‘Storytelling in song’: Mahler's songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to suggest that Mahler's compositional ‘genetic code’ can be located in his Lieder output. Many of Mahler's songs show a distinct ambiguity: even the texts of folk songs or children's songs often contain a note of tragedy, farewell, separation or death. Songs on the subject of war or military life, for example, often depict grotesque and disturbing images. It is particularly in the songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn that Mahler emphasized an unmediated proximity to life, and he was well aware that his choice of texts contrasted sharply with the Lied tradition up to that time. In a letter to Ludwig Karpath from 2 March 1905, Mahler revealed not only his distinct awareness of being the pioneer of a new Lied aesthetic but also his attempts to return to the roots of artistic creativity, and to unveil these as yet untouched by the controlling power of the artistic process – something which is also expressed in his textual additions to the poems. His vivid description of the Wunderhorn texts as ‘blocks of marble’ should be understood in the sense of their being raw or natural materials which first require individual moulding and shaping.

In 1963, an article entitled ‘The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument’ appeared in the journal Science, in which Max Mathews, the father of computer music, declared the birth of computer-generated sound. For the first time, this article described the possibility of creating sounds by using computers, and explained how ‘there are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments’ (Mathews, 1963).

Sound synthesis can be defined as the production and manipulation of sounds using mathematical algorithms. A useful classification of sound synthesis techniques was proposed by Julius O. Smith (Smith 1991) who proposes four categories: processed recordings, abstract algorithms, spectral models and physical models. Synthesis techniques such as wavetable synthesis and granular synthesis belong, according to Smith, to the category of processed recordings. Considering these techniques as merely synthesis would contradict the idea that synthetic sounds are generated from scratch, while these techniques require some initial sonic material. Abstract algorithms include techniques such as amplitude, ring, frequency modulation and waveshaping. Spectral models simulate sounds as they are received and perceived by the ear, including techniques such as source-filter synthesis, additive synthesis, the phase vocoder and subtractive synthesis. Smith's last synthesis category involves physical models, which simulate the source of sound production. We shall consider all of these categories in this chapter.

Mahler was taught piano, harmony and composition at the Vienna Conservatoire but did not study conducting, ‘the hardest thing’, as he later said. He was simply thrown in at the deep end and left to sink or swim. The art of the conductor (at the time usually referred to as Kapellmeister) was still so inextricably linked with composition, that the introduction of conducting as a subject in its own right had for far too long been considered unnecessary, and was only introduced in Vienna in 1909, when the Conservatoire of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was turned into a state academy. After all, had not the great German conductors of the nineteenth century, Weber, Mendelssohn and Wagner, all been composers? Even the younger Hans von Bülow could lay claim to an extensive compositional output, albeit one which was scarcely acknowledged. Section nine of Mahler's 1883 contract as Musical and Choral Director in Kassel still specified the duty to supply musical arrangements and, at the request of the management, to ‘provide compositions’ for special occasions. Even his Kapellmeister contract in Vienna of 15 April 1897 committed him to produce ‘new compositions or orchestrations deemed necessary by the management’.

Now that the succeeding century is well advanced into its first decade, it seems a good time to take a purchase and a perspective on the poetry of the twentieth century. This Companion offers an availably intelligible and stimulating account of the current state of its critical reception, of the issues and challenges to which it gives rise in our own cultural and social climate, and of the various engagements between poetic form and history which it offers as both problems and examples to succeeding poets and readers.

The poetry treated here is 'English' in the sense that it's written in the English language, or versions of it, by poets who are, or were, of English, Scottish or Welsh origin, or have an origin or family attachment overseas but have been resident in Britain or taken British nationality. The place of nation in the construction of personal and poetic identity is itself an issue in some of this work; and the fact that the latter part of the century witnessed a form of the devolution of political power to Scotland and Wales has found effects and emphases in some of the poetry discussed here, and not only poetry from Scotland and Wales.

The Irish story, which of course intersects with these stories at numerous points, is not told here, mainly on the practical grounds that, a separate story too, it is already the subject of Cambridge Companions: one on W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes, and one entitled Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell. Even so, Yeats, although he has no essay to himself in this book, is a towering presence within it. Discussions of his place include the elaborately artful self-revisions of his lengthy career, notably those encouraged by Ezra Pound (whose more general place in this story is outlined in several essays in this volume too); his formidable technical expertise and refusal of modernist experimentation; his establishing of the poetic sequence as a highly influential modern form; and the enduring challenge of W. H. Auden's response to him, particularly in his elegy 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', published in 1939, which is cited and discussed several times.

On 20 March 1942, aged nineteen, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend, Jim Sutton, excitedly announcing his admiration for D. H. Lawrence: 'I have been reading “Sons and Lovers” and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had been killed after writing that book he'd still be England's greatest novelist'. Larkin's own ambitions as a fiction writer came to fruition a few years later with Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). The two novels suggest a full alertness to the range of Modernist experimentation in the writings of Lawrence and such contemporaries as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Modernist fiction of the first few decades of the twentieth century encouraged Larkin to move beyond realistic depiction into a symbolist evocation of a less tangible subject matter, including obscure dreams and desires. A similar trajectory can be found in the poetry from the 1940s onwards. The sudden shift from downbeat empiricism into visionary symbolism, an opening out from the securely known into the utterly unfathomable, was to become a hallmark of his work, giving a complex charge to many of his best-known poems, including 'The Whitsun Weddings' and 'High Windows'.

Larkin's enthusiasm for the fiction of Lawrence and Woolf might come as a surprise to those categorising his work as avowedly anti-modernist. An even greater surprise awaits anyone looking back to Larkin's earliest poems, since these show beyond doubt that the dominant influence was T. S. Eliot. 'The Ships at Mylae' is a free-verse composition, echoing The Waste Land, in which Larkin addresses his mock-hero in the peremptory manner with which Eliot summons the enigmatic Stetson: 'Stanley! / You who serene from unsung argosies / Gazed on the mounting foam!'

This guide to Monteverdi's music is constructed in three sequences. The first is a catalogue of Monteverdi's works, both surviving and lost, in as near as possible date order, followed by a list of undated manuscript sources. In the case of sources containing more than one work, the contents of the volume are listed in the order in which they appear in the earliest, or the only, source (this order is not always followed in later and modern editions – see Chapter 3, above). The second sequence is a catalogue, by short title only, of prints and manuscripts containing contrafacta of Monteverdi's music: that is, adaptations of his settings by a different author to texts that are usually sacred or spiritual in character (the first lines of these settings are given in the Index). The third sequence is an index of first lines and titles, which serves as an index both to the catalogue and to the discussion of individual works in the text of this book. Each work can be traced in the catalogue from the index through an identifier, which includes the date of publication or first performance, or the year(s) in which a work, now lost, is discussed in Monteverdi's letters or another source; manuscripts are identified by the sigla for the library in which they are located. Dates or library sigla followed by [CF] refer to contrafacta. Dates followed by a superscript number follow the convention found in RISM (Répertoire international des sources musicales, the International Inventory of Music Sources), specifically in the volume Recueils imprimés XVIe-XVIIe siècles (Munich-Duisburg, 1960).

The poetic sequence

Chances are that the word 'sequence' when used of English poetry will first conjure the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, beginning with Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1582), and including Spenser's Amoretti (1595) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609). Not all the sequences of the Golden Age are wholly devoted to the sonnet - Sidney's has ten songs in addition to 108 sonnets, and Spenser concludes his eighty-eight sonnets with 'Epithalamion' - but the sonnet is certainly the dominant form. Each sequence is held together by a complex theme, love, and a loose drama or narrative development: unhappiness in an erotic relationship or, with Spenser, eventual marital bliss. Variation in theme notably occurs with Donne's 'Holy Sonnets' (1610-11), while George Herbert's The Temple (1633) presents a booklength sequence of religious lyrics only some of which are sonnets, and which is structured as much by reference to church architecture as by a narrative of spiritual development. The lyrical sequence detached itself from the sonnet sequence at an early stage, although it took several centuries to find its characteristic level as a medium-length-to-long poem that links together lyrics in a variety of stanzaic patterns.

Adjustments to the sonnet form by George Meredith in Modern Love (1862) opened the way for further (mostly deferred) experiments in the sonnet sequence, not all of which were successful. A century after Meredith, Robert Lowell wrote several volumes of fourteen-liners without rhyme or metre, of which very few individual poems have proved memorable.

In the 1970s British poetry was noticeably fatigued, a reflection of a national mood. The consensual approach to politics of the time was mirrored, in the literary world, by a combination of weariness and diminished expectations. This was perceptible, for example, in comments made by Jonathan Raban in his The Society of the Poem:

In the difficult economic circumstances of the 1970s, this consensus, 'the same communal hopes and neuroses', came under increasing strain, culminating, of course, in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In the wake of the Movement's unambitious poetics, British poetry had good reasons to doubt itself. Famously, A. Alvarez, in his provocative 1963 essay, 'Beyond the Gentility Principle', had called for a 'new seriousness'. His negative comparisons of British poetry to its American cousin struck a nerve. It is noticeable how anthologies of this period frequently draw anxious comparisons between poetry from Britain and poetry from elsewhere, particularly America, Ireland and Eastern Europe. In his anthology The Mid-Century: English Poetry 1940 to 1960, David Wright, for example, made a typically worried assault on contemporary American poetry, dismissing it as 'an industry rather than an art'.

In 1996 Yuko Nexus6, a composer and lecturer based in Nagoya, Japan, coined the term kotatsutop music to describe the current state of electronic music in Japan. One can find kotatsu, low tables, covered by blankets with a heater underneath, in almost every Japanese household. Nexus6 implied that the tools for making electronic music were just as ubiquitous as this piece of common household furniture: ‘Those days when synthesisers and computers were the prized possessions of a limited number of universities and other institutions are over, and instead, these items can be found cluttering the tops of kotatsu in small boarding houses in these same areas’ (Nexus6 1998). It should come as no surprise that the face of electronic music has changed dramatically since the 1940s, but the field has changed spectacularly even within the past ten years. My laptop is more powerful today than the fastest computers I had access to ten years ago, and I can store more data on a portable drive no bigger than my finger than I ever could on the hard drives in the studios where I worked fifteen years ago. Technology is no longer a limiting factor for most musicians, but what does this mean for the field as a whole? What are the implications of being able to create electronic music at a local café? Given the portability of recording and production technology, how will electronic music reflect local and even transient cultures? Does the ease of production imply a healthy democratisation of the aesthetic of electronic music or perhaps its corruption?

It is not easy to trace Monteverdi's musical apprenticeship reliably, for the facts are scanty. In his published volumes up to the Second Book of Madrigals (1590) he merely describes himself as the ‘disciple’ (discepolo) of the composer Marcantonio Ingegneri, maestro di cappella of Cremona Cathedral; later, he looks back to Ingegneri as a respected composer of the old school. But many of his works, up to and beyond the Second Book, are modelled on works by composers of his own and earlier generations, sometimes well outside the range of Ingegneri's musical language, and he seems also to have used modelling to alter and renew musical style in general. The music of these early books, and of their models, thus represents the only surviving evidence of Monteverdi's musical education; and the latter can, therefore, be traced only through musical analysis.

At this period, the use of models was prompted by rhetorical and educational principles. And so Monteverdi's early compositions may support three hypothetical reconstructions: first, of some aspects of his musical education (perhaps under Ingegneri's guidance, if it was Ingegneri who had the generosity to recommend the young composer to imitate most of the available models, old and new); second, of some of the processes by which musical style evolved at this period; and third, perhaps the most important, of some of the aesthetic implied by Monteverdi's works.

Two books Keith Douglas carried with him during the desert campaign, as recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, were Alice in Wonderland and 'a short Survey of Surrealism'. Both are 'easily relatable', bearing an obvious relation to his experiences as Crusader tank commander in the Eighth Army. The men Douglas meets in his regiment and in the desert are odd in a manner clearly referencing both Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That and Waugh's satires, but indebted too to Alice's encounters with the strange beasts in her dream world. The brutal comedy of the war from Egypt to Tunisia is stylised according to the economy of Carroll's nonsense - this is a war replete with farce and nightmare jokes and booby traps, run by half-crazy, obsolete military, fought caged in fantastic machineries of death, rolling over an unreal landscape, fighting an enemy not hated but admired as reflections of the desert rats themselves. The comedy has Carrollian pathos too, sentimentality being generated by the very illogicality of this strange world:

Introduction

Mahler's posthumous image is resolutely ambiguous. Appropriated as ‘emblematic artist of modernity’ or revered as a ‘prophet of modernism’ he has also, by contrast, been viewed as a ‘model of the postmodern’, and thus ‘emblematic of the emancipation from modernism’. To others he is a relic of a romantic aesthetic, to be eschewed or disavowed. Adorno was an outspoken advocate of the need for progressive, advanced material, but his Mahler writings suggest an alternative, coexistent modernist practice in which manifold layers of meaning and structure are created by the combination of esoteric, immanent configurations with exoteric objects that invite intertextual associations. For Donald Mitchell, similarly to Adorno, Mahler's ‘radical modernity’ is located in the ‘multilayered, multidimensional character of the symphonies’. Against charges of Mahler's tendency to nostalgia, Mitchell argues that ‘the great debate with the past was built into the very fabric of Mahler's symphonies and forms an inescapable part of his modernity’. This complex relationship with cultural precedents is strikingly characterized in Adorno's image of Mahler's music as ghostly reveille in which shadowy, old materials reawake into new life and meaning. The range cast by Mahler's own shadow over the century which followed him is vast.3 I will consider four areas: musical developments in Vienna, songs and operas of love and the night, aspects of symphonic syntax, and compositional reactions to his last completed work, the Ninth Symphony.

Pope's work was both energized and constrained by gender; but evaluating its effects is far from straightforward, since gender in Pope's time was neither a monolithic system nor an entirely stable one, and major shifts were under way that would have far-reaching effects on understandings of what it meant to live as a man or a woman. For instance, the progress of normative heterosexual masculinity in stigmatizing its homosexual other was gradually ruling out the possibility both that boys might be counted among the objects of a manly passion, and that excessive infatuation with women might itself be counted as effeminacy. Meanwhile, the older model of elite femininity associated with intellectual culture, public sociability and household authority was being eclipsed by an emphasis on female domesticity that emanated from the middle ranks of society. These are just two instances, but sufficient to indicate the scale and importance of some of the changes at work. For Pope, marked as different by his disability, his Catholic religion, and his Tory loyalties, gender would entail a particularly difficult interface between challenge and conventionality, one that stimulated some kinds of imaginative work while it closed down others.

This essay will unpack the simple statements that Alexander Pope was born to Catholic parents in 1688, and that he died in 1744, still a Catholic. His coreligionists constituted a small percentage of the national population. They formed a conspicuous block of society in only a few parts of the country, notably Lancashire and Cheshire, although there was an important group of recusant gentry in the Thames Valley, with whom Pope made lasting connections during his youth. Some humbler folk in the provinces retained an allegiance to the old faith, but as yet there had been no large-scale immigration from Catholic countries to major centers, so that the urban poor were Protestant for the most part. Within months of Pope's birth, James II was ousted from the throne, having lost popularity in considerable measure because of his attempts to impose freedom of worship, that is official tolerance of Catholicism. The backlash which followed under William and Mary saw the introduction of severe penal laws against the papist community. Excluded from succession to the throne, Catholics had to take oaths of loyalty, on pain of losing most civic rights. At the same time they were precluded from living within ten miles of the center of London, and from becoming members of the legal profession. Out of fear that insurrection would break out, they were likewise forbidden to keep arms, ammunition or, bizarrely, a horse worth more than ten pounds. A particularly fierce law passed in 1700 incapacitated all Roman Catholics from inheriting or purchasing land, unless they formally abjured their religion. If they refused, their property was legally transferred for life to their next of kin in the Protestant faith.

In narratives of English literary history Pope has tended to be seen as a figure of discontinuity rather than one who finds his natural place in the native tradition. By the end of the eighteenth century, Milton was the acknowledged heir to the poetic inheritance of the age of Shakespeare and Spenser, while Pope represented the triumph of neoclassical refinement after an earlier “barbarity.” In many ways this took Pope at his own valuation: he accepted the prevailing view that the achievement of the Elizabethans was marred by incorrectness, faulty versification and lapses of taste, and that only with Waller, Dryden, and Addison had the English language reached perfection. There certainly could be no return to styles of the past or to an obsolete English. The very title of Pope's The Fourth Satire of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, Versifyed assumes that Donne's poem cannot claim to be “verse” at all. Unlike the ancient writers or those of the Restoration, Elizabethan poets were not his stylistic models, and we look in vain for any acknowledgment, public or private, of the scale of his indebtedness to them.

But a stylistic influence (Waller, say) might be worn more lightly than one that fills the imagination. In his youth Pope read Elizabethan poets, along with much else, during his “great reading period” before the age of twenty-one (Anecdotes, i, p. 20). He read The Faerie Queene at “about twelve” and throughout his life he loved Spenser, for all his obsoleteness of language; later as a translator of Homer he recognised in George Chapman's old version, in spite of its stylistic “Fustian,” “a daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation” (Anecdotes, i, p. 182; Prose, i, pp. 250-1). Animation in its various meanings is a characteristic feature of Pope's writings at those moments when he is drawing on Elizabethan materials.

Like an epic, Pope's autobiographical poem Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) plunges in medias res, “into the midst of things” - or we might say, into the midst of spaces. Pope, the successful poet, is besieged by aspiring authors, with “Papers in each hand,” who “rave, recite and madden round the land. | What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? | They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide” (5-8). So the poem acts pre-emptively, opening itself by closing the door, to create a sustained refuge of 419 lines where the poet can figure out how he got here in the first place. This is one of the most dramatic spatial gestures of Pope's poetry; this chapter will open the door on others less spectacularly visible.

Pope is one of the most visual of poets. He had learned painting from his friend Charles Jervas, and in “Epistle to Mr. Jervas” he hopes his poems will have the same colour, clarity, elasticity, and precision: “Oh lasting as those colours may they shine, | Free as thy stroke, yet faultless as thy line!” (63-4). But as Lawrence Lipking notes: “The vast majority of modern readers are blind to eighteenth-century poetry. We do not see poems well; we do not make the pictures in our minds that the poets direct and excite us to make.” Part of understanding Pope's poetry is understanding how to see things, because in the eighteenth century description was used very differently. Many early prosodic techniques went out of fashion with the Romantic poets and never quite came back in, so we've lost the power to appreciate their subtleties.

Pope never found it difficult to identify the moral values he defended: “To virtue only and her friends, a friend”, he proclaimed in the first of his Imitations of Horace (TE, iv, p. 17), making the claim specific and only the application general. Where others wrestled with the semantics of a precise meaning, Pope had a startling simplicity. “Ask you what Provocation I have had? | The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad” (TE, iv, p. 324). His desire to claim a similar authority for his friendships made explicit a tendency enunciated by Swift:

For Pope the desire to establish around himself a circle of virtuous men, to correspond with constantly, became a vital element in his desire to fix forever the image of his life as a virtuous crusade. In his villa at Twickenham everything, from the motto Libertati & Amicitiae over the door to the placing of ornaments in the grotto, was designed to give his moral sentiments an outward and visible form. From the first Pope's versifying abilities were accompanied by a desire to establish friendships less with contemporaries than with men who, though advanced in years and decayed in style, could prove helpful to an aspiring poet.