Syler 1 to Offer a Definition of a Fairy Tale, Marina Warner Writes That

Syler 1 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 fairy tale, 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 Brothers Grimm, 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 Grimm tales 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 youngest son.”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.

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