GUSTAV MAHLER's Ieh BIN DER WELT ABHANDEN GEKOMMEN AS SONG and SYMPHONIC MOVEMENT: ABDUCTION, OVER-CODING, and CATACHRESIS
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DA VID L. MOSLEY GUSTAV MAHLER'S IeH BIN DER WELT ABHANDEN GEKOMMEN AS SONG AND SYMPHONIC MOVEMENT: ABDUCTION, OVER-CODING, AND CATACHRESIS While many have commented upon the manner in which Gustav Mahler quotes both himself and other sources in his music, this stylistic feature of Mahler's composition has not, to my knowledge, been examined from the perspective of intertextuality. The many intertexts of Mahler's music include: literary texts of his own creation as well as those by other authors, other musical styles and genres, musical compositions by other composers, and portions of his own oeuvre. Nowhere is Mahler's musical intertextuality more informative than in the many and varied relationships between his songs and his symphonic compositions. The case of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen as poem, piano-Lied, orchestral song, and the Adagietto movement of his Symphony No.5 is one such example. This essay will employ a semiotic methodology to examine: (1) the abductive process by which Mahler approached RUckert's poem, (2) the practice of over-coding by which this poem became a piano-Lied, an orchestral song, and finally a purely instrumental symphonic movement, and (3) the manner in which the Adagietto of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 constitutes a catachresis, or misapplied metaphor, in relation to the text from which it originated. MAHLER'S ABDUCTIVE APPROACH TO LIED COMPOSITION What does it mean for a composer at the beginning of the twentieth century to quote the musical material from a vocal composition in a subsequent instrumental composition? The first implication of this question has to do with our model for understanding Lied composition itself. The growing independence and autonomy of the musical material for a vocal composition, which is exhibited throughout the nineteenth century, is best understood as an evolution from an inductive attitude on the part of he composer toward the text to an attitude which is best described as abductive. Charles Sanders Peirce characterized abduction as "a method of forming a general prediction" (2.270). It "consists in studying facts and M. Kronegger and A-T. Tymieniecka (eds.), Analecta Husserliana XLII, pp. 293-301. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 294 DA VID L. MOSLEY devising a theory to explain them" (5.145). For Peirce, the distinction between induction and abduction was not always easy to make. l He admits, "in almost everything [he] printed before the beginning of this century ... [he] more or less mixed up Hypothesis [Abduction] and Induction" (8.227). An abductive inference carries no guarantee of certainty, but "merely suggests that something may be" (2.96). While Peirce seems to limit his application of induction and abduction to scientific inquiry and the constraints of propositional logic, these modes of thought also have important aesthetic implications and applications. Peirce's understanding of induction is conventional, i.e. it involves the observation of a sufficient number of individual facts, and, on the grounds of analogy, extending what is true of these facts to the observation of other facts of the same class, thus arriving at general principles or laws. Abduction, however, begins with the inference, or hypothesis, that certain facts or observations might be explained by such and such a theory and then proceeds to explain those facts or observations as if the inference, or hypothesis, were true. Induction, then, is a comparative process based upon analogy, while abduction is a creative process based upon metaphor. When applied to the matter of song composition, the concept of induction describes the manner in which Lied composers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set a poem to music. Composers like Reichardt and ZeIter took it as their task to mirror the formal elements of a poem in music. This approach posed little threat to the linguistic meaning of the poem and may explain why Goethe, for instance, valued the imitative nature of Zeiter's settings of his poems (Hecker, 9). Schubert and Schumann were less interested in mechan ical imitation and, instead, seized upon certain semantic elements of the poem for which tonal analogues could be found. Through the systematic use of these tonal analogues with each successive reference to the semantic element, their settings created a correspondence between words and tones.2 This approach involved certain choices on the part of the composer in reference to the linguistic meaning of the poem. Lawrence Kramer has referred to these choices as constituting a "refined form of erasure" in which the setting obliterates certain semantic pos sibilities and emphasizes others (129). This may explain why Goethe was less kindly disposed toward Schubert's settings of his poetry. Schumann summarizes this approach to Lied composition when he makes the following statement in reference to Norbert Burgmiiller's Op. 10: "He regards it - as everybody should - as the highest task to recapture the GUSTAV MAHLER 295 poem in its smallest detail with finer musical material" [Das Gedicht mit seinen kleinsten Zagen im feineren musikalischen Stoffe nachzuwirken, gilt ihm das Hochste, wie es Allen gelten sollte] (175). And again, in praise of his contemporary Robert Franz, Schumann states, "he strives to represent an embodiment of the poem" [er will uns das Gedicht in seiner leibhaftigen Tiefe wiedergeben] (348). Gustav Mahler's approach to song composition involes the positing of a single musical construct which is then developed within the code of music as a musical hypothesis about the meaning of the poem. Mahler describes the process by which he sets a poem to music in the following manner: "you can express so much more in music than the words directly say. The text is actually a mere indication of the deeper significance to be extracted form it, of hidden treasure within" [Man kann mit der Musik doch viel mehr ausdracken, als die Worte unmittelbar sagen ... Der Text bi/det eigentlich nur die Andeutung des tieferen Gehaltes, der herauszuholen, des Schatzes, der zu heben ist] (Bauer-Lechner, 32127). Mahler's reference to the capability of music to express more than language is not original: Mendelssohn and many other nineteenth-century composers made this same claim for music. What is unique about Mahler's description of his process of Lied composition is the manner in which the text is a mere indication, or hint, of a deeper meaning - a meaning which may exist in more than one sign-system or code. This approach to a poem is neither imitative nor systematic. In a response to Natalie Bauer-Lechner's inquiry as to how he set a text to music Mahler replied: "One minute it is the poem that is the inspira tion, the next it is the melody, I often begin in the middle, often at the beginning, sometimes even at the end, and the rest gradually falls into place until it develops into a complete whole" [Bald gibt das Gedicht den Anstoss, bald die Melodie. Oft fange ich in der Mitte, oft am Anfang, zuwei/en auch am Ende an, und das abrige schliesst sich machher dran und drum he rum, bis es sich sum Ganzen rundet und vollendet] (33/29). Mahler claims it is the work of the composer to extract and develop this hidden significance of a poem: "It's a strange process! Without knowing at first where it is leading, you find yourself pushed further and further beyond the bounds of the original form, whose potentiali ties lay hidden within it, like the plant within the seed" [Es ist ein seltsmer Vorgang! Ohne dass man anfangs weiss, wohin es fahrt, fahlt man sich immer weiter und weiter aber die ursprangliche Form hinaus getrieben, 296 DAVID L. MOSLEY deren reicher Gehalt doch, wie die Pflanze im Samenkorn, unbewusst in ihr verborgen lag] (Bauer-Lechner, 32127). Mahler's treatment of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen as a piano-Lied is emblematic of the abductive nature of his comments about Lied composition. The entire setting is based upon the pitch-configura tion C-D-F-A and various versions of this sonority stated in different inversions or at different pitch-levels. This pitch-configuration is outlined in the right-hand of the piano in measures 1-3 and stated vertically for the first time in measure 10. Depending upon the context of its use, this pitch-configuration may be understood as a D minor seventh chord in first inversion or as an F major triad in second inversion with an added sixth. In other words, this sonority may be heard as alluding to two keys at once, F major and/or D minor. Regardless of whether the reference is to the tonic major, its relative minor, or both, the sonority itself is an unstable one which begs for resolution by way of an appogiatura. No doubt, the instability of this sonority reflects the ambivalent tone of the narrator toward the state of alienation examined in the poem. Likewise, the movement from dissonance to consonance which charac terizes the appogiatura also characterizes the gradual resignation of the narrator toward this state of alienation. However, ambivalence and alienation are merely the poetic concepts which serve as indicators for Mahler's setting. Once Mahler makes the musical inference that this sonority and the voice-leading device which it implies are an adequate metaphor for the poem, he bases the development of the song solely on the musical properties of this inference. If the Lied composition of the First and Second Berlin Schools represents a balance between poetic and musical means of expression, and the songs of Schubert and Schumann embody a hegemony of music in relation to poetry, then Gustav Mahler's songs represent an almost total indifference to the formal or semantic properties of the poem, and, instead, focus upon the musical development of the hidden implica tions of the text which they treat.