Gustav Mahler has long played a prominent role in our understanding both of Viennese culture (especially of its modernist avant-garde) and of pervasive antisemitic currents in the Austrian capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mahler stood out as a Jewish convert to Catholicism, a director of the famed Viennese opera, and a modernist composer of note. The antisemitic press had a field day with him, depicting him as a Jew who aimed to destroy Austrian and German culture. In her new book, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, musicologist K.M. Knittel seeks to understand the antisemitic vocabulary that Viennese music critics used to criticize Mahler's musical compositions. Wisely avoiding the overtly antisemitic press and analyzing the views only of mainstream music critics in the respectable press (some of them Jewish), Knittel convincingly demonstrates how these critics employed antisemitic tropes in their evaluation of Mahler and his music. She regrets that this language—none of it overtly antisemitic or distasteful, most of it merely descriptive to the innocent reader—is still used by music scholars unfamiliar with the antisemitic Viennese environment from which it sprang.
Knittel's central point is that the Viennese music critics who first heard Mahler's symphonies were deeply influenced by Richard Wagner's antisemitic 1850 tract, Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewry in Music). In that work, Wagner claimed that Jews, eternal outsiders in Europe and aliens among the German Volk from whom authentic German music issued, were incapable of musical creativity. Jewish composers, Wagner argued, simply borrowed or imitated musical ideas and themes and covered over their imitations with dazzling surface orchestrations meant to deceive the listener. Jewish music was, as a result, meaningless, superficial, and empty. Jews, Wagner insisted, might try to pass as German composers, but the restlessness, nervousness, and coldness of their music would always betray its Jewish origins.
Mainstream Viennese music critics indicated that they disliked Mahler's compositions for the same traits that Wagner had declared “Jewish.” They criticized his symphonies because these works represented “programmatic” rather than “absolute” or real music—that is, they relied on the telling of a story rather than on internal musical logic to convey their power. The fact that Mahler labeled his compositions “symphonies” was a sign of his desire to deceive his audiences, and his need to compose programmatic music was proof of his lack of creativity. More importantly, critics chastised Mahler for borrowing musical themes, folk songs, and other material from other composers. They admonished him for writing cold, chaotic, trivial, incoherent, and incomprehensible music, and they decried his orchestrations as an attempt to conceal the emptiness of his music. Despite all his technical skill, Mahler lacked serious musical ideas; whatever was distinctive about his music was deemed “Jewish.” The use of such language, Knittel emphasizes, echoed Wagner's central point that a Jew could not write real music.
Knittel's argument is intriguing, but it suffers from several problems. In the first place, Knittel has not dealt with reviews of Mahler's music that were positive. She indicates that Mahler was very popular with Viennese audiences; if so, surely not all critics had internalized Wagner's negative views. One would also like to know what critics in Germany, France, or the United States thought of Mahler's work. If reviews of Mahler's music in those places were more positive than those in Austria, then Knittel's arguments about the Viennese obsession with Jewish difference would be compelling. But if critics in Paris or New York, who probably knew nothing of Wagner's views, also on the whole disliked Mahler, then perhaps it was not anti-Jewish prejudice alone that influenced the Viennese critics. Secondly, Knittel has failed to consider seriously the possibility that certain critics may have disliked Mahler's symphonies simply because they disliked modernism in general. It is, however, helpful that Knittel has compared the critical reception of Mahler to the critical reception of the early, modernist tone poems and operas of Richard Strauss. (Unlike Mahler, Strauss had impeccable Aryan lineage, and many critics hailed him as the outstanding new German composer.) Although reviewers criticized Strauss for many of the same qualities they criticized in Mahler—surface dazzle, chaos, lack of original musical ideas, excessive cleverness, and noise—their criticism of Mahler was much harsher than that of Strauss. Strauss openly wrote program music; he did not pretend to write symphonies like Mahler. Unlike Mahler, he had a plan, which was unpleasant and might kill music, but at least he controlled his compositions, whereas Mahler did not. Strauss might choose a “Jewish” direction, but he could change - as Mahler (the Jew) could not.
Knittel's comparison of the reception of Mahler and Strauss is interesting, but it is not always clear what she wants to do with it. She does not explicitly state that “modernism” was code for “Jewish,” or that critics used a language of Jewish difference to describe modernism in general. As with Mahler, so too with Strauss, she does not examine positive reviews of his music. She shies away from making a categorical statement that the critics regarded Strauss' music as “Jewish.” Nor does she explain the significance, for her analysis, of Strauss' turn away from modernism in his later compositions, or the critics' response to that turn.
Seeing Mahler suffers from other problems as well. Not a historian, Knittel profoundly misunderstands the nature of antisemitism in Vienna. She declares that Vienna was the most racially paranoid city in Europe and that Jewishness was no longer a religious category for the Viennese, only a racial one. In fact, racial antisemitism was not particularly popular in Habsburg Vienna, and Jewishness as a religious category certainly persisted in many arenas. To be sure, Viennese voters (who formed only about 7% of the total population) voted the antisemitic Christian Social Party into power in 1895, and that party dominated city government until the introduction of universal suffrage in 1919. However, the Christian Social Party was not obsessed with race, and those who voted for it did so for many reasons, including the desire to get rid of the detested liberal city administration. Antisemitism and notions of Jewish difference were widespread in Vienna, but not in the way that Knittel thinks.
Knittel also argues that Vienna was a gateway for Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing persecution. But Vienna never served that role; most Russian Jews fled across Germany. Those Eastern European Jews who did come to Vienna were mostly Austrian citizens from Galicia who left their homes due to economic hardship, not persecution. Yet Knittel goes so far as to write that the Christian Social Party owed its success to a fear of Russian Jews. That that is simply not the case.
There are some additional minor problems in the book. Knittel quotes excessively from her sources. The long quotations appear in English, but she also provides the original German passages in her footnotes, which is unnecessary. Knittel also gives German titles to her chapters, for no apparent reason.
Despite these problems, Seeing Mahler provides insight from an interesting angle into the way Viennese critics understood Mahler as a Jew, as well as into the way they saw his music—and perhaps modernism in general—as somehow “Jewish.” In this respect, Knittel has made an important contribution to understanding the ways in which antisemitic rhetoric pervaded European culture at the fin-de-siècle.
