Julian Johnson's new book on Mahler is a tour de force in many respects: its ambitious breadth, its interdisciplinary erudition, its elegant prose, and its display of knowledge of both Mahler's music and the criticism it has sparked from its beginnings to recent times make it an admirable addition to the large family of literature devoted to this complex yet intrinsically elusive composer. Johnson uses the ‘thread of the voice’ to link aspects of Mahler scholarship that customarily would be treated separately: analytical issues, aesthetics, rhetoric, genre, narrative, cultural context, and performance.

The first question that comes to mind is that of what ‘voice’ means for Johnson – in other words, whether it is, for him, principally a heuristic device or rather a specific critical-theoretical concept. The term ‘voice’ has been used in musicology, and in critical literature in general, in a variety of ways. In literary criticism, since such texts as Wayne Booth's 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction,Footnote ¹ it has been identified as an important discursive feature that orients the narrative in various directions, enriching its rhetorical meanings. As Gérard Genette explains, the ‘category of voice’ refers to not only the ‘person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person […] who reports it, and, if need be, all those people who participate, even though passively, in this narrating activity’.Footnote ² Questions such as ‘who is the narrator?’ – for instance, whether it is the author or an implied character – ‘from whose point of view is the story told?’, and ‘how many voices are heard in a text?’ have engendered a critical methodology in the field of narratology, in which ‘voice’ or ‘multiple voices’ have become critical terms signifying much more than the voice of a person or an actual character in a novel. Whether conceived as the true or implied authorial voice, or as the ‘true’ or ‘false’ voice of a subject, this concept has provided narratologists with a productive way of recognizing the variety of types of utterance that a work can convey. Similarly, Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism, the polyphonic novel, and heteroglossia (mentioned by Johnson, 196–8) have paved the way to recognizing the multiplicity of voices in literary works.Footnote ³

In music the term ‘voice’ has always held a natural place, used at the simplest, most concrete level to denote the human singing voice and, by extension, melody in all its guises, such as the ‘lines’ of the harmonic or contrapuntal texture of a musical piece or (more figuratively) the fictive ‘singing voices’ in instrumental music. Rousseau's belief that melody is directly connected with the human voice, and thus to the heart, continues to resonate in more recent discussions of melody and its importance as an expressive utterance. Back in 1974, discussing instrumental transcriptions of songs in his book The Composer's Voice, Edward T. Cone wrote:

This concept of voice can be extended metaphorically to music in general, but it applies especially to music where the voice is literally present. Cone unveiled the expressive implications of reconceiving and hearing instrumental lines in vocal music as ‘expressive voices’. This created the potential for a richness of interplay between a multiplicity of voices that might include the ‘composer's voice’, the singer-protagonist's voice, the poet's voice, and the voice of the instrumental accompaniment.

Other music scholars, such as Joseph Kerman, refer to the ability of ‘voice’ as manifested by instruments to imitate the vocal impulses and patterns characteristic of vocal genres.Footnote ⁵ Dissociating herself from previous writers, Carolyn Abbate, also cited by Johnson (for instance at 17 and 217–18), is interested in music's ‘narrating voice’, which, rather than being an ‘instrumental imitation of singing, […] is marked by multiple disjunctions with the music surrounding it’. Musical narration is a ‘rare and peculiar act’, constituting ‘moments that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect […] like voices from elsewhere, speaking (singing) in a fashion we recognize precisely because it is idiosyncratic’.Footnote ⁶ These are just a few examples of previous considerations of voice as a critical trope that Johnson acknowledges as precedents for his own work.

On the first page of his book Johnson posits the main tenets that guide his investigation: the prevalent impression that Mahler's music projects upon listeners an ‘expressive’ voice that ‘speaks powerfully to us’, and at the same time the ‘elusive’ quality of that voice resulting from its constant switches among a ‘plurality of musical voices’ that interact with one another (3). He justifies the use of the ‘metaphor of voice’ on the basis of the notion (similar to Rousseau's) ‘that all music, even the purely instrumental kind, refers back to a vocal origin and that even the most apparently abstract kind of music thus implies a kind of utterance’ (5). While asserting the ‘plurality of […] constituent voices’ in Mahler's music (5), Johnson leaves the concept of voice quite open and inclusive. ‘Voice’ could mean the rhetorical power of ‘telling’, a quality with which ‘we, as listeners, identify subjectively’ and which was recognized in Mahler's music by, among others, Adorno, in an apostrophized declaration quoted by Johnson near the start of his first chapter: ‘Listen. I am going to play something such as you have never heard’ (3).Footnote ⁷ But it could also refer to the simplest ‘individual line within a polyphonic texture’ (4), ‘the physicality of the voice and its mode of performance’ (4), the ‘composer's stylistic voice’ (5), ‘music's framing of its own voice […] inscribed in works themselves’ (47), the ‘narrating [third person] voice’ vs the ‘lyrical first person’ voice (6), the ‘single, exposed [instrumental] voice’ vs the ‘collective orchestral voice’ (7), the instrumental voices that ‘rework the idea of singing in the putatively more inward abstract medium of instrumental music’ (18), and so on. It soon becomes clear that Johnson is using the ‘slippery’ (4) concept of musical voice as a heuristic device, as a way of demonstrating that pinning down just one voice in Mahler's music is an impossible task, because the ‘frequent changes of musical voice and critical deconstructions of its own materials’ make this voice difficult to ‘catch hold of’ (3). It is precisely ‘the opposition of plural voices [that] defines Mahler's music’ (5), and the rest of the book endeavours to demonstrate what these multiple voices are, and how they interact – both within songs and symphonies and between one genre and the other – to define Mahler's unique expressive powers. Hence, instead of providing a fixed definition or categorization of the types of voice he will propose, he adopts a looser conception that helps him to observe a variety of meanings in Mahler's music. The book is therefore less an argument-driven proposition than a concatenation of insightful vignettes guided by the concept of voice, each illuminating another aspect of Mahler's multifacetedness.

A few specific examples of what qualifies as ‘voice’ in Mahler's music according to Johnson will suffice to give an idea of the openness of his conception and the terminological flexibility he employs. Instrumental parts can act as voices: in the Adagietto movement of the Fifth Symphony the melody presents a ‘lyrical voice’, while the string orchestra as a whole acts ‘as an expressive amplification’ of that voice (30–31); in the Eighth Symphony the organ's ‘“voice” […] is expanded by much of the orchestral writing in the symphony (neatly reversing the tendencies of nineteenth-century organs to imitate the orchestra)’ (31); and in the Third Symphony the ‘call of the post horn itself becomes a voice’ (57). At the same time ‘voices’ can refer to the vocal ‘sung lines’ in the Eighth Symphony, as well as to the ‘orchestral lines [that] lend themselves to vocalization’ (31). At a next level of sophistication Johnson shows that manipulations of voices can influence expression: in the Rondo Burlesque of the Ninth Symphony the orchestral lines become ‘orchestral voices’, the ‘rapidity with which [they] change result[ing] in something ungraspable’ (37); in the first movements of the Ninth and Tenth symphonies there is an alternation between ‘the affirmation of a nostalgically lyrical voice and a denial of its own subjective expression’ (87). Meanwhile the rhetorical effect of the Finale of the Seventh is characterized as ‘neither an ironic subversion of the lyrical voice nor a merely constructive game’ (119). ‘It is not that expressive, lyrical voices are absent’, Johnson writes, but that ‘they strain at the limits and are exaggerated in such a way that they risk becoming false’ (120). Throughout this ‘bewildering array of plural voices’ (5) the composer's ‘own voice’ itself gets lost, though at other times we are still able to distinguish ‘the development of Mahler's compositional voice’ (101).

All these and other metaphors give a sense of the wide array of impersonations Johnson assigns to Mahler's voices. Understood in this broad definition, the concept of voice is demonstrated most convincingly in the first four chapters and in Chapter 6, whereas in other chapters it seems more contrived. In Chapter 7, for example, the line between the ‘voices’ of the music and those of reception are more blurred: the subtitles ‘Critical Voices’, ‘Modernist Voices’, and ‘Political Voices’ serve more as framing devices than as explorations of the concept of voice. One might also question the dichotomy of the book's subtitle, ‘Expression and Irony’, by asking whether irony, which is a figure of speech and is treated in depth only in Chapter 4, does not itself belong under the larger category of expression. But each chapter is full of new or older insights presented from a fresh perspective, which keep the reader engaged from beginning to end.

Here is one example of the kind of reasoning Johnson invokes early on in the book. In the subchapter ‘Songs and Symphonies’ he explains voicedness through the close association, especially in Mahler's early works, between the two genres that dominate his output. Johnson states his belief that ‘Mahler's music is marked by an unusual degree of ambivalence between the figurative idea of voice and the actual human voice itself’ (17), not only because song and symphony are inextricably interwoven in Mahler, but also, and especially, because ‘the two forms permeate each other in manifold ways, as if the relationship between the human voice and an instrumental one were being continually reexamined’ (17). He continues:

Even though it might seem justified within this ‘Songs and Symphonies’ subchapter, that striking statement that there is ‘no simple opposition’ between the vocal and the instrumental in Mahler could perhaps do with more nuance and qualification, in terms of those other aspects that ‘speak expressively’ in Mahler's music, such as dance and other generic instrumental topics, as well as the purely symphonic procedures that characterize numerous movements of even the early symphonies. Johnson is right to point out that in the instrumental settings of song themes there is an ‘ambivalence’ between where the texted song stops ringing in our minds and where its wordless incarnation starts projecting its own ‘instrumental voice’. Yet I would clearly differentiate the symphonic movements that actually contain words (be they songs, such as Urlicht, or solo/choral movements such as Veni creator spiritus) from those that do not, or from those that incorporate the music but not the words of previous songs. The sonorous and semantic presence of the texts contributes such an important layer of ‘voicedness’ that we need to understand the ‘opposition’ between language and music in order to appreciate the whole. This being said, however, the above statements ring truer when Johnson exemplifies them in musical pieces.

Building upon Raymond Knapp's suggestion that ‘the slow orchestral songs that form the fourth movements in the Second and Third Symphonies function as a critique of the idea of a purely autonomous music’,Footnote ⁸ Johnson points out that when the actual singing voice is absent ‘the equation is generally more complex because […] the singing voice is absorbed into the orchestra’. In those movements the ‘tension between a lyrical voice and an objective, autonomous construction is thus internalized as a tension of the autonomous orchestral music itself’ (18). An example from the first movement of Mahler's First Symphony serves to show that the way in which the theme of the volkstümlich ‘Ging heut morgen über's Feld’ is preceded with a ‘long, atmospheric orchestral introduction’ lends the simple song a ‘grander metaphysical claim’, in that when the theme arrives in the symphony it ‘differs from the original Lied in being essentially polyphonic’, not just ‘expanded by contrapuntal voices’ but ‘also “many-voiced” in the exchange of orchestral sonorities by which it is characterized’. Through this transformation ‘into a collective rather than an individual song […] the musical subject is itself made polyphonic’, thus achieving the ‘expansion of subjectivity through the proliferation of component voices, the expansion of the single voice of the singer into the polyphony of the orchestra’ (20).

For Johnson, the absorption of the song as the ‘lyrical voice’ into the ‘putatively more inward’, ‘abstract’, ‘objective’, ‘autonomous construction’ of the orchestral, symphonic music creates a ‘tension of the autonomous orchestral music itself’ (18). This dichotomy between the subjective, lyrical voice of a song and the abstract, autonomous, objective construction of orchestral music seems to me too facile. Is this observation referring principally to the orchestral movements based on pre-existent songs? Are all song melodies lyrical? Does symphonic music always project itself as an ‘autonomous construction’, lacking lyricism? What are the conditions under which a symphonic theme can be lyrical? And in the song-based first movement of the First Symphony does the ‘absorption’ of the song's lyrical voice by the orchestral medium require that people know the song and can thus transpose the vocality of the original into the cello melody? But what if one did not know the song? What is interesting is the transformation of a vocal idiom into an orchestral one: the characteristics of the text of the song have been translated into musical characteristics (the even, walking pace, pastoral allusions, the nature sounds), and these characteristics in the cello melody itself suggest ‘vocality’ or expressive voice in a new, defamiliarized system, in which the original song does not necessarily have to belong. And, concerning ‘the expansion of the single voice of the singer into the polyphony of the orchestra’ (20), one should not forget that aspects of orchestral and vocal mixture had already occurred in the orchestral songs, where the subjective singing voice had often been interwoven with the ‘polyphony’ of the orchestra. The transmutation of subjectivity into the communal voices of the instruments is therefore not an aspect of the symphonic music alone.

Chapter 2, ‘Calling Forth a Voice’, gives Johnson the opportunity to discuss one of the most defining qualities of Mahler's music, that of acting as if it were summoning us to listen, as Adorno so powerfully put it. Johnson's examples go well beyond the obvious theatrical, curtain-raising gestures of the first movement of the Second Symphony, or of the invocation of the creator spiritus in the Eighth. He finds this rhetorical quality, for example, in music with text (such as two of Mahler's earliest songs, ‘Im Lenz’ and ‘Winterlied’), where the authentic Romantic expression is ‘necessarily distant’ and thus ‘requires calling forth to be heard at all’ (42). Images of Romantic distance involve summoning ‘disembodied voice[s]’ that call forth ‘across mountain and valley’ (42) until they sometimes break ‘in the face of an impossible act of expression, thus giv[ing] way to a purely instrumental close’ (45). Similarly, the ‘Horn Calls, Birdsong, and Bells’ that provide a subtitle within this chapter constitute ‘gestures of calling’ that construct a ‘complex layering of semiotic activity’ (53) yet whose manipulation ‘distances them from […] programmatic directness’ (54). They ‘move between the real and the aesthetic, the direct and the symbolic’, conveying a wide variety of symbolic and structural functions, such as ‘symbol[s] of homesickness’, ‘moments of arrival’, ‘collective calls’ (54–5), even ‘fragile mediation’ between ‘two musical spaces’, as in the horn episode in the Scherzo of the Third (57).

In what is one of the most original turns in the book Johnson defines a new category of calls: the ‘Calling Back’, the opposite of the ‘Calling Forth’. If music can ‘summon a voice’ in order ‘to call a presence out of absence’, Johnson suggests that

Although it is difficult to imagine how such a process of revoking something physically absent through the presence of music might happen, Johnson argues quite convincingly that this voice is heard in Mahler, particularly at moments involving the ‘musical revocation of death itself’ (71). Such an ‘orphic capacity to resummon presence’ is often given to the harp, but its most poignant manifestation happens in Kindertotenlieder, ‘songs predicated on the idea of revoking the radical absence of death through the presence conferred by an invoked voice’ (71). He refers to this ability of Mahler's music to behave as if – showing ‘how things might have been or might become’.Footnote ⁹ While one might recognize this quality of ‘as if’ in the majority of his output – as Johnson shows, Mahler's music wears many masks – it is present in Kindertotenlieder both through the text's metaphorical invocations of the children ‘as if’ they were there and through Mahler's musical ‘as if's, achieved through empty counterpoint, contextual dissonances (storm and lullaby), and so on (71–83). Other examples of ‘revocation’ are analysed in, for example, Das Lied, the Ninth Symphony, and the First Symphony.

Johnson introduces another interesting idea in Chapter 3, ‘Constructing a Voice’. Here he endeavours to explore what he sees, again, as constitutive of Mahler's music: the tension between the way in which this music ‘proposes itself as authentic expression’ and at the same time ‘draws attention to itself as something made – as artifice’ (93). Johnson has put his finger here on an important aspect of Mahler's music that both his contemporaries and today's generations have sensed but have had trouble defining. Perhaps an early attempt to deal with this issue was Robert P. Morgan's invocation of the procedure of ‘defamiliarization’ from the Russian formalists,Footnote ¹⁰ but Johnson goes further in exploring it. He shows that there is in this music a wilful, deliberate avoidance of a ‘subjective, lyrical voice’, and that instead Mahler is ‘approach[ing] musical expression obliquely, through a series of character masks’ (100). Because of this tension ‘one is never entirely sure about the status of what is being said’ (102). One can think of many examples, but Johnson's include songs in a folk style, imitating a Ländler, yet caught in the ‘discrepancies between the actual genre (the lied) and the one evoked (a country dance), and between the actual instrumental forces (voice and piano) and those evoked (a village band)’ (103). The listener's reaction would possibly be one of sentimental attachment to the old country atmosphere, yet the constructed denial of authenticity discourages a naïve expressive approach. The same is true in another example Johnson gives, from the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, where ‘naïveté and historicism meet’ (107). Here again the ‘pure’ Classical expression is not to be believed, because of the many manipulations and distortions of classical patterns that Mahler applies to the movement. The result, therefore, is a distantiation from Romantic expression, a call to accept this new, more cynical and self-reflexive artificial style that is Mahler's own construction. Exposed also in the two Nachtmusiken of the Seventh Symphony, the tension between artifice and authenticity ‘places the expressive voice [in Mahler's music] most definitely in quotation marks’ (124).

Chapter 4, ‘Plural Voices’, provides a very good discussion of humour, recapturing the connections between Mahler's attitude towards irony and Jean Paul's categories of humour, including an interesting parallel between Jean Paul's and Bakhtin's concepts of the ‘inverted sublime’ manifested through the ‘carnivalesque’ (128–34). Yet Mahler's humour is, in Johnson's opinion, closer to Jean Paul's concept because ‘he deploys the carnivalesque in the face of [that] aspiration toward order’ (132). Johnson posits an interesting distinction in Mahler between humour, which ‘generally overlaps with a deliberate naïveté that, as it were, speaks for itself’, and irony, which ‘is the product of authorial interventions, evident in the disparity between the material and its treatment’ (134). Johnson sees Mahler's term ‘humorously ironic’ as implying ‘that he saw Humor and irony as much the same thing’ (134). While the examples examined in this chapter differ from those of the previous one, and more attention is paid to citation, in terms of both ‘borrowed voices’ and self-borrowing, one might notice a certain resemblance between the ‘disparity between the material and its treatment’ and the tension between ‘authenticity’ and ‘construction’ explored in the previous chapter.

The book's remaining chapters (5–8) seem to follow more beaten paths than the previous ones, providing insightful commentaries on Mahlerian topics familiar from the literature, but gathered under the new umbrella of ‘voice’, with reflections informed in part by the previous chapters. Chapter 5, ‘Genre and Voice’, is more about genre than about voice. The contributions of the genres of song, opera, and symphony are considered, as well as ‘Mahler's ambivalence about symphony versus tone poem’ (186) or ‘the tension between the particularity of the material and the abstract logic of form’ (189). Johnson insists especially on Mahler's self-critical approach to the symphony as a genre, his contribution to which, in the opinion of many scholars, marks an end to the symphonic tradition as we know it. Chapter 6, ‘Ways of Telling’, brings further insights into the ways in which this music communicates meanings, through narrative strategies such as those pointed out by Adorno, ‘collapse, breakthrough, suspension, and fulfillment’ (216), or through ‘fragmentation’, ‘recollection’, or ‘reminiscence’. Johnson considers the ‘literary voices’ that influenced Mahler (such as Dostoyevsky, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nietzsche, or Jean Paul) and, in the subsection ‘Idyll, Dream, and Fairy Tale’, the ‘capacity to shift from one poetic world to another’ (207) demonstrated in the many movements that juxtapose musical renditions of these literary categories. The last two chapters are purely historical: ‘Vienna, Modernism, and Modernity’ assesses the reception of Mahler's music and personality in the political, cultural, and artistic climate of his time, while ‘Performing Authenticity’ discusses the performance history of the works. Informative and well written, like the rest of the book, they show that even if Mahler's voices will never be exhausted, Johnson has certainly found his own.