After Beethoven

The late A. Peter Brown described Leipzig as the ‘epicentre of symphonic compositions’ in the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.⁶ The presence in the city of several music publishers and important music journals, as well as one of Europe’s leading conservatories, contributed to its pre-eminence, but pride of place in this account must fall to the Gewandhaus Orchestra. This venerable institution (founded in 1781) occupied the leading edge of a gradual trend away from the miscellaneous concert programming of the past, with its preference for ‘entertaining’ admixtures of instrumental and vocal pieces, concerted and solo numbers, not always played in their entirety, towards the new, more ‘serious’ approach that eventually came to define the modern symphony concert, with an overture and a concerto in the first half, followed, in the second, by a symphony (which gained in prominence by coming last and standing alone).⁷By the 1820s subscribers could look forward to hearing complete performances of all nine Beethoven symphonies on a regular basis; selected symphonies by Haydn and Mozart were heard frequently as well. Nevertheless, room was still found for three or four new symphonies every season.

‘German music blooms so finely here’, wrote Robert Schumann in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, ‘that, without ignorance, our city may venture to compare its productions to those of the richest fruit and flower gardens of other cities’. He continued:

The unnamed famous composer was Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the orchestra from 1835 until his death in 1847. Although Mendelssohn’s programmes were dominated by the music of the Viennese classical composers, he also instituted a series of ‘historical concerts’ (each devoted to a grouping of composers from the more distant past) and made certain to perform several contemporary works each year.⁹ Within the subscription concerts, for example, Mendelssohn introduced no fewer than forty-five new symphonies, including three each by Louis Spohr (nos. 5–7), Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda (nos. 5–7) and Franz Lachner (nos. 5–7), two each by Niels Gade (nos. 1–2), Julius Rietz (nos. 1–2) and Robert Schumann (nos. 1–2), Franz Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony and his own Symphony No. 3 (‘Scottish’).¹⁰ Various benefit and extraordinary concerts provided the opportunity for introducing still other new works, including Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (Lobgesang), Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 (in its original orchestral dress from 1841), together with his Overture, Scherzo and Finale and, from France, Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Félicien David’s Le Désert (each conducted by its composer). Newly introduced works often were repeated in subsequent programmes; Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, for example, was heard twelve times during the Mendelssohn era.

In principle, the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra encouraged the silent aesthetic contemplation of music, the ‘selfless immersion into a music that manifested “another world”’, and so performed an educative and edifying function (Bildungsfunktion): in such a context, as Dahlhaus notes, music was intended to be ‘understood’ and not merely to be ‘enjoyed’.¹¹ Yet there was more to this than ‘vintage German transcendentalism’, inasmuch as the symphony was constituted ‘not only aesthetically but also as a relation of nations’.¹²This distinction comes through clearly in August Kahlert’s review of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, introduced at the Gewandhaus on 3 March 1842 and published a year later:

Seen in this way, then, the Bildungsfunktion of the symphony concert assumes not only an aesthetic, but also a national dimension that Dahlhaus, with his aversion to political interpretation, seems loath to acknowledge.

Complicating this picture, however, was the Symphonie fantastique. Introduced at the Gewandhaus on 4 February 1843 (and thus undoubtedly on Kahlert’s mind as he penned his review of the ‘Scottish’ Symphony), this work had in fact already been the subject of considerable interest in 1835, following the publication of Schumann’s lengthy and extravagant review of the work when it appeared in Franz Liszt’s piano reduction.¹⁴ Here (and not for the last time) Schumann offers his take on the recent historical development of the genre: ‘After Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, greatest of all instrumental works in external proportions, form and intention seemed to have been exhausted . . . Later symphonic composers sensed this, and some of them even took refuge in the comfortable forms of Haydn and Mozart’.¹⁵ Schumann goes on to list a number of more recent composers, regretting that ‘none . . . had ventured to make any significant modifications to the old forms – if we leave aside isolated attempts such as the most recent symphony of Spohr’.¹⁶ He finds more to praise in Mendelssohn’s development of the concert overture as an alternative to the symphony – Schumann appears to be unaware of the ‘Italian’ Symphony, performed by the London Philharmonic Society in March 1833 and immediately withdrawn by the composer – and then acknowledges that he had begun to doubt whether the symphony had any future at all.

With all this as background, Schumann turns to the form of Berlioz’s first movement, so strange on the surface. ‘Yet we ought always to look at a thing on its own terms’, he cautions. ‘The stranger and more ingenious a thing outwardly appears, the more carefully we ought to judge it.’ Reminding his readers that the outlines of Beethoven’s music, too, had once seemed unintelligible, he contrasts Berlioz’s unorthodox form with that of ‘the earlier norm’. He provides diagrams of both, finds nothing preferable about the latter in either variety or uniformity, and adds, ‘We only wish we possessed a truly colossal imagination and could then pursue it wherever it goes.’ Here – for all his doubts about programme music – Schumann seems to have discovered the step forward from Beethoven that he found lacking in so much contemporary symphonic fare.¹⁷

Having nothing to do with this idea, by contrast, was Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, editor of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Schumann’s nomination of a potential French successor to Beethoven in the realm of the symphony was by itself an affront; even worse, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik had recently published without comment a translation of an article from a recent French journal that made the claim that François-Joseph Gossec had ‘founded the true character of the symphony’ and that Haydn had merely been his ‘successor’.¹⁸ To this Fink responded indignantly:

Schumann probably would not have disagreed with this sentiment, the gist of which had already appeared in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (July 1810), with its claims that the German composer ‘unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable’.²⁰ But the two critics part company over the question of whether any real progress in the genre might be possible beyond that achieved by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (those ‘three heroes of our music’, as Fink described them).²¹ Again relying heavily on Hoffmann’s aesthetics of ‘pure’ instrumental music, the conservative Fink takes qualities such as large dimensions, expanded forms, richness of medium and elevated ideas that Hoffmann had extolled in Beethoven’s Fifth and subsumes them all under his notion of the grand symphony, presumably attempting to establish in this way standards for the genre that he knew the Romantics would find impossible to meet.²²

A prize symphony

This critical colloquy between the editors of Leipzig’s two music periodicals provides the best context in which to examine one of the most talked-about symphonies of the 1830s, Franz Lachner’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor (Sinfonia passionata), widely known as the ‘Prize Symphony’ by virtue of its having won a competition for new symphonies sponsored by the ‘concerts spirituels’ in Vienna in 1835.²³ Following its performance at the Gewandhaus on 27 October 1836, both Schumann and Fink weighed in with memorable reviews that tell us a good deal about the contemporary state of symphonic politics.

Schumann came first and took the unusual step of pitching his remarks as a response to a story told tongue-in-cheek by his friend Wilhelm Florentin von Zuccamaglio, published under the pseudonym Gottschalk Wedel as a kind of preface to Schumann’s review.²⁴Here the protagonist dreams that he has written a symphony for the competition in the style of the Symphonie fantastique, certain that the judges would favour this ‘new artistic fashion’, only to awaken in a cold sweat to learn with relief that the prize had already gone instead to a proper German composer, Franz Lachner of Munich. ‘Our gentle Gottschalk Wedel has worked himself into quite a rage over the Frenchman Berlioz!’ begins Schumann’s anonymous review.²⁵ He continues in jest for a few lines, but when he moves on to the music at hand, he turns serious – and unusually merciless. ‘[Lachner’s] symphony is lacking in style’, he writes, ‘a mixture of German, Italian and French, comparable to Romansh.’ The best comparison Schumann could find was Meyerbeer’s operas, but these works – which, for Schumann, epitomised the worst of Philistine culture – certainly offered no suitable model for the elevated genre of the German symphony. The critic could forgive neither the ‘sprawling breadth’ (the work runs about an hour), nor the overly obvious (and overused) allusion in the first two movements to the famous rhythmic motive of Beethoven’s Fifth and the associated lack of any real thematic substance. Even still, the first movement at least shows ‘a kind of passion, if perhaps not the most poetical source’. Not so the Adagio, ‘which ends on every page and never stops!’ And with that comes the coup de grâce: ‘Were there but uncouth blunders, formal weaknesses, excesses, then there would be something to talk about and improve, and some reason for encouragement. Here, though, one can only say things like “it is tedious”, or “it will pass”, or sigh, or think about something else.’

Fink took a very different stance. He begins by making a careful analysis of each movement, and though he shares some of Schumann’s reservations, he nevertheless concludes, ‘without fearing the slightest contradiction from connoisseurs I must therefore pronounce this symphony of Lachner’s a thoroughly capable and skilful work . . . The flow of ideas is natural, straightforward [unverschnörkelt], never tied together in confusion.’²⁶Fink notes with approval that Lachner’s ‘inner essence of musical poetry is more like that of Haydn and Mozart than of Beethoven’, and then explains the difference:

Fink explicitly associates the older (one might say, classical) style with the ‘Prize Symphony’: ‘[Lachner’s] passion’, he writes, ‘is not the so-called Romantic [passion]’. And while Fink ties the newer style to no musical work in particular, it is easy enough to associate it in a negative way with the programme of the Symphonie fantastique (‘terrible pain’, ‘externally rushing lust’) and the unusual music to which it gave rise. It thus seems clear enough whom the critic had in mind when he castigates those composers who falsely claim to be Beethoven’s disciples and who become ‘drunk on [Beethoven’s] wine [only to] sing, not in exaltation but in inebriation’.²⁸ Who else apart from Berlioz might have inspired such imagery?

A ‘new norm’

Two years later, in a review from July 1839 of recently published symphonies by Gottfried Preyer, Karl Gottlieb Reißiger and, again, Lachner (this time, the Sixth, in D major), Schumann trained his focus on a more sober group of Beethoven’s disciples. He begins by placing Beethoven’s symphonies at the very centre of German national identity:

As the critic continues, he implicitly takes note of the extent to which Beethoven’s symphonies had come to dominate the public concert and so, in effect, the self-understanding of the German bourgeoisie. Yet, in what seems a clear reference to his earlier criticism of the ‘Prize Symphony’, he laments the failure of any living German composer to come to terms with this patrimony and to build on it meaningfully in his own music:

After briefly mentioning Berlioz (a ‘phenomenon’ known more in Germany by hearsay than by his music itself) and Schubert (‘whose accomplishments in the area of the symphony [had] not yet become public’), Schumann turns to the works at hand. While he is fairly merciless with Preyer and Reißiger, he treats Lachner more kindly than before. Once again, however, Schumann chides the composer for his long-windedness, urging him not to milk each of ‘his beautiful ideas’ dry, but rather to mix them in with other ‘new, ever more beautiful ones’. He concludes: ‘everything as in Beethoven. And so we always come back to this godly [composer] and would add nothing further today than to hope that Lachner might move forward on the path towards the ideal of a modern symphony, which after Beethoven’s passing it is granted to us to arrange in a new norm. Long live the German symphony, and may it blossom and thrive anew!’ The contradiction lying at the heart of this admonition is evident. Mark Evan Bonds has suggested that for Schumann the new norm could only be measured against the standard set by Beethoven. Yet, as Siegfried Oechsle has noted, what the critic calls for here – beauty and diversity of thematic-motivic invention – is not exactly what one takes to be the defining properties of Beethoven’s symphonies.³⁰At all events, Schumann had already found something close to what he was looking for in Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony (1825–8), which he had ‘discovered’ in a visit during the previous winter to the Vienna home of Schubert’s brother Ferdinand.³¹ This work ‘matched Beethoven’s symphonies in length, drive, weight, and freshness of form but . . . with [Schubert’s] special brand of expansiveness, leisureliness, lyricism, instrumental colour, and harmonic finesse’.³²Whereas in 1835, in his review of the Symphonie fantastique, Schumann could only hope that ‘after Beethoven’s nine muses [Schubert] might have borne us a tenth’, five years later, in an equally remarkable review of the ‘Great’ C major, Schumann could write Berlioz out of the history of the German symphony once and for all as merely ‘an interesting foreigner and madman’.³³Here, too, was everything that the ‘Prize Symphony’ had not been: in contrast to Lachner’s ‘never-ending’ essay, with its feeble imitations of Beethoven’s manner, stands Schubert’s work, with its ‘heavenly length, like a novel in four volumes by Jean Paul’, and its ‘complete independence’ from Beethoven’s symphonies.³⁴

The ‘Great’ C major led directly to Schumann’s own breakthrough as a symphonist.³⁵ Drafted in a scant four days in January 1841 and introduced at the Gewandhaus to great acclaim two months later, Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (‘Spring’) shows a host of Schubertian influences, extending from its prominent use of a melodically similar introductory horn call to matters of tonal planning and musical rhetoric. Schumann was not alone in being swept up in the moment. Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony (many of whose themes can be described as ‘songs without words’) and Gade’s Symphony No. 1 (largely based on the Danish composer’s song ‘Paa Sjølunds fagre sletter’), both of which date from the following year, likewise respond in their own way to the Schubertian model.³⁶

By contrast, Dahlhaus discusses the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Spring’ symphonies – he leaves Gade’s enormously popular ‘Nordic’ work unmentioned – entirely in terms of Beethoven, and by that measure each inevitably falls short.³⁷ A brief digression will help to explain why. Dahlhaus argues for a close connection between the idea of aesthetic autonomy (Hoffmann’s ‘pure’ instrumental music) and the nineteenth century’s striving to Bildung, that quintessentially German ideal of education leading to character formation, which ‘fulfils no tangible function in everyday life’, but rather, by presuming an inner detachment from the ‘realm of necessity’, offers a ‘counter-instance’ to the alienating ‘functionalization of humankind’.³⁸Herder’s concept of Bildung zur Menschheit, in turn, helps to explain why Dahlhaus claims the symphony as the illustrative model of aesthetic autonomy. Menschheit (humanity) carries a double meaning; it refers not only to the totality of humankind, which commentators from the early nineteenth century on maintained was the symphony’s rightful intended audience, but also to the humanity of the individual. With their will towards monumentality (characterised by easily grasped thematic ideas that are intimately bound to the orchestral medium and are easy to follow in their subsequent development) and dramatic teleological form – the exoteric and esoteric sides of the ‘symphonic style’ – Beethoven’s symphonies seemed to encompass both sides of the humanity idea.³⁹ The composer’s chamber music likewise dealt in thematische Arbeit, but it was only his symphonies, because of their monumentality and association with the institution of the public concert (as opposed to private musical culture), that became the musical representative of bourgeois humanitarian ideas in the sense outlined above.

But here is where, for Dahlhaus, the Romantic composers come up short. To be sure, he praises Mendelssohn’s ability in the ‘Scottish’ Symphony to shape a successful symphonic movement through the use of lyrical themes, but these cannot give rise to an appropriately monumental edifice. By the same token, Dahlhaus draws a pointed contrast between the ‘sublime uniformity’ of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies, whose ostinato themes are the vehicle for real melodic development, and the rather different uniformity that characterises Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, which, because its main theme couples a motoric ostinato rhythm to a largely unchanged sequence of pitches, ‘falls short of its vindicating sublimity’.⁴⁰As Scott Burnham has noted, Schumann is faulted in this case ‘for trying to be Beethovenian without fully understanding the nature of Beethoven’s music’.⁴¹

Things look very different, however, when we let go of Dahlhaus’s idea that these works constitute the dying breath of an implied ‘first age of the symphony’ dominated by Beethoven and the idea of the sublime, and follow Oechsle in positing Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony and the idea of humanity (in the sense of the individual and not of the masses) as having sparked the beginning of a new era of the Romantic symphony.⁴² By 1839, Oechsle argues, during a period marked by social processes of liberalisation and equalisation in which the independence of the individual was more strongly accented than before, the genre was ‘ripe . . . for the reception of the revolutionary attempt to produce grand symphonic form on the basis of an “individual” that was initially absolutely unthematic and in and of itself not suited to represent the symphonic “masses”’.⁴³

Dahlhaus argues that the essence of a successful symphonic movement resides in the critical ‘double function of a symphonic main theme, which Beethoven elevated to the status of a rule’: it was to be broken down into its constituent parts in the development only to return intact at the beginning of the recapitulation as the ‘triumphant goal and result’ of what had come before it.⁴⁴ But none of the works under consideration follows this ‘rule’. Each begins with important cantabile material that is introduced ‘outside the form’ (that is, in a slow introduction) – the horn call, in the case of Schubert and Schumann; the song or song-like themes, in the case of Mendelssohn and Gade.⁴⁵ And in all four works, this material eventually recurs in the main body and even determines its form. This results in a distinctly non-Beethovenian ‘epic-lyrical monumentality’, whereby the symphonic structure is created, not through the dramatic working out of a main thematic idea, but rather, as Oechsle puts it, ‘as a process of integration of an originally extraterritorial, individual, “capricious” subject-matter that seems strictly limited in its [symphonic] working potential’.⁴⁶

Seen in this way, the ‘Great’ C major Symphony stands as the central work in a Problemgeschichte that is very different from Dahlhaus’s conception. With the discovery of Schubert’s Symphony and its ‘new norm’, a dike was opened through which a stream of new symphonies now might flow freely. (This is a very different metaphor, of course, from that having to do with Beethoven’s shadow.) Indeed, for all its reputation as a work in which the composer ‘overcomes difficulty’ in the manner of the heroic Beethoven, Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C (1846) is unthinkable in the absence of Schubert’s symphony in the same key, and the same thing can be said for Gade’s Second and Third symphonies (1843 and 1847).⁴⁷

The ‘dead era’

Yet Dahlhaus argues that the symphony fell into a ‘crisis’ around mid-century, in that some twenty years would pass following the appearance of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 (1850) before there would come another orchestral ‘work of distinction that represented absolute rather than program music’.⁴⁸With the deaths, not only of Mendelssohn and Schumann, but also, in Wagner’s provocative formulation in Opera and Drama (1851), of the genre itself, historical development in the orchestral realm now seemed to shift to the symphonic poem, established by Liszt and marked by features such as Mehrsätzigkeit in der Einsätzigkeit and thematic transformation.⁴⁹ This allows Dahlhaus to dispense with the ensuing ‘dead era’ in the history of the older genre simply by invoking the names of the popular Gade (eight symphonies altogether), Anton Rubinstein (six) and Joachim Raff (no fewer than eleven), while leaving their music and the broader context in which it was heard entirely unexamined.⁵⁰ To do otherwise, he explains, would be to give undue weight to ‘mere statistics’ at the expense of ‘music-historical facts’ based on ‘aesthetic judgments’.⁵¹

There is something to be gained, however, by not passing too quickly over this period. ‘Serious’ programming of the type that had characterised the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra during the Mendelssohn era gradually took hold elsewhere.⁵² Moreover, subscription concerts on the Leipzig model were established, not only in major urban centres such as Vienna, Berlin and Dresden, but in smaller towns as well. While the balance between living and dead composers in concert programmes continued to shift in favour of the latter – the music of Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, after all, had now joined that of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in the corpus of available repertoire from the past – works by contemporary composers still held a respectable share in concert programmes, in the order of 20 to 30 per cent, depending on the locale and decade.⁵³

Fearing that concerts might become too hidebound, critics used their pens to urge the inclusion of new works.⁵⁴ As a result, there was no dearth of orchestral Novitäten in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which witnessed the composition, premiere or publication of approximately 500 new orchestral compositions.⁵⁵ This list includes a range of programmatic types, including such once-popular works as Johann Joseph Abert’s ‘Columbus’ Symphony (1864), Joseph Rheinberger’s four-movement ‘symphonic tone painting’ Wallenstein (1866) and Heinrich Hofmann’s Fritjof Symphony (1874), but the lion’s share consists of more-or-less traditional multi-movement symphonies. And though fully half of these works were what Grotjahn calls ‘nine-day wonders’ (Eintagsfliegen), no small number achieved status as ‘short-term hits’ (kurzfristige Spitzenreitern) and some were heard often enough over a long enough period of time to warrant her characterisation of them as ‘living classics’ (lebende Classikern).

Among the works in this last-named category are several that attest to a continuing ‘Mendelssohn cult’. Heading this group is Gade’s Symphony No. 4 (1850), with ninety-one performances by 1875; the composer’s earlier First and Third symphonies retained their popularity as well, with fifty-five and thirty performances respectively. At eighty-nine performances during the same period, Anton Rubinstein’s ‘Ocean’ Symphony (1851, rev. 1863, 1880), a ‘characteristic’ work that shows clear affinities with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides and Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt overtures, was as familiar a presence in concert programmes as Gade’s Fourth.⁵⁶Other popular works in the Mendelssohn style include Ferdinand Hiller’s Symphony in E Minor (1849), inscribed with a motto from Emanuel Geibel (Es muß doch Frühling werden) and Julius Rietz’s Symphony No. 3 in E flat (1855).

Works that date from the 1860s, of course, had a more difficult furrow to plough: they had to compete, not only with the symphonies of the Viennese Classical composers and the first generation of Romantics, but also, almost as soon as they appeared, with those that came during Dahlhaus’s ‘second age of the symphony’. Yet even among this group, too, are several that could be heard with some frequency over the next several decades, including the Symphony No. 1 in D minor by Robert Volkmann (1863), a handful of works by Joachim Raff, as well as Max Bruch’s Symphony No. 1 (1868) and Albert Dietrich’s Symphony in D minor (1870), exemplifying the Mendelssohn and Schumann traditions respectively.⁵⁷

Conspicuous by his absence here was Brahms, but this composer carried unique burdens dating back to Schumann’s encomium ‘Neue Bahnen’ (1853), with its foretelling of a grand symphony to come from the then-unknown composer. Matters were only made worse in 1860, when, with no such work to show, Brahms instigated a public ‘Manifesto’ against the historical claims made on behalf of Liszt and the symphonic poem in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which, under the editorship of Franz Brendel, beginning in 1845, had coupled a progressive, anti-Romantic stance with a denial of the continued historical viability of traditional genres such as the symphony.⁵⁸ Relatively few critics took such an extreme position, however, and there is no reason to believe that most critics – despite the occasional reproach that the main theme of this symphony or that was not ‘truly symphonic’ (echt symphonisch) – were determined to find fault with composers for failing to meet a set of standards derived from middle-period Beethoven or as codified by the likes of Fink.⁵⁹

Indeed, the aesthetic demands of the symphony after 1850 seem on balance to have been reduced well beyond even the ‘new [non-Beethovenian] norm’ for which Schumann had once called. Writing about Woldemar Bargiel’s Symphony in C (1860), for example, one critic noted, with no particular regret, that ‘It is no “grand” work in the eminent sense that we have before us, since the “grand” in this sense, which is sometimes called the “monumental”, may in our times be hard to find in the realm of art.’⁶⁰What often comes across instead is a concept of the genre as mittlere Musik (music of an intermediary niveau), which allowed one to assume the proper attitude of a Bildungshörer without having to forgo simpler pleasures: one did not have to choose between art and entertainment.⁶¹ In such an environment, composers could respond to growing market demands for new music while knowing that they were not charged to seek a place in the canon. (That Brahms carried higher ambitions – and composed accordingly – helps to explain the lukewarm reception that often greeted his challenging symphonies.)⁶² Even mittlere works should demonstrate technical solidity, but they should steer clear of becoming overburdened with too much ‘art’. Terms frequently appearing in reviews that may now seem patronising – ‘pretty’, ‘fresh’, ‘interesting’ – were in fact in step with listeners’ expectations, while those that may now seem more favourable – ‘grand’, ‘deep’, ‘monumental’, ‘significant’ – were seldom used and then mostly as a way of negatively characterising works for their excesses in either length or instrumental forces.⁶³

By the same token, originality was not essential. When one critic wrote of Hiller’s Es muß doch Frühling werden Symphony that it was made up of motives taken from Mendelssohn, Schumann and others, this was not necessarily seen as a fault, since the work sprang from a ‘refined artistic spirit’ and showed ‘nothing of that morbidity that attaches to almost our entire modern literature and from which the productions of even our most highly honoured younger powers cannot completely be freed’.⁶⁴‘At all events’, as Grotjahn notes, ‘a workmanlike, cleanly executed “beautiful” symphony is preferred to works that expect their listeners to deal with complex contents and unusual musical effects.’⁶⁵Many of these themes are neatly summed up in Eduard Hanslick’s report on the first Viennese performance of the period’s most often played work of all:

Another prize symphony

If Gade’s eight symphonies extend from the age of Mendelssohn and Schumann clear through the 1860s, the eleven symphonies of Joachim Raff appeared, one every year or two, from the mid-1860s through the first decade of the genre’s ‘second age’. This composer claimed to follow a ‘middle way’ between the New German (Berlioz–Liszt) and conservative (Mendelssohn–Schumann) factions in the musical politics of the day. As Louis Köhler put it, ‘he is a New German (vulgo “Musician of the Future”) in classical guise’.⁶⁷Thus while nine of Raff’s symphonies carry a descriptive title, only the Fifth (Lenore), based on the famous Sturm-und-Drang ballad by Gottfried August Bürger, follows Liszt in having a programmatic basis in literature (Eine Faust-Symphonie, Dante Symphony, the symphonic poems). For the most part, as in the Symphony No. 3 (Im Walde), with its colourful delineation of the German forest, the composer aimed to realise traditional symphonic forms with the help of a scrupulous use of tone painting, an attempt ‘to write programme music that shall at the same time be absolute music’ that Hugo Riemann later contemptuously dismissed as ‘an aesthetic lie’.⁶⁸

Although the Symphony No. 1 (An das Vaterland) fell by the wayside long before either the Im Walde or Lenore symphonies, this earlier work warrants some further attention here. Evidently composed between 1859 and 1861, it was selected as the first-place winner in a competition for new symphonies announced by Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in April 1861. Reviewing the first performance, which took place in Vienna on 26 February 1863, Hanslick acknowledges that An das Vaterland contains ‘ingenious and absorbing features, poetic moments and original technical experiments’, but its ‘affectedness, bizarrerie and floridness’ made it impossible for the critic to want to hear any of its parts again.⁶⁹ He continues:

Hanslick’s comment about Raff’s portrayal of the Germans was prompted by the work’s programme, which the critic reproduces in full.⁷¹ The first three movements are poetic in nature, depicting, in turn, the ‘German character’, ‘the German forest’ and the ‘homely hearth’. The fourth and fifth movements, by contrast, are explicitly political: the fourth concerns the ‘failed attempt to found the unity of the fatherland’, symbolised by quotation of Gustav Reichardt’s well-known setting of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s patriotic poem ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ (‘What is the German’s Fatherland?’); the Finale begins with a ‘lamentation’ on this defeat followed, at last, by a ‘renewed upswing’ in the ensuing Allegro trionfale, symbolised by a peroration on the borrowed patriotic hymn.

In view of Hanslick’s reputation as an opponent of programme music, what he makes of all this is naturally of some interest. In a review written only one month earlier, the critic had noted with approval that Rubinstein’s ‘Ocean’ Symphony ‘carries no poetic guide apart from the inscription “Ocean”. The composer is liberal enough to allow our fantasy full freedom.’⁷² It was precisely a lack of such freedom for the listener that irritated in the case at hand. ‘It requires a fair amount of self-control’, Hanslick begins, ‘not to be prejudiced against [Raff’s] music from the start on account of this poetic-political user’s manual [Gebrauchsanweisung].’ He continues:

Raff was not thinking solely about the failed revolution of 1848 and the dashed hopes of German national unity, however, but was also looking ahead. In the foreword to the first edition of the score, he reports that he had set to work on the Symphony under the first impression of the Armistice of Villafranca (1859), which ended active hostilities between the combined Franco-Italian forces of the Second Empire and the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia and those of Francis Josef’s Austrian Empire. As a result, Austria lost most of her Italian holdings and impetus was given to the movement towards Italian unification. These developments were not without ramifications elsewhere, and in the same year leading German liberal nationalists met in Frankfurt to form the Deutsche Nationalverein with the goal of unifying the German states in the kleindeutsch solution under Prussian leadership. Meanwhile, traditional Austrian hopes for hegemony in Germany under a großdeutsch solution were beginning to fade, and this may explain why Hanslick made no mention of the peroration of ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland’ coming at the end (the symbolism in that omission is palpable). However that may be, Wolfram Steinbeck seems on the right track when he posits An das Vaterland as one of the first truly national symphonies: ‘That it is a German work, what is more, that is locked into a concrete (and at that time moving) historical situation is remarkable. The universal claim of the symphony is destroyed through the particularly national subject matter.’⁷⁴ But while Europeans had long identified and accepted the symphony as being a German art – the enormous prestige of Beethoven had seen to that – Raff’s Symphony No. 1 was more than simply a national work; it was a self-consciously nationalist one.

The national symphony outside the German cultural sphere

The rise of important national schools, both to the east in Russia and to the west in France, is a defining feature of music history in the later decades of the century. (The situation in Bohemia stands somewhat apart on account of its close historical–cultural relations with Austria and Mitteleuropa more generally.) In Russia, the first symphonies by Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Porfirevich Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov date from the 1860s. There was a certain paradox in the timing of this development, coming as it did in the wake of the ‘death of the symphony’ and the transferral of the symphonic style into a new genre, the symphonic poem, that was seemingly more amenable to nationalist musical discourse. As Andreas Wehrmeyer has noted:

Among the members of the ‘Mighty Handful’ (moguchaya kuchka), Beethoven exercised a strong hold and provided a powerful model for cultural accreditation.

What for these composers was not valid, however, were the earlier accomplishments in the genre by their fellow Russian Anton Rubinstein, whose affinities with Mendelssohn in his early symphonies, among other works, made him unacceptably ‘German’. (That Rubinstein was born a Jew probably should not be overlooked either in explaining the antipathy towards him.) Reviewing a St Petersburg performance of the ‘Ocean’ Symphony in 1869, for example, Borodin claimed: ‘Here, as in most other works by Rubinstein, is shown this same repetition of banalities of a routine à la Mendelssohn. One finds in the ideas the same paltriness and shortness of breath, the same lack of colour in the instrumentation, the same conventional symmetry in the formal construction.’⁷⁶

Tchaikovsky, by contrast, was an admirer of the ‘Ocean’ Symphony and, more fundamentally, shared Rubinstein’s openness to Western principles of form. His Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies, of course, are staples of the standard repertory. The Fourth (1878) provides Dahlhaus with an example of how, in the ‘second age of the symphony’, a composer who employed un-Beethovenian materials could nevertheless create a large-scale symphonic form by adopting techniques from the symphonic poem. (This work and Dahlhaus’s assessment of it are considered again in Chapter 9.) The ‘fate motive’ played by the horn and trumpet at the outset appears at first to function as an introduction. By using the same theme to initiate the recapitulation, Dahlhaus argues, the composer contravenes Beethovenian norms by transferring it from an introductory to a formally constitutive role, thereby creating a ‘monumentality that remains a decorative façade unsupported by the internal form of the movement’.⁷⁷Yet Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (a work that Tchaikovsky was known to have admired) likewise opens, as we have seen, with a somewhat similar horn call that is originally presented ‘outside the movement’ and eventually becomes integrated into the form as a whole. Seen in this way, Tchaikovsky’s work provides another example of the ‘epic–lyrical monumentality’ that characterised an important group of symphonic works from the 1840s and so suggests a continuous historical development that is at odds with Dahlhaus’s dialectical model.⁷⁸

A handful of major French composers likewise took up the genre during these years (two examples each by Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet and Camille Saint-Saëns, with numerous echoes of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann), but operatic hegemony in France made this something of a thankless task, as did the overwhelming preference for older, mostly German repertoire in the programmes of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Société de Sainte-Cécile and Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires de Musique Classique. Moreover, although the composition of a ‘school symphony’ (symphonie d’école) formed a student’s capstone requirement at the Conservatoire, the genre itself was held in no special high regard.⁷⁹

It took military humiliation at German hands in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) to begin to turn matters around. The Société Nationale de Musique was founded on 25 February 1871 by Saint-Saëns and a number of other composers with the patriotic ‘intention to let French instrumental music speak for itself in a language of its own’.⁸⁰Yet under its motto ars gallica, the Society in fact ‘fostered the most thoroughgoing Germanification (or “New-Germanification”) French music ever endured’, as Richard Taruskin has wryly put it, whose ‘chief concern was to prove that the Germans, with their absolute music, had no lock on “lofty musical aims”’. The task, then, was nothing less than to produce a body of non-programmatic orchestral and chamber music designed ‘to rival the German and even surpass it in its demonstrative profundity of content’.⁸¹

In the event, however, it was the music of Berlioz and Wagner, respectively, that was more likely to be included in the orchestral programmes of the newly founded Concerts Colonne (1873) and Concerts Lamoureux (1881). Not until the later 1880s did the ‘New-Germanified’ French symphony really come into its own. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Organ’ Symphony (1886), Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886), César Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1886–8) and Ernest Chausson’s Symphony in B flat (1889–90) – these works share a number of features, none more prominent (nor more important in the effort to establish ‘lofty aims’ along New German lines) than cyclic form, characterised by the dramatic return of material from one movement to another, thematic transformation and a variety of other formal experiments.

Symphonic politics in Vienna

These same years saw Vienna reclaim the status it had ceded to Leipzig in the 1830s as the most important centre of symphonic activity in the German cultural sphere. In 1860 the Wiener Philharmoniker formally established a regular subscription series and elected Otto Dessoff as their conductor. Dessoff was followed, in 1875, by Hans Richter, who conducted the group over the last quarter of the century, during what one commentator has called its ‘golden era’.⁸² Most programmes contained at least one newer work, and nearly every season offered at least one premiere, most notably Johannes Brahms’s Second and Third symphonies (1877 and 1883, respectively) and Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 (1892). The opening of a new home for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in 1870 further shaped the city’s musical life; in its magnificent Großer Musikvereinssaal were given not only the Philharmonic’s concerts, but also those of the Society’s own series of choral and orchestral programmes, which included the first Viennese performances of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 (1876) and Bruckner’s Second and Third symphonies (1876 and 1877, respectively).

The familiar Brahms–Bruckner polemics of the day not only reflected a fundamental aesthetic disagreement – over the relative merits of ‘rational elaboration’ (Brahms) versus ‘inspired invention’ (Bruckner) – but also fell out along a growing political fault line within Vienna’s bourgeoisie.⁸³ Brahms’s tradition-orientated style suited the taste of Vienna’s older Bildungsbürgertum; indeed, as Margaret Notley has suggested, it seemed actually to project the typically middle-class values of logical thinking, self-restraint and accomplishment earned through hard work. Significantly, the cultural outlook of these ‘commercial, industrial, academic, professional meritocrats’, as Ernst Gellner put it, still reflected much of the liberal nationalist ideology of 1848.⁸⁴ For this social stratum, which included a disproportionate number of Jews, Germanness was not a birthright, but something that could theoretically be acquired by any ambitious Bürger through a conscious embracing of liberal cultural values such as education and property ownership. If this side of the cultural divide could make little sense of Bruckner’s sprawling symphonies, which seemed to be more a matter of emotional outpouring than of intellectual control, it was precisely that aspect of the music (along with Bruckner’s avowed worship of Wagner) which appealed to those musicians and music critics who reflected the more ethnically delineated German nationalist sentiment that began to form among younger segments of the bourgeoisie in the 1880s. Along with this form of German nationalism came a new völkisch cultural critique, whereby essentialist ‘German’ and ‘non-German’ traits were opposed in a set of binary oppositions that always privileged the former against an (implied liberal and Jewish) ‘other’: idealism as opposed to materialism; inwardness as opposed to superficiality; morality as opposed to intellect; rural as opposed to urban; and so on.⁸⁵ From this time forward, German identity became a matter of contention in the reception of new symphonies (that most German of genres).

Brahms’s long-awaited emergence as a symphonist – and with a work that invited comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth and was even dubbed ‘The Tenth Symphony’ – drew from Wagner a predictably vitriolic response, expressed in a series of essays published in the Bayreuther Blätter.⁸⁶ Of particular interest are Wagner’s biting comments in the essay ‘On the Application of Music to Drama’ regarding the ‘symphony compositions’ of Brahms and other composers of the ‘Romantic-Classical school’. No composer other than Beethoven is mentioned by name but the inferences are clear. All but Brahms were Jews and none was shown in a favourable light. After dismissive allusions to Anton Rubinstein’s ‘programmatic oceanic birds’ (‘Ocean’ Symphony), Joseph Joachim’s ‘Hungarian’ Concerto and Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, Wagner comes at last to the ‘sterling symphonist disguised in a Numero Zehn’ and with that to a less opaque style, so as not to be misunderstood:

And this was especially true, Wagner held, in the case of the absolute symphony, which took on a ‘clammy cast of melody’ that had been inappropriately transplanted from the chamber into the concert hall: ‘What had been fixed up as quintets and the like was now served up as symphonies. Paltry “melody-chaff”, comparable to a mixture of hay and old tea . . . ’

These essays gave intellectual ‘cover’ to a future strand of anti-Semitic musical discourse (while setting a precedent for lumping Brahms in with the Jews).⁸⁷ At the same time, they gave new life to old notions of the große Symphonie and sowed doubts about the generic propriety of the Romantic symphony, above all in terms of its themes, which were seen to fall short of the ‘truly symphonic’.⁸⁸ Although, as suggested earlier, it is easy to overstate the importance of this kind of essentialist thinking in the reception of new works introduced in the years following Wagner’s mid-century pronouncement of the death of the symphony, it seemed to take an especially strong hold in the 1880s and 1890s among Vienna’s Wagnerian critics.⁸⁹ Brahms had more powerful champions in the liberal press, especially Hanslick, but even in this quarter certain doubts about his symphonic style occasionally came to the surface.⁹⁰

Still, it is important to stress that the symphony was not inevitably a high-stakes affair. Consider the case of Robert Fuchs, a genuinely popular composer with Viennese audiences who, with two symphonies, several orchestral serenades and a piano concerto under his belt by the end of the 1880s, was heard as often in the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts as any other living composer apart from Brahms himself. Fuchs’s breakthrough as a symphonist came in November 1884 with the premiere of the Symphony No. 1, Op. 37. To be sure, for the critic Theodor Helm (a recent convert to Bruckner’s cause and clearly reflecting the Wagnerian line described above), this was little more than a ‘very pretty, charming work’; its main theme, he acknowledged, was ‘truly symphonically conceived’, but overall the composition left him with ‘the feeling that Fuchs’s creative power [was] insufficient for the wide scope of a grand symphony’.⁹¹Yet Hanslick (echoing the sentiments expressed a quarter of a century earlier in his review of Gade’s Fourth) offers a considerably different take:

What evidently mattered to this important critic – and, no doubt, to the majority of the orchestra’s well-heeled subscribers – was that the composer had set his sights on expressing the beautiful, not the sublime. As for Brahms, he described the Symphony as Fuchs’s ‘best larger work, and far better, more buoyant, and polished than I ever expected . . . He carries on in such a cosy, intimate way.’⁹³

Cosiness and intimacy is not what one associates with Bruckner’s symphonies, of course. Owing to Hanslick’s opposition, these were largely kept off the Philharmonic’s subscription programmes throughout the 1880s, and it fell to the Vienna Academic Wagner Society to keep Bruckner the symphonist in the public eye.⁹⁴ It was, after all, easy enough to associate Bruckner with the deceased ‘Master’ (despite the latter’s limited interest in the former). In part, this had to do with certain musical similarities involving outward features such as size and scope, instrumentation and harmonic language. But, as Thomas Leibnitz has argued, Bruckner’s devotees seem to have recognised a certain spiritual kinship between the music of the two, in that both ‘demanded total devotion from the listener’, although not of the critical, rational sort required fully to apprehend the work of Brahms.⁹⁵ On the contrary, Bruckner’s symphonies, in the Wagnerian manner, ‘aroused a state of overwhelming feeling that brought listening into the vicinity of a mystical and cultic experience’ – a far cry indeed from the bourgeois sensibilities of the Philharmonic’s patrons.⁹⁶

Not until 21 March 1886, with the Symphony No. 7, did the Philharmonic’s subscribers have the opportunity to hear a Bruckner symphony in its entirety. (No doubt the orchestra was responding here at least in part to the recent breakthrough performances of this work in Leipzig and Munich.) The Vienna Academic Wagner Society afterwards presented Bruckner with a laurel wreath inscribed ‘To the German symphonist, Master Anton Bruckner, in faith and veneration’.⁹⁷ In an earlier time, of course, the expression ‘German symphonist’ would have amounted to a tautology, but in the politicised environment of the moment, it carried pointed meaning among the Viennese Wagnerians, as suggested above. Yet the liberal critics Hanslick (who likened the work to a ‘symphonic boa-constrictor’), Gustav Dömpke (who asserted that ‘Bruckner composes like a drunkard’) and Max Kalbeck (who described the work as ‘no more than an impromptu comedy’) found less flattering ways to characterise the composer and his music, and Bruckner disappeared once more from the subscription concerts.⁹⁸Dahlhaus termed this period ‘one of the sorriest chapters in the history of music criticism’, although he might have noted that Bruckner could at least count on the strong support of Helm, critic for the German-nationalist Deutsche Zeitung.⁹⁹Moreover, by 1890, when the composer’s symphonies finally began to appear regularly in the Philharmonic’s programmes, Helm had been joined by a new, younger breed of national–liberal (and anti-Semitic) critics who published in the newly established Deutsches Volksblatt (1889) and Ostdeutsche Rundschau (1890), for whom Bruckner represented nothing less than the Aryan ideal of a symphonic composer.¹⁰⁰

Was ist deutsch?

Far removed from this Aryan ideal, but enjoying a place at the very centre of late Hapsburg musical culture, was Carl Goldmark, best known for The Queen of Sheba, which opened at the Vienna Court Opera on 10 March 1875. Goldmark’s debut as a symphonist came one year later, on 5 March 1876, when the Philharmonic players introduced Ländliche Hochzeit (Rustic Wedding), a colourful symphony in five suite-like movements that likewise was highly popular in its day.¹⁰¹Our concern here, however, is with the composer’s less well-known Symphony No. 2, heard in the Philharmonic concerts on 26 February 1888, during a period when Viennese anti-Semitism, in a new racialist manifestation, was beginning to gather some political force, and in particular with the work’s reception by the critic Ludwig Speidel, who, along with Hanslick, was the most influential of Vienna’s liberal critics.

‘With Goldmark’, notes Speidel, ‘the East is doubly present: by birth and heritage; he is Hebrew and Hungarian, Jew and gypsy’. He continues:

For Speidel, the supposed lingering influence in the opera of Goldmark’s traditional Jewish upbringing was unseemly, too redolent of the ghetto, and the critic is only too happy to note how, in the new symphony, no trace of this aspect of the composer’s heritage can be detected.¹⁰³

There could be no denying, by contrast, that the second movement, marked by two outbursts in the verbunkos style, looks towards the other side of Goldmark’s Eastern heritage. Yet this was a matter of no special dismay; after all, as Speidel notes, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert had long ago incorporated gypsy music ‘as an interesting province into the empire of German music’. (The implication, of course, is that a musical style that might somehow reflect Ostjudentum, with its assumed religious obscurantism, was fundamentally incompatible with that empire.) And with that, the critic turns happily from the subject of Goldmark’s Eastern heritage to his firm embrace of liberal German culture:

The end of this passage almost reads like an account of a Beethovenian sonata form, and it clearly recalls Dahlhaus’s notion of a Beethovenian ‘rule’ regarding the ‘double function’ of a symphonic main theme as something to be broken down in the development and then triumphantly recombined at the outset of the recapitulation. Thus, striking as Speidel’s comments about oriental inclinations and musical imperialism may be, what seems really at stake for him is to establish Goldmark’s German credentials. The Jew has been assimilated; the gypsy, colonised; the German, celebrated. And we have no reason to think that Goldmark – who utterly embraced a German cultural identity – would have objected.¹⁰⁴

Antonín Dvořák, by contrast, would never have counted himself among the Germans, but that did not stop Hanslick, the Czech composer’s greatest Viennese champion, from writing about his music as though he did.¹⁰⁵ Hanslick’s determination to treat Dvořák as an acculturated German betrays, of course, his continuing commitment to traditional liberal nationalist ideology. The younger Helm, by contrast, who came of age in the 1860s, after the Czech national movement had begun to threaten traditional German prerogatives in Bohemia, tended to see difference based in ethnicity where Hanslick did not.¹⁰⁶ And among those still-younger critics of the Deutsches Volksblatt and Ostdeutsche Rundschau who evince the radical ideology of pan-Germanism in their work, we see the tendency to denigrate both the Jews and the Czechs, treated more or less interchangeably as aliens within the German nation and enjoying undue favourable treatment under the Hapsburg state.

The critical response to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, heard in the Philharmonic series on 3 January 1891, illustrates every aspect of this complex picture. Whereas Hanslick writes favourably about the work, Helm looks disparagingly at Dvořák’s ‘addiction to Slavic national composition’.¹⁰⁷This last remark pales, however, in comparison to the over-the-top rhetoric employed by Camillo Horn (a German Bohemian) in his review for the Ostdeutsche Rundschau.¹⁰⁸ Much of this scathing account consists of a gloss on Hanslick’s review, in which the deutschnational critic interweaves passages adapted from that account with his own caustic commentary. Horn then takes wider aim at the liberal critic as a ‘foreign’ representative of the despised supranational monarchy:

Here Horn treats Hanslick (whose mother was a baptised Jew) not as a fellow German but as one ‘who wanted to be numbered among them’. And this ‘imposter’ had not only sat on the state commission that awarded the Slavic composer several stipends in the 1870s, but was also largely responsible for impeding Bruckner’s fortunes in the Imperial capital. To a pan-Germanist like Horn, then, the critic of the Neue freie Presse was an almost irresistible target – as both a Jew (however Hanslick might have thought of himself) and a powerful representative of the hated liberal nationalist elite, and as both an opponent of an unjustly neglected echt German composer and a champion of an unworthy Slavic one. Just how unworthy becomes clear, finally, in the essay’s concluding lines, wherein, by likening Dvořák to Meyerbeer, Horn in effect condemns him as a Jew:

Although coarse rhetoric of this kind is scarcely representative of Viennese society as a whole, much less of the elite that retained its hold over the institutions of culture, it cannot escape notice that the 1890s, which saw Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party rise to municipal power on an openly anti-Semitic appeal, marked the securing at last of a firm place in the Philharmonic’s repertoire for Bruckner, capped by the triumphant premiere of the Symphony No. 8 on 18 December 1892. Subscribers trickled out of the hall after each of the movements (Hanslick himself before the Finale), but this evidence of discomfort on the part of the city’s ‘meritocrats’ only encouraged the large crowd of some 300 Bruckner partisans, including many students with pan-German sympathies who gathered in the standing room and gallery of the Großer Musikvereinssaal. Writing this time in the Deutsches Volksblatt, Horn praised the ‘German feeling and thinking, which endowed the second movement that the composer himself had christened “the German Michael”, with eloquent expression’, while the composer’s triumph stimulated an anonymous writer for the Ostdeutsche Rundschau to enthuse in a manner worthy of Wagner himself: ‘What makes Bruckner so valuable a musician is his unconscious recognition of the true mission of music, namely the direct illustration of the primordial shaping, destroying, conflicting world-feeling-elements.’¹⁰⁹ An account less apt to describe the music of Brahms, not to speak of Fuchs, Goldmark or Dvořák, is difficult to imagine.

Epilogue

In September 1898, Hans Richter abruptly resigned the position he had held for more than twenty years as director of the concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic and was replaced by Gustav Mahler, then entering his second season as director of the Imperial Court Opera.¹¹⁰The presence in Lueger’s Vienna of a thriving anti-Semitic press meant that Mahler’s status as a Jew (despite the baptism he had recently undergone in order to work at the court) would not go unmentioned in discussions of his work in these two key appointments. The Deutsche Zeitung pulled no punches: ‘In our view, in a German city only a German appears qualified to interpret German music, [and this is] a condition that Mahler is just not able to fulfill’.¹¹¹ Nevertheless, in an era in which Jews dominated Vienna’s public life more than ever, the power and influence that Mahler exercised as head of both the Court Opera and the Philharmonic concerts was beyond question, and despite all the controversy he engendered (much of it having little to do with anti-Semitism), Mahler was undoubtedly ‘one of the city’s few authentic celebrities, with many more admirers than detractors’.¹¹²

In one sense, Mahler’s association with the Wiener Philharmoniker reminds us of our starting point. As had been the case sixty years earlier with Mendelssohn and the Gewandhaus Orchestra, once again we find a composer of the first rank in a position of leadership of a pre-eminent orchestral series. Like those of Mendelssohn, Mahler’s programmes were dominated by the music of Beethoven but also included selected symphonies by Haydn and Mozart as well as works by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn himself. To this established canon was added music by the recently deceased Brahms (including the Second and Third symphonies) and Bruckner (abridged versions of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies). On the other hand, the once-popular Fuchs now lost his place entirely in the orchestra’s repertoire, while Goldmark and Dvořák, the other two living favourites of the Richter era, were represented only by shorter, non-symphonic works (mostly concert overtures and other programmatic compositions). To be sure, Mahler widened the orchestra’s repertoire by conducting its first performances of a number of other compositions from the preceding half-century, including Liszt’s Festklänge, Hermann Goetz’s Symphony in F, César Franck’s Variations symphoniques, as well as pieces by Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Smetana. But apart from Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien, the only ‘modernist’ works that were heard during Mahler’s time at the orchestra’s helm were two symphonies of his own, the Second, in the annual Nicolai benefit concert, in April 1899, and the First, in a subscription concert in November 1900.

In April 1901 Mahler resigned his position as director of the Philharmonic concerts after only three turbulent seasons.¹¹³Although his symphonies remained a notable presence on Viennese concert bills for several years thereafter – each of the first seven was heard at least once in the Imperial city between 1902 and 1909; the Ninth received its première there posthumously in 1912 – it cannot be said that any of these works went down especially well with the largely conservative Viennese audiences, nor with many of the city’s music critics.¹¹⁴By the turn of the century, Vienna was gripped by the same ‘suspicion of new music’, as William Weber has put it, that now characterised public concert life more generally. Unfamiliar works of any kind – still more those of the ‘modernist’ stripe – were anathema to audiences, and most critics were quick to denounce new music ‘in and of itself’.¹¹⁵ To be sure, Mahler could always count on support from a vocal minority of mostly younger listeners. Moreover, certain liberal critics such as Richard Heuberger, Max Kalbeck and Julius Korngold, Hanslick’s successor at the Neue freie Presse, consistently accorded the composer a measure of guarded respect, despite their aesthetic misgivings.¹¹⁶ After all, if the aesthetic core of the earlier Bruckner–Brahms debate had had to do with the relative merits of ‘inspired invention’ as opposed to ‘logical elaboration’, then it is easy enough to see how Mahler’s characteristic (and virtuosic) technique of breaking down his tunes into their constituent motives and then recombining them in ever new melodic and contrapuntal patterns would now have its appeal for the same critics who had always supported Brahms at Bruckner’s expense.¹¹⁷ Yet at a time when even Brahms’s works were only now becoming an ‘easier sell’ in Vienna, we can scarcely wonder at the puzzlement caused by Mahler’s symphonies, with their unheard-of dimensions, idiosyncratic formal designs and many stylistic discontinuities (which the composer made all the more puzzling by resolutely refusing to ‘explain’ them by means of a programme).

Hanslick was in attendance at the Philharmonic’s performance of the Symphony No. 1 in 1900. Like Kalbeck and the other younger liberal critics mentioned above, he seems to have wanted to give the composer’s work its due, yet he scarcely knew how to go about it. (For once, he regretted the absence of a programme that might show the way.) In conveying this state of affairs, the aging critic began with a brief anecdote and ended with a frank acknowledgment of his own limitations:

Several years later Mahler would find himself in a somewhat similar situation after hearing the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s taut, one-movement Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, given at the Musikverein on 8 February 1907. In a public display of his own guarded respect for the younger composer, Mahler came to Schoenberg’s defence as the expected hue and cry broke out in the hall, just as he had done three days earlier when a similar scene erupted during the premiere of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet.¹¹⁹ But, like Hanslick, he could only go so far in his own appreciation. ‘I don’t understand his music’, Mahler confessed afterwards to his wife, Alma, ‘but he’s young and perhaps he’s right. I am old and I dare say my ear is not sensitive enough.’¹²⁰

The very notion of a ‘chamber symphony’, something that Brahms but certainly not Wagner might have imagined (although Schoenberg’s work was indebted to both), is clearly at odds with concepts such as the symphonic style and monumentality. At the same time, it is emblematic of what Dahlhaus characterises as ‘a shift in accent in the system of musical genres’ that took place in the early twentieth century in the transition from musical modernism to the New Music: in a ‘tricky dialectics’ (vertrackte Dialektik), chamber music – that erstwhile ‘reserve of conservatives who clung to the old because they were baffled by the new’ – now displaced the Lisztian symphonic poem and Wagnerian music drama as the principal means of ‘progressive’ musical expression.¹²¹ But when Dahlhaus goes on to argue that the symphony as represented by Bruckner and Mahler had formed a ‘quasi-neutral’ genre in the party polemics at the turn of the century we have reason once again to take pause.¹²²In Vienna, at any rate, the highly charged question of who counted as German was never far from the surface in any critical account of that most ‘German’ of genres.