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A more detailed study of fairy tales would teach us what awaits still in the world. -Elias Cannetti1

[The 20th century is like] a badly-written drama. Act I—greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, post war injustice and hysteria, boom, crash, totalitarianism. Act II—greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, post war injustice and hysteria, boom, crash, totalitarianism. Act III—greed and hysteria…I don’t dare to continue…What do you do if you’re a hypersensitive like Mahler and instinctively know what’s coming? You prophesy, and others pick up your trail. -Leonard Bernstein2

To offer a definition of a , Marina Warner writes that “Fairy tales exchange knowledge between an older voice of experience and a younger audience, they present pictures of perils and possibilities that lie ahead, they use terror to set limits on choice and offer consolation to the wronged, they draw social outlines around boys and girls, fathers and mothers, rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled, they point out the evildoers and garland the victorious, they stand up to adversity with dreams of vengeance, power and vindication.”3 The very basis of the tale, it seems, is contrast, and the highlighting of that contrast. Expect the unexpected: through fantasy, nothing is as it seems, nothing can be taken at face value: compassion for the beggar, who is actually a fairy in disguise, and scorn for the handsome young prince, who is actually a fearsome monster. Strangely enough, the same correlation could be made for the works of Gustav

Mahler, whose fairy tales with a twist draw the same conclusions. In other words, kiss the frog and listen to the prophecy.

1 Zipes, 283. 2 Bernstein, “Unanswered Question” Norton Lecture 5 3 Warner, 21. Syler 2

Before analysis of the meaning of the forest in fairy tales, and in the texts4 of

Mahler, a moment must be spared to discuss the rise of such fairy tales, particularly those of the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob. The collection of 211 tales in the 1857 edition of the Kinder und Hausmärchen consist of “folk and fairy tales, legends, fables, anecdotes, didactic narratives, and journeyman tales.”5 As a result of this collection of tales, which soon became a household item, the brothers began to unearth a sense of

German nationalism. Ludwig Uhland said that the Grimms “had spun a golden threat of poetry which, thanks to them, runs through all of German life,”6 and developed a most remarkable fairy tale tradition. “In short, the issue of nationalism, the , and the Kinder und Hausmärchen is a complex one…[the Grimms] came to view themselves as midwives, who perhaps of a strong affection for their material and the

German people, became zealous advocates not only of German nationalism but of democratic reform.”7 The have come to embody an essence of Germanic thought—demonstrated by its status as the second most-popular book in Germany, with only the Bible exceeding sales.8

To the authors of fairy tales, the forest represented many contradicting ideas.

Bruno Bettelheim notes that even Dante’s The Divine Comedy begins, “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”9

However, he finds Virgil in this forboding wood, the guide to the journey of hell,

4 I see the analysis of Mahler’s texts in comparison to the German Romantic fairy tale as a first step to fully understand how Mahler uses the orchestra and choral forces in Klagende and in the Faust movement of the Eighth. Unfortunately, to do both textual analysis and a study of Mahlerian instrumentation would have been too broad. 5 Zipes, 276. 6 Grimm, xi. 7 Bottigheimer, 272. 8 Ibid., 275. 9 Bettelheim, 94. Syler 3 purgatory, and heaven—with the forest as both damnation and salvation. In this same vein are the German Romantic fairy tales of the brothers Grimm and Bechstein—as well as in the works of Mahler. “Since ancient times, the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our subconscious,” writes Bettelheim.10 This excursion is no day at the park, but often a grueling trial to either grow into maturity or be killed by any number of heartless fiends, your own brother not excluded. At once symbolizing eternal rebirth and the bitter embrace of mortality, the fact remains that this is a “dark” forest, filled with unsavory creatures (and equally unsavory demons in our subconscious). According to Behler, an occupation with the “dark side (Nachtseite) of nature, and an attempt to “penetrate the darker realms of the soul, the unconscious, and the subconscious…[the Swabian School of Romanticism] recognized the subconscious as the basis of all our conscious activity and as such the source of all creativity.”11 Perhaps, then, is the forest the source of all creativity, at least for the German Romantics?

In any case, the key to creativity and to maturity is the journey through the forest and the subconscious, both to come into the darkness and to eventually escape out, for

“[if we] must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered into this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed at finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity,” according to

Bettelheim.12

Not even in fairy tales is there always such a happy ending. Mahler’s Das

Klagende Lied, which he began writing while at conservatory, is a remarkable example of

10 Ibid. Italics mine. 11 Behler, 69. Italics mine. 12 Bettelheim, 94. Syler 4 both the forest in mythology and in German culture. “The first work in which I really came into my own as ‘Mahler’ was a fairy tale (Märchen) for choir, soloists, and orchestra: Das klagende Lied. I number that work Opus 1.”13 Mahler, although not visited by Pan, was visited by another familiar face, according to Nathalie Bauer-Lechner. Years later, Mahler admitted that while working out “ a seemingly insignificant passage…he could never get through it without being profoundly shaken and overcome by intense excitement…whenever he reached it, he always had a vision of himself emerging out of the wall in a dark corner of the room. He felt such intense pain, when his double

(doppelganger) tried to force its way through the wall that he could never go on with his work and had to rush from the room—until one morning, while working on the same passage, he collapsed in a nervous fever.”14

While Mahler wrote his own text, the basic outline can be traced back to The

Singing Bone, with versions by the Grimms, Ludwig Bechstein, and Martin Greif.15

Mahler would have been intimately familiar with the tales; his childhood friend Theodor

Fischer explains that his nurse Nanni used to tell such fairy tales, including one called

“Das klagende lied,” which Fischer suspects might have given rise to Mahler’s composition of the same title. (Amazing conclusion, no?) It is also of note that around the time Mahler would have started work on the composition, drama students at the conservatory put on a production of the Bechstein version of the story, and although

Mahler’s attendance cannot be verified, it is an interesting coincidence.

In comparing Mahler’s text with those of his possible sources, there are both similarities and differences that appear. For the Grimms’ tale, the hand of the king’s

13 Reilly, notes, 1 14 Ibid. 15 Reilly, 32. Syler 5 daughter must be won through the slaughter of a wild boar.16 Two brothers, one “crafty and shrewd,” the other “innocent and simple,” went into the forest to attempt to capture the creature. Bettelheim writes that the “motif of the two brothers” in fairy tales can date back to the oldest fairy tale, found on Egyptian papyrus dating back to 1250 BC, and that there are at least 770 variations on this tale “symbolizing opposite aspects of our nature, impelling us to act in contrary ways…The stories on the ‘Two Brothers’ theme add to this internal dialogue between id, ego, and superego another dichotomy: the striving for independence and self-assertion, and the opposite tendency to remain at home, tied to the parents.”17 There is a draw to reach within and break the ties to the past while moving on to the future, both within ourselves and our fairy tale counterparts…and in both instances, when the past is utterly severed leads to disaster, and to live entirely in the past is safe but yet provides no life on its own. Only with all parts of the whole, through “thorough integration of these contrary tendencies,” as Bettelheim would say, will lead to a successful life.

On the nature of male characters in fairy tales, particularly fitting is Tatar’s assessment, “If female protagonists are often as good as they are beautiful, their male counterparts generally appear to be as young and naïve as they are stupid…To the question, Who is the stupidest of them all? most fairy tale fathers would reply: My .”18 It is also of note to mention that while the “guileless youth” most common in German tales, the trickster is his counterpart in French tales, and “the shift in emphasis from cunning to naivete as one moves across the Rhine is telling, suggesting…

16 As Warner points out, “No beast in fairy tale at the time would have excited anything less that… squirming terror; no courtier would have cooed and gurgled at the appearance of a bear [or in this case, a boar] in the manner of children today.” Warner, 6. 17 Bettelheim, 91. 18 Tatar, 97. Syler 6 that the French celebrate cleverness and audacity while Germans enshrine the virtues of naivete and guilelessness.”19

In any case, both brothers set off, and the younger is aided by a dwarf who gives him a black spear to slay the boar because his heart is “innocent and good.” Bettelheim discusses the significance of the dwarf as representative of the pre-oedipal existence and as a phallic symbol,20 but in any case, the younger son slays the boar with the dwarven spear and sets off toward home, coming across a house where a party is in full swing. His older brother sees him and his prize, and “his envious and evil heart gave him no peace.”

They drink together, and on their way home, the older brother kills the younger as they cross a bridge, taking the boar for his own to claim the king’s daughter in marriage.21

Years pass, and a shepherd spots a bone near the bridge and picks it up to carve into a mouthpiece for his horn. The symbolism of the horn is far-reaching and widespread, particularly in Germanic culture, and a discussion of that will have to be saved. “What a wonderful horn,” says the shepherd, as it tells its fateful tale, and takes it to the king.

“The wicked brother could not deny the deed. He was sewn into a sack and drowned

19 Ibid., 110 20 To Bettelheim, “Dwarfs—these diminutive men—have different connotations within various fairy tales. Like the fairies themselves, they can be good or bad…Like all dwarfs, even the unpleasant ones, they are hard working and clever at their trade.” (Bettelheim, 209) However, these denizens of the forest “evoke other unconscious associations…these ‘little men’ with their stunted bodies and their mining occupation— they skillfully delve into dark holes—all suggest phallic connotations.” Why was the dwarf not able to kill the boar with the spear himself? Answers Bettelheim, “They are certainly not men in any sexual sense— their way of life, their interest in material goods to the exclusion of love, suggest a pre-oedipal existence… But dwarfs are free of innter conflicts, and have no desire to move beyond their phallic existence to intimate relations. They are satisfied within an identical round of activities; their life is a never-changinf circle of work in the womb of the earth.” (Bettelheim, 210) Only a man open to such conflicts and a hope for a better future wield this spear (which has phallic connotations of its own). 21 It must be noted that the Grimm brothers wrote two versions of The Singing Bone, with the first edition in 1812 and the second in 1819, “Wilhelm in particular infusing the new editions with his Christian fervor, emboldening the moral strokes of the plot, meting out penalties to the wicked and rewards to the just, to conform with prevailing Christian and social values.” One such example in this story: “When his younger brother did not return he said, ‘The boar must have ripped him apart,’ and everyone believed it. But as nothing remains hidden from God, this black deed was also to come to light.” Warner, 211 Syler 7 alive. The murdered man’s bones were laid to rest in a beautiful grave in a churchyard.”

(Nothing says medieval like a fairy tale punishment.)

Mahler uses this as a basic frame, but puts his distinctive stamp on the story to create a fairy tale of his own. The story begins at the willow tree in a cool forest. Perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of the gruesome events that will come to light—it is said that the enchantress Circe lived in a grove of willows, and that during the Argonautic Expedition,

Jason saw corpses hanging from the trees.22 The knight lying under the tree is blonde, and as Warner writes, “Blondeness is less a descriptive term about hair pigmentation that a blazon in code…Fairness was a guarantee of quality…it connotated all that was pure, clean good…Golden hair tumbles through the stories in impossible quantities.”23 Again, a minstrel sees the bone, this time carving it into a flute (or a piccolo, as Mahler scored it).

The story unfolds—the two brothers were sent to find a red flower in the forest to win the hand of the king’s daughter, and as in the Grimm version, the younger finds the flower first. However, he falls asleep and the older kills the younger as he rests under the tree, taking the flower. The minstrel takes his leave to see the king immediately, rather than waiting a couple of years, playing the song of woe to people everywhere.

Part two of Mahler’s tale begins with the chorus setting the stage (“And don’t you know the reason for the joy? Let me tell you!”) as if in a Greek play. The queen is to wed the knight who found the flower (“today her proud mind is yielding,” reads one translation, “today her proud spirit will be broken,” says another. O the joys of marriage!), but the king looks disturbed and pale. His doom approaches in the form of the minstrel, who is playing his tibia flute, spilling the beans to all at the wedding feast. 22 Porteous, 64. 23 Warner goes on at length to discuss hair and color symbolism, judging from the title of her book. My favorite example is Tipelo’s painting Vice and Virtue—guess who is a pure blonde and a dark redhead. Warner, 364. Syler 8

When the king snatches the flute, the bone cries, “Now you are playing on a bone from my corpse! I must complain of that eternally!” All the while, the chorus has been interspersing cries of sorrow and woe, in spite of the rollicking festivities of the offstage wind band, but the sorrow mounts to a peak, and there is silence as the party flees and the castle crumbles, leaving only sorrow and an A minor chord.

In Klagende, the dramatic focus of the work isn’t the death of the younger brother, but rather the retribution that follows. The very title of the work gives it away— klagende translates not only as “lament,” but also has shades of “accuse, charge, complain, indict.” In legal cases, the klagende is the plaintiff. The central character isn’t the murderer, or even the silent queen (whose only real action in the entire plot is to fall to the ground at the very end; not much of a title role)…but the lowly minstrel who uses his skill as a creator and performer to expose the crime and overthrow a corrupt regime; the folk figure (a musician, no less) who brings aristocratic criminals to justice.24

The reception of Klagende wasn’t exactly a roaring success. It was submitted in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s Beethoven Prize competition, and the judges awarded the prize to a piece by Robert Fuchs. Mahler again submitted the work to Liszt, but the failure this time was more personal—Liszt said that the text was not likely to bring the work success. Having been rejected twice, “by two of Mahler’s most outstanding older contemporaries, representing both conservative and radical compositional tendencies of the time,”25 Mahler turned to conducting. Subsequently,

Klagende did not have its premiere until 1901.

24 Reilly, reconsidered, 50 25 Reilly, program notes, 2 Syler 9

Fast forward to the beginning of the end, and the labor that is Mahler’s Eighth

Symphony. A truly epic monument, it earns its moniker “Symphony of a Thousand” (or

Mahler’s epithet of “Barnum and Bailey”) with some room to spare. In a way, the role of the chorus it follows the same Greek tragedy chorus pattern as Klagende—the full choral complement singing the first movement, “Veni, creator spiritus” as almost an invocation to the muses. The Eighth clearly does not stem from a particular fairy tale, but rather it is

Mahler’s most personal personal fairy tale.

Without a doubt, the opening setting of the Faust movement, “Mountain ravines, forest, cliffs, wilderness,” calls on this spirit. The quintessential fairy tale setting, we are lost in the forest with , stumbling upon the dwarves’ cabin in Snow

White…or even upon Hundig’s cabin. Bettelstein claims that in the forest, we encounter

“a creation of wishes and anxieties”26 (and what a cast of characters we do find in this wilderness). In fairy tales, the forest represents a loss of the parental home for one reason or another, a journey into the unknown to build the inner structures of self which are only gained through life experiences. In his discussion of Goldilocks and her search for identity, Bettelheim writes, “The most direct image for a need to search is that something which has been lost must be found. If that search is for ourselves, then the most convincing symbol for this is that we have gotten lost. In fairy tales, being lost in the forest symbolizes not a need to be found, but rather that one must find or discover onself.”27

Images of nature and the forest intermingle with those of eternal love and divine bliss—odd, considering that the forest has been seen up to this point as merely a place to

26 Bettelheim, 94. 27 Ibid., 220. Syler 10 grow and mature, but it has always been seen as the beginning or midpoint of a journey, never an end. When even the “lions stalk silently, in amity, around us, honoring the hallowed spot, refuge of sacred Love,” there’s got to be something different about this situation. To Mahler, it seems, the forest is a representation of this sacred Love, a way to gain access to the “eternal flame of bliss, glowing bond of Love” of which Pater Estaticus speaks.

After Faust rises with the angels, the focus shifts as Doctor Marianus spots the

Queen of Heaven, Mater Gloriosa, who appears in the sky and hangs out for a while before singing her two lines. The focus shifts again, to the chorus of penitent women— the women who have sinned and have been redeemed through love, just as Faust was redeemed and brought up. While “figures of female evil”28 are a hallmark of classic fairy tales, evil stepmothers outnumbering the ogres and dragons with room to spare, there isn’t much room for redemption. Mahler has written a literal fairy tale: as the word ‘fairy’ traces back to the Latin fata, a variation of fatum, goddess of destiny, knowing the course of fate.29 “Recall the three Fates: Klotho, the spinner, spins the thread of life; Lachesis, draws it out, thereby apportioning one’s lifespan and destiny, and the dread Atropos, she who cannot be kept from turning the spindle, is ‘the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,’ who ‘slits the thin-spun life.’”30 The Mater Gloriosa embodies and embraces all three.

If Karel Capek is correct when he writes, “A real fairy tale, a fairy tale in its true function, is a tale within a circle of listeners,”31 then Mahler’s Eighth turns the circle outward to encompass us all, to remind us of our fates with Mater Gloriosa. The penitent women seem to gather all of humanity in as a grandmother pulls the babies to her lap, 28 Warner, 201. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Rowe, 63. 31 Warner, 17. Syler 11 both sharing their stories of love and forgiveness. Forgiveness through the Eternal

Feminine—a fairy tale with a twist. Most certainly the end of most fairy tales involves marriage, the quest through peril and hardship to find the woman—often the silent woman, as demonstrated in the Singing Bone, as the only demand of the queen is for her to fall on the ground as the murderer is revealed. The silence has ended—Magna

Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, Maria Aegyptica, and above all, Mater Gloriosa, proclaim the triumph of the woman’s voice, unlike in the fairy tales—originally the stories of the old women, written down by men, who then dressed in drag. “Like Perrault, who hid himself in the skirts of ma Mere l’Oye, the brothers [Grimm] put on the granny bonnet of

Dorothea [Viehmann, source of many of their tales], icon and voice of the folk.”32 To

Mahler, this isn’t necessary—only through the Eternal Feminine, which transcends both male and female, is this ascension, one of the two lines of Mater Gloriosa, “Come! Raise yourself to higher spheres,” possible.

“Everything perishable is merely an image. The unfulfillable: here it becomes actuality,” the Chorus Mysticus begins. Mahler’s “romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming…that is should forever be becoming and never be perfected,”33 at least according to Schlegel. However, with the Mater Gloriosa and the eternal essence of womanhood, Mahler himself crystallizes and begins the journey upward.

The fairy tale as a genre rests on the facets of contradiction and irony. As Max

Lüthi observes, “[the folktale in general has] a liking for all extremes, extreme contrasts in particular,” with characters as either beautiful or ugly, good or bad, poor or rich, industrious or lazy, humble or noble.”34 Keep in mind the contrast—“‘Beast’ can be at

32 Ibid., 193. 33 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments #116 34 Tatar, 107. Syler 12 once savage and civilized…the youngest of three sons can be both a simpleton and a sage, a humble lad and a prince, a coward and a hero.”35 The key element is the shift from extremes, and recognizing and appreciating the instability is “vital for understanding its characters, plots, and thematic orientations.”36 Change a few words, and the same sentence applies to Mahler and his propensity for embracing the ironic.

Novalis wrote, “A true fairy tale must also be a prophetic account of things—an ideal account—an absolutely necessary account. A true write of fairy tales sees into the future.”37 In his “Unanswered Question” lectures, Leonard Bernstein claims that “Ours is the century of death and Mahler is its musical prophet.”38. Although foreseeing the nuclear apocalypse and Watergate might be a bit farfetched, Mahler was indeed hypersensitive to the dualisms of himself and of his society. At once, he was torn between “composer, conductor, Christian, Jew, sophisticate, naïf, provincial, cosmopolitan.”39 Irony itself makes us aware of “the most noble, even the divine in human nature and shows how it is entirely absorbed into this life of fragmentation, contradiction, and nothingness.”40 Perhaps the view of Mahler as both musical prophet— and musical folklorist—isn’t so farfetched.

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 109. 37 Warner, 188. Italics mine. 38 Bernstein 39 Bernstein 40 Behler, 71. Syler 13

Bibliography

Behler, Ernst. The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism. Handout, MUSL 294.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Bottigheimer, Ruth, ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, allusion, and paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Rowe, Karen E. To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale. Tatar, Maria M. Born Yesterday: Heroes in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Zipes, Jack. The Grimms and the German Obsession with Fairy Tales..

Brackert, Helmut and Sander, Volkmar, ed. German Fairy Tales. Foreward by Bruno Bettelheim. New York: Continuum, 1985.

Hefling, Stephen, ed. Mahler Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reilly, Edward. R. Das klagende lied reconsidered.

Porteous, Alexandrer. Forest Folklore, Mythology and Romance. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. New York: Noonday Press, 1994.

Schlegel, Freidrich. Lucinde and the Fragments. Handout, MUSL 294.