord with the essence of the drama’ (p. 21). Bahr mentions Appia, Gordon Craig and ‘our Olbrich and our Roller’.Google Scholar

43 Graf, Legend of a Musical City, 193, 195, 135. Klimt, Ibsen, Strindberg, Gerhardt Hauptman, Zola and Debussy are among the new masters that Graf charged with terrifying Vienna.Google Scholar

44 Eduard Hanslick, Aus neuer und neuester Zeit (3rd edn, Berlin, 1900), 76–7.Google Scholar

45 Theodor Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst und Literatur’, Deutsche Zeitung, 15 January 1900, 3.Google Scholar

46 Deutsche Zeitung, 18 March 1900, front page, anonymous letter signed ‘A Friend of Music’, in which Mahler is criticized also for refusing performers ‘leave of absence for personal reasons’ while taking them himself.Google Scholar

47 For Strauss's letter to Mahler, 22 April 1900, see Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888–1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1984), 47.Google Scholar

48 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ‘Aufführung von fünf Mahler-Lieder’, Gustav Mahler, ed. Killian, 152.Google Scholar

49 See Mahler: A Documentary Study, ed. Blaukopf, 206, on Brahms. Karen Painter, in ‘The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the Fin de siècle’, 19th Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 236–56 (pp. 241ff.), discusses Hirschfeld's review, which appeared in the Wiener Abendpost, 5 November 1909. Knittel, ‘“Ein hypermoderner Dirigent”’, 261.Google Scholar

50 Walter Niemann, Die Musik der Gegenwart (5th–8th edn, Berlin, 1913), 147.Google Scholar

51 Helm, ‘Theater, Kunst and Literatur’, Deutsche Zeitung, 29 January 1900. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 10 April 1899. Responses to this symphony in Berlin at its première on 13 December 1895, in Liège on 6 March 1898 and in Munich on 15 October 1900 were all of equal enthusiasm, and by audiences of dissimilar nationality.Google Scholar

52 Rudolf Louis, Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (2nd edn, Munich, 1909), 182.Google Scholar

53 Franz Willnauer, ‘Kampf mit der Zensur’, Gustav Mahler und die Wiener Oper (Vienna, 1979), 189–209. ‘I pledge’, Mahler wrote (p. 196) to Strauss in 1905, ‘that I will leave no means unexplored [to perform] this unique and thoroughly original masterpiece.’ See ibid., p. 205 for Mahler's letter about his planned resignation. And for this pertinent comment of Strauss: ‘Graz is very good soil … in contrast to the very backward Vienna’, see Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence, ed. Blaukopf, 135. Salome performances: the première, Dresden, 9 December 1905; Graz, 1906; Vienna, 1907, in its second opera house, the Kaiser-Jubiläums Stadttheater, offered by a company from Breslau (Wrocłtaw), but banned in New York in 1907.Google Scholar

54 Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, trans. Basil Creighton, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner (London, 1990), 117, discusses Mahler's trip to Rome to conduct ‘three concerts’. Prince Montenuovo had long given Mahler firm support. La Grange indicates that the prince, with the emperor's approval, ‘habitually replied [to Mahler's critics]: Gustav Mahler is my opera director. Is there anything else I can do for you?’ He was strongly opposed to Mahler's initial suggestion to resign to ‘measure [his] popular support’, commenting: ‘For God's sake, don't say you want to resign! If the archdukes hear that, they will be along here like a shot.‘ La Grange, Gustav Mahler, iii: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford, 1999), 596–7.Google Scholar

55 Holland cites other works of Mahler celebrated in Munich. See Holland, Dietmar, ‘Gustav Mahler als Dirigent und Komponist bei den Münchner Philharmonikern’, 100 Jahre Münchner Philharmoniker, ed. Gabriele Meyer (Munich, 1994), 157–87 (p. 161). The Ninth Symphony did have its première in Vienna, but only after Mahler's death. Graf, Die Wiener Oper, 96. For Mahler's confession, see Selected Letters, ed. Martner, 301.Google Scholar

56 Rumours circulated widely about Mahler's departure in 1907, Willnauer reports (Die Wiener Oper, 211–12), from April to October, when the Kaiser was informed of Mahler's request to resign. Antagonism to Mahler was evident then even in left-wing journals such as the tabloid Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt. Its circulation of 40,000 ‘ordinary Viennese’, McColl discovered, attracted readers through ‘front-page feature illustrations … [of] murders, suicides, and bodies floating in the Danube’. But its music reviews were ‘in general, bland’ (McColl, Music Criticism, 14–15). However, in a calculated attempt to stir attention, the tabloid printed an article on Mahler on 11 June 1907 by the critic Hans Liebstöckl, recently returned from America, of hostile intent: ‘we have to thank [Mahler for] something very important, his resignation’; La Grange, Gustav Mahler, iii, 673–5, quotes extensively from the article. He indicates also (pp. 576ff.) that ‘rumours without foundations’ on Mahler's resignation started in the Viennese press as early as January 1907.Google Scholar

57 Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 93. The editors of the radical nationalist Alldeutsches Tagblatt, officiating as music critics of Mahler in their article ‘Jüdische Frechheit in der Hofoper’, apparently were ignorant of Wagner's special spelling of his opera Parsifal and of its important character Klingsor.Google Scholar

58 Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 93; Hamann later (pp. 496ff.) explains that the young Hitler had in 1908 not yet developed his notorious anti-Semitism. Ron Rosenblum, in Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of his Evil (New York, 1998), seems to agree with Hamann, in contradistinction to ‘most Hitler explainers’ (pp. xxxvi–xxxvii). Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936 (New York, 1998), also is convinced of the young ‘Hitler's admiration for Mahler’ as ‘conductor in the opera’ (pp. 23 and 616, n. 110). Hitler's ‘paranoid anti-Semitism’, Kershaw argues (p. 104 and passim), was the product of the First World War and the post-war years.Google Scholar

59 Felix Weingartner, Lebenserinnerungen, ii (Zurich, 1929), 159–63. Weingartner applauded Mahler's extraordinary achievements (p. 155) but, with good reason, criticized his insertion of Leonore overtures ‘into the middle of Fidelio’ (p. 158). Weingartner's discussion (pp. 156–7) of Mahler's favourite singers, too, is entirely different from the comments quoted in the Alldeutsches Tagblatt. On the length of ‘Wagner's works’, Weingartner affirmed (pp. 178–9): ‘they tire both public and performer. … I have long been convinced that the cuts, which were originally made [in the Ring] should be reinstituted … perhaps until Wagner will again be in fashion.‘Google Scholar

60 For Beller's review of Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Exploration in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998), see ‘Clio in Vienna’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 July 1999. Schorske's ‘repeated emphasis’ occurs, almost like a leitmotif, twice in his chapter on Mahler: ‘As director of the Court Opera, Mahler served as guardian of the most official – and most Baroque – of all of Austria's arts. Reared in the culture of the Word, both as Jew and as liberal, he thus became, through his conducting career, identified also with the culture of Grace’ (pp. 13, 187). The chapter, written for political and social historians, adds little on Mahler that is new, based as it is mainly on secondary sources.Google Scholar

61 Gutman, Robert W., Mozart: A Cultural Biography (New York, 1999), 563. On immigration in Vienna, see Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 68, Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 9ff. and passim, and Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 468, 469.Google Scholar

62 Sheehan, ‘A People Apart?‘, and German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1986), 790.Google Scholar

63 See Werner, Eric, Mendelssohn, trans. Dika Newlin (London, 1963), 230–1, on the Singakademie and on Mendelssohn ‘as a great teacher’ (p. 259). Leipzig's musical periodicals, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Werner notes (p. 264), ‘greeted the new music director most warmly’. Furthermore, after Mendelssohn's death, ‘academic circles of the conservatory founded by Mendelssohn clung stubbornly to a so-called “Mendelssohn” tradition’ (p. 260). The ‘turning-point’ in music was ushered in by Wagner's famous article originally published under a pseudonym in 1850 and revised and republished under his own name as ‘Aufklärung über das Judenthum in der Musik’ in 1869 (see Wagner, Richard, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, Volks-Ausgabe, 6th edn, Leipzig, n.d., 238–60). The revised edition was dedicated to Frau Marie Mouchanoff, née Gräfin Nesselrode. It appeared at the time when Jews were being granted full legal rights in Prussia, Austria and elsewhere. (The publication of this article in a Volks-Ausgabe is itself interesting.) ‘Turning-point’ and ‘turnabout’ are terms that Werner (p. 507) and Herbert Kupferberg, The Mendelssohns (New York, 1972), 233, use to indicate the beginning, for several reasons, of widespread negative reaction to Mendelssohn.Google Scholar

64 Lueger, , quoted in Berkley, Vienna and its Jews, 106. Hamann concludes, in Hitlers Wien, 416–18, as have other scholars, that Lueger's anti-Semitism was motivated essentially by political rather than ethnic antecedents. Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien, 328, or My Youth in Vienna, 6. See Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 196ff., in negative responses by pan-Germans to Lueger. The mature Hitler found Lueger's anti-Semitism too mild.Google Scholar