‘Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain, and one day we shall meet’, mused Gustav Mahler about his fellow composer.Footnote ¹ The same could be said of Thomas Peattie and Seth Monahan, authors of Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes and Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas. With one nuance: if one can imagine Monahan digging a tunnel through the mountain, Peattie would rather climb it. Both are determined to explore most of their Mahlerian mountain, but through very different means. Peattie the Wanderer carves paths for the reader to follow, occasionally taking us on a train ride, deploying the lines and bumps of Mahler’s musical landscapes before our eyes and ears. Monahan chooses to expose the mountain’s foundations, fencing through the tunnel as he progresses towards its end, armed with his Sonata Theory sword and bits of Adornian briskness. The mountain shall be known from the inside out, he seems to argue. Monahan’s ‘fencing approach’ is presented upfront – he intends to ‘counter’ problematic assumptions ‘in a single stroke’ (p. 12), pleading a ‘need for reliable answers to long-standing interpretive dilemmas’ (p. 5). Such an undertaking justifies the robustness of his style, which, he acknowledges, might put some readers off, but ‘you can’t please everyone’ (p. 7). Monahan’s book is openly teleological – there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and we shall get there – while Peattie’s insistence on the ‘deeply fractured teleology’ of Mahler’s music (p. 1) allows him to resist the temptation of transforming it into a coherent whole. Rather than drawing a detailed picture of the mountain, Peattie evokes interpretive lines with a brush, sketching an impressionist landscape. Monahan claims a resolutely narrative approach, which Peattie clearly challenges. In short, we are dealing here with two inspiring pieces of Mahlerian scholarship, which confirm that the complexity of Mahler’s music can be tackled and addressed from opposite perspectives. The question then, is: will the Wanderer and the Fencer meet at some point of their exploration?

With Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes, Peattie wants to explore the composer’s ‘provocative reinvention of the genre at the turn of the twentieth century’ (p. 7). Whereas Monahan is determined to anchor Mahler’s symphonies in sonata form, Peattie is more interested in their breaks, fractures and discontinuities. In fact, the latter attempts to tease out the ‘fundamental and largely unacknowledged tension between the music’s episodic structure and its often-noted narrative impulse’ (p. 7) – also expressed in terms of a conflict between ‘discontinuity’ and ‘continuity’. Like Monahan, Peattie is interested in the ways in which Mahler’s music dialogues with traditions, proposing an interdisciplinary model drawing on three broad categories: landscape, mobility and theatricality. The idea of movement is essential in Peattie’s vision, playing an equally important role within the other two categories. On the one hand, Mahler’s relationship to nature and landscape is explored from the perspective of the traveling (mobile) composer; and on the other hand, Peattie shows how Mahler expands the symphonic space by playing on the successive remoteness and closeness of ‘theatrical’ offstage utterances. It is the tension between theatrical and symphonic forms, suggests Peattie, that allowed Mahler to ‘revitalize the symphony as a genre’ (p. 9).

The book’s five chapters each address key aspects of Peattie’s approach. He begins with Mahler’s treatment of symphonic space in Das Klagende Lied and in the First Symphony, revealing the significance of the theatrical component in his œuvre. Chapter 2 explores Mahler’s manipulation of distance – ‘imagined’ or real – in the Second and Third Symphonies. The Sixth and Seventh Symphonies are used as case studies in Chapters 3 and 4 to discuss notions of landscape, particularly the extent to which the progressive intrusion of technology affects the perception of the modern traveller. In the last chapter, Peattie slows down the train to end with the figure of the Wanderer, considered in connection with Das Lied von der Erde. Therefore, Peattie leads us from the notion of theatricality as played out in space (Chapter 1), using the idea of ‘distant sound’ (Chapters 1 and 2) as a transition towards the concept of mobility, which in turn informs his perspective on landscape (Chapters 3, 4 and 5).

Peattie’s journey begins with another composer, Luciano Berio. Starting from the latter’s reworking of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony in the Sinfonia (1968–69), the author suggests that Berio’s ‘critical engagement’ with Mahler’s music sheds light on two of its most significant features: its ‘theatrical excesses’ and ‘the unique and often radical approach to the presentation and ordering of musical events’ (pp. 1 and 7). What Peattie precisely means by that is not fully explained, but it has to do with the ‘crucial relationship between continuity and discontinuity’ (p. 1). Peattie’s project in this book, clearly laid out at the end of the Introduction, is to search for the origins of Mahler’s ‘fractured teleology’ (p. 8) using an interdisciplinary framework.

The first chapter considers the ‘expansion of symphonic space’ in Mahler’s early works from the perspective of his conducting practice. Peattie focuses on the idea of ‘distant sound’ (or offstage music) in Das Klagende Lied and in the First Symphony, seeing it as a theatrical gesture inspired by operatic models – particularly by Wagner. For Peattie, Mahler’s music ‘thrives on the tension generated by its conflicting allegiances to a range of symphonic and operatic models’ (p. 12). In ‘Der Spielman’, as well as in the First Symphony, the manipulation of distant space does not bear any obvious programmatic meaning, which contributes to establish a ‘highly original symphonic dramaturgy’ (p. 12). Peattie argues that throughout his works, Mahler tends progressively towards a form of ‘abstract’ theatricality that can relate to Theodor Adorno’s notion of opera assoluta: Mahler’s symphonies are ‘works that tend towards opera, but opera that has been, so to speak, purified of any outer action’ (p. 41).

The question of ‘distant music’ is further explored in Chapter 2, where an additional layer is added: music ‘from the distance’ is not necessarily exported in the offstage space but can also emerge from the stage, implying the new category of ‘imagined distance’ – ‘music as if from the distance’ (p. 9). The distance conveyed by the horns playing in weiter Entfernung at the beginning of the Finale of the Second Symphony, instructed to play ‘as loudly as possible’, ‘has less to do with their physical distance from the main ensemble than with the fact that they seem to occupy an entirely different temporal sphere’ (p. 50). Here Peattie makes a fascinating distinction between physically distant sound and the idea of distance. In other words, Mahler manipulates both the ‘real’ scenic space and a more abstract notion of musical space. These different conceptions of distance all play significant roles in the Third Symphony, where ‘the intersection of real and imagined distance results in the creation of an entirely new kind of symphonic landscape’ (p. 9). Peattie shows that this play between literal and imagined distance is particularly striking in the Scherzo’s posthorn episodes. In the first episode, the impression of mobility is conveyed by performance indications, while in the second, the sound is ‘physically distant’ but remains immobile (p. 72).

Chapter 3, ‘Alpine Journeys’, turns our attention to another kind of distance – vertical this time: the topos of mountain heights as a retreat from the Weltlauf. To help us rethink the relationship between music and alpine landscape, Peattie turns his attention to the cowbells of the Sixth Symphony. Challenging the assumption that the cowbell episodes plainly symbolize the solitude of alpine retreat, the author suggests that their ‘increasingly unorthodox’ treatment ‘undermines any claim to a specific symbolic meaning’ (p. 83). Mahler is situated here in the context of a ‘rapidly changing landscape’, accessible by railroad and occupied by an increasing number of tourists. The reconstruction of a ‘lightening journey’ (Blitzausflug) Mahler made in the Dolomites reveals the composer as a modern inhabitant of a landscape that has been ‘transformed into one of the most important sites of urban culture’ (p. 10), which challenges the Romantic view of the promeneur solitaire. It is precisely the failure of a solitary communion with mountain, according to Peattie, which is reflected in the Sixth Symphony. In this light, the sound of cowbells in the Sixth is heard as an ‘aural disturbance’, functioning as ‘ironic souvenirs of the fin-de-siècle Austrian institution of the Sommerfrische’ (p. 84).

Chapter 4 depicts Mahler as a railway passenger, a traveller whose relationship to nature has been shaped as much by train trips as by his not-so-solitary practice of hiking. The ‘breathtaking panoramas he experienced from the perspective of the railway carriage’, Peattie writes, ‘offer a powerful metaphor for coming to terms with the kaleidoscopic unfolding of musical events that characterizes parts of the Seventh Symphony’ (p. 10). If Mahler’s play on distant sound in his earlier symphonies suggests the mobility of the listening subject, landscape itself might have been set to motion in the Seventh. Peattie first examines Mahler’s perspective on nature against the backdrop of nineteenth-century paintings (J.M.W. Turner, Adolph Menzel and Honoré Daumier), moving then to cinematic panoramas – a new form of entertainment that was meant to replicate the experience of the modern traveller –, which lead us to a discussion of an early film from the Lumière brothers. The view, taken from the carriage, of a continuously unfolding landscape constantly interrupted by objects in the foreground, resonates with the tension between continuity and discontinuity that characterizes Mahler’s Seventh. Chapter 4 ends with a thought-provoking discussion of the ‘idyll’ as being both interrupted and intrusive – which raises the question, not discussed in the book, of the relationship between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ in Mahler. (Put differently, it is often difficult to understand where the ‘norm’ is in this music, as the ‘intruder’ often becomes assimilated into the main discourse, which in turn can intrude into the new fabric).

The notion of being out of place, searching for where we belong, is discussed in the final chapter, ‘Wanderers’. There, Peattie deconstructs Mahler’s complex relationship to the figure of the Wanderer – which immediately brings to mind the composer’s often-quoted comment on his condition of a perpetual intruder.Footnote ² Peattie evokes the figure of the wandering Jew, but quickly dismisses it as not particularly relevant to the question: ‘In the end …, it seems clear that Mahler’s reference [to Ashasver] represents nothing more than a casual flirtation with a commonly invoked figure that was on some level interchangeable with the Romantic wanderer’ (p. 160). He is right to question the idea that Mahler necessarily identified with the wandering Jew, but this complex question deserved more attention. The following reflections on Mahler’s ‘obsession with walking’ (p. 157) are illuminating, and could have been related to the topic of the wandering Jew: he ‘might have walked’, proposes Peattie, ‘to lay claim to the places that he wishes to belong’ (p. 164). The reader is then led at the core of the chapter’s main task: to untangle the ‘relationship between lateness, leave taking, and biography’ (p. 153). While Peattie acknowledges the presence of a real preoccupation with death in the composer’s late years, he complicates this picture by insisting on the deeply positive aspect of wandering – the physical act of walking. Peattie carefully reconsiders the context of composition of Das Lied, showing that Mahler’s lack of mobility in 1908 had a strong impact on his compositional practice. Mahler needed to move in order to compose, and walking appears here as a fundamentally ‘life-affirming’ practice (p. 10). In the end, the Wanderer is ‘striving for the heavenly while finding itself inextricably rooted in the earthly’ (p. 190), in a similar way that Mahler’s music embodies a ‘tension between hopeful yearning and impossibility to attain transcendence’ (p. 143).

Peattie’s exploration of Mahler’s symphonies through categories of landscape, mobility and theatricality offer new insight into fundamental issues, such as the tension between symphonic and operatic models, or Mahler’s ambivalent relationship to the urban space, nature and technology. The provocative ideas proposed in this study might have been more strongly supported by a closer attention to musical detail, particularly explaining more clearly how Mahler’s presentation of musical events is ‘unorthodox’, and in relationship to which orthodoxy. That the book does not contain any musical example is consistent with the author’s project to offer a broader picture of Mahler’s works, drawing on parallels with literature, visual arts and cinema, but Peattie’s discussion of specific passages would occasionally have benefited from a musical visualization of the points at stake. That said, Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes is a highly engaging study that will inspire other readers and scholars to carve new paths on their own Mahler mountain.

Let us turn now to what happens under the mountain.

Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas begins with reflections on the relationship between Mahler studies and music theory. Music theorists paid less attention to Mahler than to other composers of the same period, claims Monahan, because engaging with his music means dealing with larger hermeneutical questions. In other words, Mahler would not be the ideal candidate for those who want to deal only with ‘the music itself’. In turn, Mahler studies have been more preoccupied by the ‘broadest issues of meaning in Mahler, but they have often rushed into high-flying hermeneutics without a penetrating consideration of the musical facts on the ground’ (p. 2). This book is an attempt to ‘break that stalemate, to bridge these scholarly cultures by bringing new analytical rigor to the task of interpreting Mahler’ (p. 2). If ‘high-flying’ hermeneutics has been more preoccupied with ‘transsymphonic story telling’ – that is, with narratives spanning the whole work – Monahan wants to examine Mahler’s single-movement narratives with ‘uncommon precision and intertextual scope’ (p. 3). His battle plan implies no less than ‘taking ownership of all the notes – ‘a complex task’, he acknowledges, ‘but a vital one’ (p. 74). This systematic colonization project will be carried through an examination of ‘the role of sonata form in Mahler’s creative imagination’ (p. 3).

Part I exposes Monahan’s original theoretical combination of Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory, Adorno’s concept of the ‘novel’ symphony and theories of narrativity, in order to come to terms with Mahler’s reinterpretation of sonata form. Parts II and III present four cases studies based on sonata form movements from Mahler’s early and middle-period symphonies (1888–1904). Published in the Oxford series Studies in Music Theory, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas is complemented by its website companion, which hosts analytical short-score reductions of each movements discussed in the book – a good strategy to reduce the number of musical examples in the book.

The opening chapter develops Monahan’s key thesis that a ‘surprisingly “traditional” concept of sonata form informs all of Mahler’s early and middle-period symphonies’ (p. 12). Critics, he rightly points out, have been ‘more inclined to hear Mahler as the harbinger of the Second Viennese School than a latecomer of the First’, and as a result, they have ‘tended to downplay [his] classical traits as mere “scaffolding”’ (p. 99). Mahler didn’t use sonata form as a vestige of a dying tradition, argues Monahan, but as a dynamic, ‘narrative vehicle, a means of musical storytelling’ (p. 4). The stories told by Mahler’s sonatas are interpreted here as ‘intramusical narratives’, ‘abstract dramatic scenarios’ in which the ‘execution of sonata form itself provides the music’s main dramatic/teleological backbone’ (p. 5). In Hepokoski and Darcy’s sonata theory, the secondary theme S is the agent responsible for the completion of the movement’s ‘essential trajectory’ or ‘generic mission’ (see Fig. 1.1, p. 14). The perfect authentic cadence closing the recapitulation (ESC) is the ‘telos of sonata plot as a whole’ (p. 13), the ultimate goal towards which the ‘imperative tonal arc’ tends. If agent S fails to accomplish its mission – to secure the ESC – the sonata is a ‘failure’. Starting from there, Monahan suggests that the success or failure of the sonata plot provides the dramatic substance of Mahler’s works, as ‘affirmative/major mode sonata endings’ correspond with ‘properly functioning recapitulations’, while ‘tragic/minor-mode conclusions’ are associated with ‘failed recapitulations’ (p. 16). Three case studies are briefly exposed in Chapter 1 – one success and two failures –, serving as an introduction to the more developed analyses unfolding in chapters 4 to 7. The Finale of the First is a fascinating case, where the failure of the sonata enables the transcendence of the whole work, the ‘success of the transsymphonic D-major arc’ (p. 27). ‘The sonata would have to fail’, writes Monahan, ‘so that the symphony as a whole could succeed’ (p. 28). As shown in the last chapter, the finale of the Sixth Symphony offers a case of spectacular failure of the sonata form, which could also be taken as a necessary step towards Mahler’s transcendence of traditional forms.

Adorno’s ‘novelistic’ approach to Mahler’s music, the other crucial inspiration for Monahan’s project, is examined in detail in Chapter 2. The author takes the opportunity to reassess Adorno’s view of Mahler as ‘critic of bourgeoisified Romanticism’, who mainly used traditional forms to subvert and distort them (p. 5). With his typically fearless and efficient energy, Monahan undertakes to make order in Adorno’s messy prose, in order to reach a ‘more coherent kind of sense’; a task implying ‘a certain amount of distortion’, ‘necessary and even desirable’ (p. 36). Drawing both from the ‘bottom-up’ construction of Adorno’s model of the novel-symphony (p. 39) and from Hepokoski and Darcy’s concept of the sonata plot, Monahan’s key thesis is that Mahler’s music embodies two conflicted impulses, epic and formalist.

In Chapter 3, Monahan continues to bring order into messy business – here, the business of ‘Mahlerian hearing’, by ‘mapping out the narrative domains that interact most productively with the movement-spanning sonata plot’ (p. 6). Summarizing the musicological debate on narrativity launched in the 1990s, Monahan concludes that the justification of narrative readings lies in ‘whether they are illuminating and eloquent, not in proofs that the music “narrates” per se’ (p. 6). At this point the reader is warned: the book is not for those ‘eager to trivialize narrative analysis’ – so beware (p. 74). This chapter addresses a fundamental aspect of Monahan’s theory, which immediately raises questions. If the success or failure of the sonata plot provides the dramatic substance of Mahler’s works (at least up to the Sixth Symphony), how does the author intend to interpret the other movements? How can one justify a focus on sonata form movements (beginnings and endings), if Mahler’s symphonies are to be taken as ‘integral teleological wholes’ (p. 2)? It may be claimed that outer movements are more important than the inner ones, for two main reasons. First, they often refer to each other through motivic connections; and second, ‘nearly all inner-movement narrative threads point to one or the other of the outer movements’ (p. 88). While this focus on beginnings and ends makes sense on a certain level – and Monahan’s illuminating analyses of the first and last movements of the Sixth (Chapter 4 and 7) support such a position – disregarding middle movements as ‘tableaux’ which could be reordered without changing the meaning of the whole seems expeditious (p. 89).

Part II exposes two examples of Monahan’s category of ‘classical’ sonata form in Mahler: the first movement of the Fourth Symphony and the opening Allegro of the Sixth. While the Fourth present a classicist form on its surface, the Sixth is classical on a deeper level. The latter is the fil rouge holding these four case studies as a coherent whole. In Chapter 4, Monahan reassesses the reception of the Sixth, focusing on its deeply classical architecture concealed by a modernist surface, examining the extent to which its archaism relates to its tragic tone, as well as to its autobiographical aspects. ‘Nowhere does Mahler dramatize the basic teleology of the classical sonata with such urgency’, he writes:

Monahan views the symphony’s ‘overarching drama’ as being enacted through its outer movements, as the Finale seems to ‘wrap up a story set in motion in the symphony’s opening bars’ (p. 98). In terms of musical plot, the Allegro of the Sixth dramatizes a structural crisis and its resolution (associated here with a domestic crisis between Mahler and his wife): the secondary theme fails to lead to the tonic in the recapitulation, until the coda ultimately redeems this failure by bringing the missing tonic back.

The opening Allegro of the Sixth is a successor of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, described as an ‘ironized pastiche of Mozartean gestures and textures’ (p. 99). Monahan examines in Chapter 5 what he calls ‘games of closure’ at play in this movement: at the moment of the anticipated cadence in the exposition, the sonata’s trajectory is deflected in a series of digressions, leading to closure in the tonic key. This happens in the recapitulation as well, and thus, ‘the exposition’s tonic ending neutralizes the very “tonal tension” that is supposed to motivate the drama to its close’ (p. 146), which destabilizes the traditional structure of ‘promise’ and ‘accomplishment’ of the sonata plot.

In Chapter 6, Monahan explores the first movement of the Third Symphony, Mahler’s longest symphonic opening, in two opposite perspectives – as an Adornian novel, and as a sonata, which is clearly at odds with Adorno’s take. The proposed reading arises from the tensions between these two conflicting conceptions – the ‘top-down’ hearing of a sonata plot, and the ‘bottom-up’ epic approach. Here,

The book ends with the catastrophic Finale of the Sixth Symphony. Chapter 7 makes the provocative suggestion that the Finale’s tragedy ‘only begins with monumental self-destruction’, because ultimately, it ‘entails the wholesale negation of two preceding sonata-form movements as well: 6/I and 3/I’ (p. 219). Using the common image of Mahler as the Finale’s protagonist, Monahan envisions the composer in an ‘act of a spectacular creative immolation’ à la Brünnhilde, ‘methodically’ laying ‘waste to his own history’ (p. 219). The Finale of the Sixth ‘negates’ the first movement with its ‘epic tendency’ inherited from the Third Symphony, by ‘revoking its major mode conclusion, but also by laying bare the artifice and arbitrariness of its seemingly naturalistic, effortless classical form’ (p. 219). This is where Monahan makes the connection between the ‘classicism’ of the Sixth and its negative quality: its negativity arises precisely from Mahler’s critique of sonata form. Monahan then proposes to relate the Sixth Symphony’s ‘domestic’ and ‘tragic’ subtexts (involving, among other things, a connection between the hammerblows of the Finale and Alma Mahler’s gynecologist) in a compelling Freudian reading.

With his last words, Monahan offers his study as a ‘starting point for extended dialogues that brings us into a closer engagement with this music’ (p. 261), and there is no doubt that this task is well achieved (‘mission accomplished’, agent ‘S’ Monahan). His analyses are clear, compelling and never dry – the reader always knows what to look for. Monahan’s unapologetic praise of musical details is commendable, because the detail is used to move to broader interpretive issues. He does not attempt to coerce the music into a single theoretical approach, and allows for multiple readings to coexist. On another level, this study has the merits to challenges the postmodern view of Mahler using tradition only to distort it, by highlighting the composer’s constructive use of traditional forms. It remains that Monahan’s interpretive framework works only for part of the Mahlerian repertoire, and his justification for leaving the other movements aside is not fully convincing. Here and there, bold claims undermine the subtly of the argument – for example, his comment that ‘the relevance of rotational concepts to the Mahler canon’ is ‘beyond debate; no study of his formal thinking could do without them’ (p. 76), or his belief in ‘musical facts’ (p. 96). One can also wonder if the opposition of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is not too simplistic for Mahler’s music, which resists dichotomies. However, these reservations are tempered by Monahan’s constant self-awareness of his analytical position, and attempts to complicate his readings with other, contradictory views.

Monahan’s and Peattie’s very different responses to Mahler’s music show the large range of perspectives that can be relevant when dealing with these works. Whereas the Wanderer and the Fencer began carving their path on opposite parts of the mountain, they do meet at several moments of their respective journeys. Both authors acknowledge their debt to Adorno by grounding their interpretations on a tension between two opposed impulses – Monahan’s tension is located between ‘narrative’ freedom and ‘formalist’ restraint, while Peattie’s tension operates between continuity and discontinuity. Moreover, both Monahan and Peattie are interested in the extent to which Mahler dialogues with past traditions. Even if Peattie is more attracted to Mahler’s ‘unorthodoxy’, he nevertheless systematically grounds the composer’s reinvention of the symphonic genre within musical or literary traditions. The visual component is equally important in both studies, but expressed in different ways: while Monahan appropriates Mahler’s music through schemes, graphics and shapes, Peattie uses extramusical associations. Both authors have a dynamic perception of the music. Monahan, following Hepokoski and Darcy, sees form as a dynamic process, and Peattie is attentive to instances of mobile sounds in Mahler’s works as well as to musical landscapes seen from the perspective of a mobile traveller. In the end, neither of these authors pretend to domesticate their Mahler mountain, but they both contribute to expand our knowledge of the territory and create new horizons, each in their own way. Mahlerian readers – you do need these two books, as they beautifully complement each other.