Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 20 - Organized Religion

  • from Part IV - Mind, Body, Spirit
  • Edited by Charles Youmans, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Mahler in Context
    Published online:
    18 December 2020
    Print publication:
    19 November 2020, pp 173-181

  • Summary

    Mahler’s innate spirituality, which we might read in modern terms as a tendency to be “spiritual but not religious” – has a long pedigree. Richard Wagner’s Religion und Kunst (1880) makes a distinction between inward faith, living and authentic, and outward religion, rigid and dogmatic. This contrast finds an important nexus in Austro-German lands in the latter half of the nineteenth century in three distinct areas that figured centrally in Mahler’s life: Jewish assimilation (including secularization and conversion); tendencies in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism; and the transference or sublimation of religious experience to the arts and particularly music (Kunstreligion). A born Jew, a converted Roman Catholic, and a lifelong Wagnerian, Mahler deemphasized the role of organized religion in his personal worldview, replacing it with the religious sensibility that is captured by the Wagnerian ideal of Kunstreligion.