Mahler and Schubert's A Minor Sonata D. 784 Author(s): Miriam K. Whaples Source: Music & Letters, Vol.

65, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 255-263 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/736096 . Accessed: 13/09/2011 18:32
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MAHLER AND SCHUBERT'S A MINOR SONATA D.784

BY MIRIAM K.
WHAPLES

IN HIS obiter dicta the mature Mahler shows no great admiration for Schubert. 'Today', he told Natalie Bauer-Lechner on 13 July 1900, a few days after his 40th birthday, I have read through all of Schubert's chamber music. Out of twelve [sic] works, you'll find at most four good ones. Likewise, in 800 [sic] songs perhaps 80 are altogether lovely-which is enough in any case. But if only he hadn't turned out all this insignificant stuff that almost makes you want to deny his talent, no matter how enraptured you are with the rest. It's because his technique lags so far behind his feeling and invention. How easy he makes things for himself in developments! Six sequences follow one after another and then still one more in a different key. No working out, no artistically realized reshaping of his ideas. Instead of that he repeats himself so much that you could cut half the piece without hurting it.' A few sentences later comes this bewildering passage: For Schubert's melody is already eternal[ewig], like Beethoven's and Wagner's. That's why he shouldn't fall back on the Haydn-Mozart kind of formalism, which had still been a completely appropriate basis for their works.2 A year later (5 August 1901) he dropped another remark in the same vein. Apropos of a tune by a local popular composer, Thomas Koschat, which had 'come by chance' ('geriet') into his Fifth Symphony, on which he was then working, he told Bauer-Lechner: I'm glad it's by Koschat and not Beethoven, because he developed his themes himself. As for Schubert, one could with a clear conscience [ruhig]pick up most of his themes and work them out for the first time. Yes, it wouldn't hurt them in the least, they're so utterly undeveloped.3 No great admiration-and no great knowledge either, one is tempted to add. Yet for two years at the Vienna Conservatory (1875-7) Mahler had studied the piano and enjoyed a warm personal relationship with Julius Epstein, one of the great Schubertians of his day and later editor of all the solo piano music for the first Schubert Gesamtausgabe.Epstein is also credited with being the first to bring some of Schubert's lesser-known piano solo and duet music from the salon into the concert hall: Willi Kahl mentions by name the sonatas in D flat/E flat (D.567/568),
' Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Erinnerungen Gustav an Mahler,ed.J. Killian, Leipzig, 1923, p. 138. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are the author's. See also Bauer-Lechner, Recollections GustavMahler, of trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin, London, 1980. 2Erinnerungen, loc. cit. 3 Ibid., p. 165.

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A major (D.664) and G major (Op. 78, D.894).4 There is no doubt that Schubert figured importantly in his teaching. We may be fairly certain, for instance, that Mahler studied that prodigious essay in thematic development, the 'Wanderer' Fantasia, with Epstein during his first year at the conservatory, since he performed it in public the following summer.5Likewise, the D major Sonata, D.850, which he may have played for his Leipzig circle in the 1880s (a minor riddle to which we shall return), would most likely have dated back to his student repertoire. Other Schubert works that he studied at the conservatory cannot be identified with certainty; one is the sonata for which he was unanimously awarded a first prize in piano performance at the end of his first year (23 June 1876). The official school records give the following information: Epstein)-Schubert: Sonata in A First Prize:Herr Gustav Mahler (class of Professor minor, first movement.6 This event is generally noted by Mahler's biographers. But though some go on to observe that there are three Schubert piano sonatas in A minor,7none, so far as I know, has considered the identity of Mahler's prize piece a question important enough to pursue further. Yet the problem-and its solution-are not without interest. In any event, we encounter the same title again some three years later, on a concert programme of 24 April 1879.8 In what must have been one of his last public appearances as a pianist, Mahler took part in a mixed vocal and instrumental concert in his home town (Iglau/Jihlava in Moravia). The most substantial of the eleven numbers comprised Schumann's 'Humoreske', with which he had won another first prize in the 1877 conservatory competition, and Schubert's 'Sonate A-moll fur Pianoforte'. There is no listing of movements that would make it possible to identify the sonata; but we should be safe in assuming that this was the prize piece of 1876, played now, despite the length of the programme, in its entirety. Mahler the composer did 'pick up' a few Schubert themes, most of them in the same way that he 'picked up' themes of other composers, including Beethoven:9 brief casual quotations or near-quotations, abandoned without further elaboration. For example, towards the end of the second movement of his Third Symphony (bars 260 ff.) there is a reminiscence of the first movement of Schubert's E flat Piano Trio, D.929 (bars 84 ff., 470 ff.) In both Schubert and Mahler this is a decorative cadential idea, flowing naturally from what has come before but without further consequence. Similarly, there is a stray quotation from the finale of Lied Schubert's G major Sonata, D.894 (bars 21-22), in the orchestral Wunderhorn 'Lob des hohen Verstandes' (bars 70-71)'0 and another from the finale of the D major Sonata, D.850 (bars 30-31) in the finale of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (bars 128, 132, 138, 174; a variant in bar 167)." At the beginning of the same symphony
iii. und Gegenwart, 1457. 4Die Musik in Geschichte Study, New York, 1976, P1. 30 and p. 153. aKurt Blaukopf, Mahler: a Documentary 6Ibid., pp. 152-3.
8

7D.537 (1817), D.784 (1823) and Op. 42, D.845 (1825). Facsimile in Blaukopf, Mahler, P1. 39. 9 Compare Mahler's 'Des Antonius vpn Padua Fischpredigt', bars 100-108, with Beethoven's G major Violin Sonata, Op. 96, third movement, trio. 10Quoted in Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, i (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 779-80. Ibid., pp. 821-2.

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Mahler reproduces a Schubertian melodic shape-from the second theme of the E flat Sonata, D.568-in a changed rhythmic context for his own first theme.'2 The E flat and G major sonatas, D.568 and D.894, are among the Schubert works that Julius Epstein introduced to the Viennese concert public. Mahler's echoes provide some evidence for ascribing them also to his own piano repertoire. His possible playing of D.850 has already been mentioned. There is another group of Mahler's Schubert quotations, of a different kind. Rather than stray phrases, they are important thematic ideas; all come from a single work, the A minor Piano Sonata, D.784; and Mahler develops them, if not for the first time, at any rate in new directions. They begin to appear in the First Symphony (1885-8), a work in which 're-compositions' of other music play an important role. The reworkings of'FrereJacques' (or 'Bruder Martin') in the third movement and of Mahler's own 'Ging heut' morgens iubersFeld' (the second of the Liedereinesfahrenden in Gesellen) the first are only the most obvious and best-known examples. The second movement, which opens with an idea from another earlier Mahler song ('Hans und Grethe', from the first set of 'Lieder und Gesainge' of 1880-83), borrows from Bruckner's Third Symphony in ways that will be dealt with later. And the introduction to the first movement, like that to Beethoven's Ninth, prepares a symphony in D (here D major) by reiterations of the descending fourth A-E. 'Ging heut' morgens', which provides most of the thematic material of the exposition, begins with a descending fourth, D-A, that connects logically with the introduction. The motivic fourth reasserts itself at the beginning of the development in the original A-E disposition, but is very soon (4 bars after Fig. 12'3) transformed into the descending fifth E-A, which now evolves into one of the important motifs of the symphony. In its fullest form (Ex. la) it leads into the second section of the development. There, in a major-key version, it is combined
Ex. 1

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Ibid., p. 817.

I' Rehearsal numbers from the Universal Edition study score (UE 946 LW).

257

contrapuntally with fragments from the song, as for instance at Fig. 18 (Ex. Ib), and it remains prominent in the recapitulation (e.g. trumpet at Fig. 27 and 6 bars after Fig. 29). It is never found in an integral statement of the song theme (there is none in the recapitulation) or in the final orchestral version of the Liedereines fahrendenGesellen,which was probably completed after the symphony. In its original minor form this motif is taken up in the principal theme of the finale (Ex. Ic). The motif common to Exx. 1a, 1b and 1c bears a strong resemblance to one in the first theme of Schubert's Piano Sonata D.784, the second of his three in A minor. I quote Schubert's theme in full, so that the rhythmic similarity of Ex. Ic and of the placement of the borrowed motif will be readily apparent (Ex. 2). That
Ex. 2 Allegro giusto

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the similarity is not fortuitous but really does have its basis in Mahler's (conscious or unconscious) memory of D.784 is supported by another correspondence between the two works. At the principal climax of the first movement of the symphony, just before the beginning of the recapitulation, Mahler prepares the return to D major by a passage of increasing tension in which the culmination of a falling minor third motif is reached by a chromatic shift upwards, with simultaneous rhythmic diminution and augmentation in different voices (Ex. 3a). In the coda to the first movement of D.784 we find a similar constellation: falling minor third motif, chromatic shift upwards and simultaneous rhythmic augmentation and diminution (Ex. 3b). Mahler's passage reproduces not only the compositional details of Schubert's but also the plangency; and it achieves greater significance by being repeated, in an intensified version, in the finale of the symphony (4 bars after Fig. 50), again just before a structurally important resolution to the tonic key. It seems in retrospect inevitable that Mahler should have been drawn to D.784. Schubert's despairing march theme, with its heavily falling third or fifth at the end 258

Ex. 3 338

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260

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of every phrase, was in a genre to which he was uncommonly susceptible. Each of the three movements of the sonata oscillates between the eerie and the nostalgic in a way that we are now more likely to call 'Mahlerian' than 'Schubertian'. The second theme of the first movement (in the unusual dominant major) offers a consolatory warmth, but the persistence of a new version of the leaden march cadence reveals that these are not present joys it tells of. In the second movement (in F major) an ardent rising lyricism is answered in every phrase by a sinister twisting figure con sordini (which anticipates the equally sinister bass trills in the first movement of the B flat Sonata, D.960). The finale, a sonata-rondo, 'Allegro vivace', alternates a ghostly 9/8 theme in two-part texture with a wistful, somewhat hectic lIndler. The lIndler is heard three times, but the 9/8 theme, suddenly menacing in fortissimo double octaves, brings the sonata to a close. It is not a hopeful ending. In his Sixth Symphony (1903-4) Mahler also wrote a tragic work in A minor. But it is in his next, the Seventh, which he described as 'preponderantly cheerful in character',"4 that we again hear echoes of Schubert's sonata. The scherzo of the
Seventh
4

(1905)

imitates

the finale of D.784

in melodv

rhvthm

and tetiire.

and

Selected Lettersof GustavMahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins et al., London, 1979, p. 312.

259

even-although it is a scherzo and trio-in form. Like Schubert's sonata-rondo it is built on the alternation of a spectral 9/8 theme (explicitly marked 'schattenhaft') with a scarcely less spook-ridden waltz or Iindler. While the dance melodies in these two movements have little in common but nervousness, the opening themes show a strong resemblance. As in the First Symphony, Mahler assembles his themes gradually out of different arrangements of the basic motifs; the two characteristic forms beginning in bars 13 and 27 are closest to Schubert's. As in the First Symphony, one thematic reference to D.784 is confirmed by another. The immense C major rondo-finale of the Seventh (also composed in 1905) places a principal group of three triumphant march tunes-the second of Prelude-in opposition to a more graceful, them redolent of the Meistersinger 'Austrian' secondary complex. On first appearance this secondary material arouses no specific memories. But its return culminates in a passage (Ex. 4a) that once more recalls D.784, here the closing theme of the first movement (Ex. 4b).
Ex. 4 tJ t

183

(a) 86

ff

(b)) i ,,

The biographical fact and the musical ones are strongly complementary. Given the significant presence of some Schubert A minor piano sonata in Mahler's life, we should be unlikely to dismiss reminiscences of any such sonata as meaningless. Correlatively, the multiple echoes of D.784 (and the absence of any from D.537 or D.845) surely permit us to identify it as the 1876 prize piece. Once answered, however, the question leads to some harder ones. Was Mahler aware of his debt to D.784? Can it throw any light on his puzzling attitude towards Schubert and towards artistic 'property' in general? 'As for Schubert, one could, with a clear conscience, pick up most of his themes and develop them for the first time.' The remark, with its cavalier aggressiveness, was only partly a joke. But we should surely be wrong to read it as even partly a declaration of intent. Mahler seems never to have acknowledged any of his numerous quotations to be deliberate. A certain discomfort, even defensiveness, is evident when he does mention them, easily explainable perhaps as chagrin over an unreliable memory. But it suggests too that he was ignorant of the long and honourable history of this form of homage and also that he had little idea of the distinction between different sorts of borrowing. A final example from the First 260

Symphony bears this out. 'Everyone will label me a thief and unoriginal', he lamented to Natalie Bauer-Lechner in 1900, apropos of the trio of the scherzo of that work, 'because of the two opening bars, in which my memory deserted me and which recall a symphony of Bruckner [the Third] which is very well known in Vienna."5 She adds that Mahler altered the passage, 'at the last minute', for the Vienna performance. One hardly knows what to make of this. If Mahler really made a change, it was only to conceal his memory lapse temporarily from the Viennese, not to remedy it. But why should he have thought it necessary? The passage in question is common coin, the most conventional and anonymous sort of introductory figure. It appears again in Mahler's Fourth Symphony (1899_1900)'6 in the same key and almost precisely the same context, apparently without his becoming aware of it a second time. In another way too the incident testifies to Mahler's general unconsciousness of his borrowings. For the innocuous reminiscence that worried him is followed by a second, more substantive one, from the same Bruckner movement, which he might have been at some pains to eliminate had he noticed it. In both works we find, at almost precisely the same point in the trio (eight or ten bars into the second section), in a remote key, a passage of alternating tonic major/minor and dominant arpeggiated chords over a tonic pedal, followed by a drop to the neapolitan of the dominant.'7The parallel is remarkably exact. Like the Schubert sonata, Bruckner's Third Symphony was deeply ingrained in Mahler's memory. In 1878, while still a student, he had been entrusted with the piano duet transcription, his first published work. The First Symphony was completed during Mahler's stay in Leipzig (1886-8). For the same period we have some first-hand testimony about his playing of the solo piano repertoire several years after he had ceased to play it in public. In his most intimatecircle he cast new light for us with the plasticityof his playingof Beethovenat the piano. It was astonishingwhat he could do even with less grateful pieces; at the Vienna Conservatoryhe had excited unanimousadmirationwith an examinationperformance Schubert'sD major Sonata, [a work] consideredto be of
utterly ungrateful.'8

The writer is the critic Max Steinitzer (1864-1936), in a 1910 collection of 50th-birthday tributes to the composer. In 1885, shortly before coming to Leipzig, Steinitzer had completed doctoral studies at Munich, with a dissertation on the psychological effects of musical forms; he became a prolific and respected writer on music. But here he is a disappointing witness. Not only does he wrongly identify the conservatory prize sonata; he does not say whether he heard Mahler actually play the D major Sonata (D.850), or indeed any Schubert. Yet, unless the mention of D.850 is completely gratuitous, one might infer that he did hear Mahler play it and then confused it with what he was told (by whom?) about the 1876 competition. TIhereis also reason to infer from this that Mahler did not play the A minor Sonata for his Leipzig circle, since such a performance would have obviated the identification error. It might very likely also have called attention-always
5
16 7 18

Bauer-Lechner, Erinnerungen, 149. p. Second movement, bars 204-5. Mahler, First Symphony, trio, Figs. 21-22; Bruckner, Third Symphony, trio, bars 49-57. GustavMahler: ein Bild seiner Pers3nlichkeit Widmungen, Paul Stefan, Munich, 1910, p. 13. in ed.

261

assuming D.784 to be the work in question-to the similarities in the new symphony. (This is not to imply that Mahler deliberately avoided playing the sonata for others.) Steinitzer also reminds us how effectively the received opinion of Schubert's shortcomings could perpetuate itself. While granting Mahler the independence of his own judgement in the matter, it is difficult to ignore a certain tactical motive in his denigration of Schubert's technique.'9 This motive reveals itself even more clearly in a remark about another source of inspiration, towards which Mahler's proprietorial attitude can only be called lordly: poetry in general, and in particular the texts of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. A conversation in 1904 between Mahler and Ida Dehmel (wife of the poet Richard Dehmel) touched on the suitability of various sorts of text for musical anthology naturally came up. According to the account setting, and the Wunderhorn of Mahler's remarks in Frau Dehmel's diary, 'These were not finished poems, but blocks of stone, from which anyone might make what he would',20The analogy with Schubert's 'utterly undeveloped' themes is striking; furthermore, in this case Mahler was indicating his conscious practice, which in one instance conforms to the usual definition of plagiarism (as his thematic quotations do not). The story of the texts of the LiedereinesfahrendenGesellen(c.1883-5) is well enough known not to need extensive review here.2' Briefly, the first of the four verses-unrelated poems is little more than an amalgamation of two Wunderhorn but consecutive in the Arnim-Brentano anthology.22In later years Mahler dated his first acquaintance with that collection 1888. No poet was named in the or programme listings of the Gesellen-Lieder in their published versions. (The first vocal score appeared in 1897.) But Mahler claimed authorship of all the texts in a letter to the critic Max Marschalk in 1896,23by which time he was familiar with the contents of the anthology and could have known that there were real grounds for labelling him 'a thief and unoriginal'. (In fact, no one seems to have called attention to the matter until 1920.24) Lieder-'Wer hat dies Liedel Two of Mahler's acknowledged Wunderhorn erdacht?' and 'Wo die sch6nen Trompeten blasen'-are also each put together out of two separate poems,25and almost every other one shows some significant textual alteration: titles or words changed; lines omitted, added or transposed. Mahler could make equally free with less 'undeveloped' texts, for example appending his own continuation to the beginning of Klopstock's 'Auferstehung' for the finale of Flote his Second Symphony and making numerous revisions in Die chinesische for the texts of Das Lied von der Erde.26
'9 It is only fair to note that Mahler at least once praised Schubert's development technique. In a conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the spring of 1899 he criticized the waltzes ofJohann Strauss for their total lack of in musicaux, which 'there is a work 'the faintest attempt at development' and compared them to Schubert's Moments p. of art in the conduct, the unfolding, the content of each bar' (Erinnerungen, 117). It may be significant that this praise is reserved for a non-sonata work. 20 Alma Mahler-Werfel, Erinnerungen GustavMahler, Frankfurt, 1971, p. 121. an 21 Years,London, 1975, See La Grange, Mahler,i. 742-3, and Donald Mitchell, GustavMahler:the Wunderhorn texts to Mahler pp. 117-19. In the 'Mahler' article in TheNew Grove,however, Mitchell attributes the Gesellen without comment. 22 Ausgabenach dem Text von 1806/1808, Munich, 1962, pp. 704-5. vollstandige Des Knaben Wunderhorn: 23 20 March 1896: Selected p. Letters, 178. By March 1896 Mahler had composed all but five of his total of 24 songs. Wunderhorn 24 Years,p. 117. Mitchell, The Wunderhorn pp. KnabenWunderhorn, 144, 122; 676, 696. 25Des 26 Music, i (1977), 33-47. See Arthur Wenk, 'The Composer as Poet in Das Lied von der Erde', 19th-Century

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Nowhere in his letters or his reported remarks about literary sources do we find any of the discomfort or ambivalence that he expressed in connection with his musical influences. About poetry he could afford to be naive, as he could not about professional matters. That his own early poetic production was unassuming he was well aware. In the letter to Max Marschalk cited above he gives his reason for not publicly acknowledging his authorship of the Gesellen poems: 'to avoid providing ammunition for adversaries who would be quite capable of parodying the naive and simple style'.27His own intention was anything but parodistic. In the three texts that he wrote himself the young journeyman-conductor and despairing lover (of the singer Johanna Richter) translates his case into the predicaments and imagery of a well-worn Romantic genre (most obviously of Wilhelm Muller's without self-consciousness or detachment. There is no gap in attitude Winterreise) between these verses and their early-nineteenth-century models. In Mahler's evocations of early Romantic musical styles, on the other hand, the gap is essential. The nostalgia for a pre-Wagnerian Eden that we hear (to cite one example among many) in the posthorn trio of the Third Symphony cannot afford to take itself altogether seriously. Most of the waltzes, Iindler and military marches stand at least partially in ironic inverted commas.28 some extent these are early To instances of the Modernist mode in which art is a legitimate subject of art. But Mahler is also the first composer to realize the affective possibilities of parody; and these retrospective genre pieces, which come to take up more and more of the symphonies (they dominate the Fifth, the Sixth and especially the Seventh, and it is their absence from the Eighth that makes that work untypical), have an extraordinary resonance. Like the great 'serious' elegiac movements (the third movement of the Fourth, the finales of the Third, the Ninth and Das Lied vonder Erde)they embody Mahler's characteristic gesture of Abschied-leave-taking-from Romanticism, from youth, from all the no longer possible simplicities, ultimately from life itself. In this view of things Schubert clearly belongs with what had to be left behind; and it is easy to see in Mahler's exaggerated censure an effort to deprecate an early outgrown love. If that effort seems excessive to us, a 30-year involvement with the A minor Sonata, much of it unconscious, may help to explain why he was moved to protest too much.

SelectedLetters,p. 178. For a discussion of Mahler's ironic relationship to German Romanticism see Henry A. Lea, 'Mahler: Man on the Margin', ViewsandReviews Modern German Literature: of ed. Festschriftfor AdolfD. Klarmann, Karl S. Weimar, Munich, 1974, pp. 92-104, esp. pp. 102-4.
27 28

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