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INTEGRATING MUSIC INTO INTELLECTUAL

HISTORY: NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART MUSIC
AS A DISCOURSE OF AGENCY AND IDENTITY

JOHN E. TOEWS

Modern Intellectual History / Volume 5 / Issue 02 / August 2008, pp 309 - 331

DOI: 10.1017/S1479244308001662, Published online: 27 June 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244308001662

How to cite this article:

JOHN E. TOEWS (2008). INTEGRATING MUSIC INTO INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY: NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART MUSIC AS A DISCOURSE OF
AGENCY AND IDENTITY. Modern Intellectual History, 5, pp 309-331 doi:10.1017/
S1479244308001662

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Modern Intellectual History, 5, 2 (2008), pp. 309–331 
C 2008 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1479244308001662 Printed in the United Kingdom

integrating music into

intellectual history:
nineteenth-century art music as
a discourse of agency and
identity
john e. toews
Department of History, University of Washington

Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that

the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed
at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic
convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works
from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us
in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music”1 —was an
enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history,
especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German
Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later
in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance
and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the
history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining
and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung
of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities
through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations
between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual
historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward
investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected
to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of
how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize
and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past,

1
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

309
310 john e. toews

to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the

transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding
historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both
the individual and communal levels.
Yet the history of music has not fully entered the mainstream of intellectual
and cultural history. I am old enough to remember reading Jacques Barzun’s
massive study of Berlioz and Romanticism as an undergraduate and more recently
(1985!) to have thoroughly enjoyed Paul Robinson’s Opera and Ideas,2 but these
works seem to have been grounded in very personal talents and obsessions
of individuals who happened to be European intellectual historians. Neither
study had the disciplinary “legs” to enter the mainstream of historical cultural
analysis and neither is cited in the works under review in this essay. Carl
Schorske’s interest in classical and modernist music3 encouraged some of his
students, including Michael Steinberg4 and William McGrath,5 to pursue their
own musical interests in their scholarship, but the primary efforts to integrate the
interpretation and history of music into the history of culture have come from
historical musicologists in departments of music. In the two essay collections
included among the six books under review in this essay, nineteen of the twenty-
one contributors are from departments of music, and similar ratios hold true for
other recent collections that seek to integrate the history of music into the history
of culture.6 The historical musicologists whose work inspires and informs these
anthologies, like Rose Subotnik, Lawrence Kramer, Susan McLary and Richard
Leppert,7 are little known among historians. Even Steinberg, who decries this

2
Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1950,
3rd edn 1969); Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
3
See especially the chapter on Schoenberg and Kokoschka in Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); and the lecture on
Mahler published in idem, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
4
Michael Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology,
1890–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). The book includes a discussion of
musical works by Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler.
5
William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974), esp. chap. 5 (on Mahler).
6
See, for example, Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, eds., The
Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003).
7
Subotnik’s influential essays of the 1970s and 1980s are collected in Rose Rosengard
Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Kramer’s books include Music as Cultural Practice,
1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Classical Music and Postmodern
Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Musical Meaning: Toward
 integrating music into intellectual history 311

ignorance, does not really engage the scholarly tradition of “new historicism”
in musicology (with which he shares many assumptions and concerns) in his
own work, preferring to relate his analyses to the older generation of venerated
historicizing musicologists and cultural critics—like Carl Dahlhaus and especially
Theodor Adorno8 —rather than to scholars of his own generation.
Why have historians been so cautious in embracing, appropriating and
participating in the project to integrate the history of music into the history
of culture?
Two obvious answers to this question emerge from the reviewed materials.
One is the abstract formalism that has been so prevalent in the analysis of
musical works by musicologists in university music departments during the last
half century. The amount of technical expertise and sheer stubborn patience
required to comprehend analyses of the internal structures of classical music is
formidable. Yet historians are rightly cautious about writing about music in its
various historical contexts without the benefits of some non-hermetic language
for verbalizing what is actually going on within the music itself. The widely chosen
alternative is to write not so much about the music itself as about institutions that
support the composition, performance and general consumption of music; about
the individuals who compose, perform and consume; and especially about the
aesthetic and philosophical commentary that tried to provide a framework for
listening to music and construing its meaning at different times and in different
places. Even those historians who probably could cite scores and analyze the
internal dynamics of formal musical structures in a sophisticated fashion tend
to fall back on external descriptions and analyses to escape the confined space
of formal musicology and to communicate with their intended audiences. It is
noteworthy that none of the historians in the books under review actually cite
or analyze musical scores, and that, when they are not talking about the various
external factors impinging on the music, they tend to speak about musical works
that have texts (operas, lieder, cantatas, oratorios and other choral works) so

a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Leppert and McClary’s
anthology, Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) played a critical role in promoting the
development of the new historical musicology, as did their subsequent efforts to infuse
musicological analysis with conceptions of subjectivity drawn from critical theory and
post-structuralism.
8
References to Adorno are omnipresent in the new musicology. He is clearly the primary
intellectual mentor of recent attempts both to historicize musical forms and to analyze
these forms in terms of the dialectical dynamics of subjectivity. For a good summary
of the impact of Adorno on Anglo-American musicology see the introduction and
commentaries by Richard Leppert in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, selected and
with an introduction and commentary and notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002).
312 john e. toews

that the music can be talked about largely through interpretive analysis of the
structure and dynamics of the texts and of the perspectives and interactions of
the characters who sing the texts.
Another possible approach, perhaps modeled on Adorno’s supreme
confidence in his ability to say what the music was saying, is to replace discussable
descriptions or arguable citations with direct assertions about what the tones must
mean. The latter tactic probably connects to a second source of trepidation for
historians who want to include music in their analysis of the history of culture—
the widespread belief that musical experience is an experience of the ineffable,
that what music does cannot be adequately redescribed or represented in words
or images, but transcends the representational stances of speaker and observer in
other artistic media and merges subjective and objective dimensions in ways that
always elude any specific reference to, or representation of, a content beyond its
own internal structural components. From this perspective, writing about music
can quickly begin to look like, and be judged as, a series of empirically unverifiable
subjective responses to a transcendent reality that cannot be rationally described
or verbally communicated.
Both the hermetically autonomous structures of musical forms and the
ineffable, transcendent, non-referential nature of musical experience constitute
cultural constructions of the nature of music that work to isolate music from
other cultural phenomena and erect barriers against the specific contextualizing
and temporalizing methods of historical analysis and narrative mediation. At the
same time however, these ascribed characteristics of musical reality and musical
experience are historical residuals of the cultural construction of the tradition of
European classical music in the nineteenth century. They are connected to the
historical emergence of a particular kind of music at a particular time and place
and are thus themselves primary objects for historical analysis. Many historical
musicologists and cultural critics have taken note of the paradoxical nature
and ideological uses of definitions of music as a self-referential autonomous
structure of tones that somehow transcends the conditions of meaningful speech
and communication.9 The emergence of the concept of “pure” or “autonomous”
art music after 1800 was accompanied by a flood of commentary and criticism
(some of it by composers themselves, like Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann or
Richard Wagner) that mediated between the ineffable work and its particular
historical audiences, as well as by a systematic aesthetics that provided it with

9
The classical modern account is Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel:
Baerenreioter Verlag, 1978); but see the more recent Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music
and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and
the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
 integrating music into intellectual history 313

philosophical foundations. In fact most historical analysts of the emergence

of classical music take their interpretive cue from contemporary philosophers
(like Schelling or Schopenhauer) or literary/cultural critics (like Ludwig Tieck,
Wilhlem Wackenroder, Friedrich Schlegel and E. T. A. Hoffmann) who elaborated
the concepts of the autonomous purity of musical form and the sublime
ineffability of musical experience.10
In this essay I will organize my examination of six recently published books
on nineteenth-century classical music around a number of central themes in
the intellectual and cultural history of “subjectivity.”11 These themes include
the problematic relationship between experience and linguistic meaning, the
development of historical self-consciousness at both the individual and collective
level, the transformation of individual subjective agency into cultural and group
identity, and the construction of narrative coherence in the absence of belief in
objective meaning. I will ground my hypothetical starting point and organizing
assumption on the claims of Michael Steinberg in Listening to Reason, one of the
books under review. Steinberg suggests that nineteenth-century “autonomous”
art music can best be interpreted and engaged as a “language,” or more aptly and
specifically a “discourse,” of subjectivity, as an aesthetic and cultural form that
embodies and enacts or “performs” the activity of a thinking, feeling subject as
it defines and constructs itself in relation to cultural, social and political realities
that make claims to define, appropriate, suppress or “subject” it. This musical
“I” is not simply the composer’s “I” represented in music but the “I” of the
music itself, constantly engaged in negotiating and arguing with, freeing itself
from, and surrendering itself to, the claims of representation and identification, of
subjection to some cultural other. Subjectivity in this sense, as the constant activity
of self-definition, self-construction and self-liberation, as the activity of the
subject within the force field of relations between emancipation and integration,
is to be distinguished from the Cartesian “subject” considered as the continuous

10
The beginnings of the aesthetic theory of autonomous, abstract art is connected to the
emergence of the classical instrumental forms of symphony, sonata and chamber music in
the late eighteenth century in John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language:
Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986).
11
Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and Nineteenth-Century
Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Ian Bent, ed., Music Theory in the
Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Celia Applegate, Bach
in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St Matthew Passion (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005); Daniel Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought:
Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2006); and Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
314 john e. toews

essential center of consciousness and action or from the Lockean embodied

individual self with defined properties and rights.12 Musical subjectivity is
imagined as a creative agency constantly producing and reproducing itself
in intersubjective relations and in relation to already constructed meaningful
worlds.
The most obvious affinity of music in this definition is to the post-Kantian
conception of philosophy as the dialectical production of conceptual meaning,
as the reflective dynamics of meaning-construction that is defined by its own
movement, so that its form is indistinguishable from its content. From Schelling
and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Adorno, it has been German philosophy
that has claimed the mantle of the musical and raised the status of the musical to
thought or thinking, and thus asserted music’s privileged role as the embodiment
of a spiritual becoming that could never be fully represented in other media.13
From the perspective of the history of subjectivity, the emancipation of art
music as an autonomous form becomes a less paradoxical and contradictory
phenomenon. The liberation of instrumental music as the maker of its own
meaning from its traditional functions as a representation of religious meaning
or natural truth, as a support for political power or social distinction, as a
servant of visual spectacle or of the written and spoken word, did not necessarily
imply that music was somehow purified of its relations to the world, or that it
constituted a refuge or escape from mundane reality. Rather, the emancipation of
music as an autonomous art form allowed it to act and react as a subjective
agent in relation to the world. The autonomy of music as an actor in its
own right was thus the condition of its engagement with, and in, the world.
As Lydia Goehr has stated, “music is philosophical and political by virtue of
being autonomously musical.”14 According to Steinberg, the capacity of music to
articulate subjectivity and embody its relations to cultural and political others
in a constant process of self-definition and self-creation assumes that music as
aesthetic form possesses consciousness and agency. These assumptions are of
course “fictions.” We experience or experiment with our own subjectivity in the
discursive relations of musical form because we imagine music as acting and
speaking in the first person, as an “I” in motion and conversation, as a voice
operating in real present time, a voice that does not report or represent a story
that has happened but performs the story of itself within the shifting structural

12
Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 5 ff.
13
The conference anthology edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter, Sound Figures of
Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006),
represents a sustained effort to reconstruct this tradition and, more, to sustain its viability
in the post-Adorno era.
14
Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 1; original emphasis.
 integrating music into intellectual history 315

horizons of its constructed musical world as we listen.15 Moreover, Steinberg

claims, as a performing subject with the capacity for memory and hope, music
itself “listens”; that is, it makes and remakes itself through interaction or dialogue
with representations of both past and present cultural realities. In listening to
music we hear music listening. We experience music as engaged in a discourse
that reflects on its relations to various others, a discourse of critical distancing,
appropriation and self-reflection, a discourse of “reason.” The experience of
music is thus a critical site for the learning and cultivation of selfhood as critical,
reflexive subjectivity, for the cultivation of subjects who come to know themselves
as self-reflective actors, whose life is defined in a constant process of negotiation
and reconsideration of any particular historically contingent identity, a life of
overcoming the fixations and dependencies of representation and identity, a life
constantly moving between memory and expectation.16
This construction of music as the articulation and performance of subjectivity
on the constantly shifting boundary between autonomy and integration, agency
and identity, is itself a useful fiction, an ideal type that opens up reflection on
the new cultural potentialities that emerged with the emancipation of music as
an aesthetic form around 1800. It helps track some of the changes in musical
culture during the nineteenth century and allows intellectual historians to look
in new ways at central issues in the history of cultural forms and the history of the
modern subject. And it opens the door to the integration of the new historical
musicology into the mainstream of intellectual and cultural history.

i. tones and words

How should historians construe the relationship between the plethora of words
written and spoken about musical composition, structure and performance
during the nineteenth century and their own experience of that music through
recorded or live performances in the present? Can past musical experience
be reconstructed from the documentary record of written responses to that
experience? Does familiarity with the musical theory, commentary, criticism and

15
For Mark Evan Bonds, this construction of music as an imagined narrative of the thinking
subject, as a discourse of subjectivity, a way of knowing rather than a rhetoric of speaking,
is clearly a fiction of the listener. In his view the “revolution” in music c. 1800 was really a
revolution in the aesthetic discourse about music, a change in the framework of listening
created by the critical and pedagogical activity of aesthetic theorists and music critics
rather than by composers and compositions. Beethoven’s symphonies did not create a
new way of listening—a new way of listening was created by a transformation of ideas
about subjective agency that was subsequently attached to Beethoven’s compositions. See
his Music as Thought, 5–29 and passim.
16
Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 9–11.
316 john e. toews

analysis of the nineteenth century allow historians to relate their own present
experience of the music to the ways music was experienced in the past? What is
the relationship between the history of writing about music and the history of
music? Certainly the historical description and analysis of writing about music is
easier to connect to other textually articulated forms of intellectual history than
the performance of historical subjectivity within the music itself. Music Theory
in the Age of Romanticism, a collection of essays by a dozen Anglo-American
musicologists whose education has been informed by various post-structuralist
conceptions of subjectivity, and the monograph by the music historian Mark
Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven,
provide some suggestions about what might be learned from close readings of
writing about music.
Four essays in the first section of the edited collection address the ways in
which theoretical constructions of musical experience in the nineteenth century
were framed by general assumptions concerning the nature of sense experience,
intellectual cognition, the metaphysical foundations of structural relations, and
the dynamics of structural transformations in time. What comes across in
these essays first of all is the variety of philosophical frameworks informing
musical theorizing. An essay by Leslie David Blasius explores the theoretical
literature on piano pedagogy and finds it shaped by a robust survival of late
eighteenth-century sensationalist and associational psychology. His sources, as
one might guess, tend to come from French and English culture, and the study
of the piano exercises might perhaps be classified under educational theory
as much as musical theory, but it is important to remember that all musical
theory in the nineteenth century did not stem from German idealist and
Romantic philosophy, and that, as in other cultural dimensions, the conflict
and interaction of Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, utilitarian and
idealist philosophies, continued through the so-called “Romantic” period. The
three essays that follow, by Ian Biddle (on Schelling), Thomas Christensen (on
the Hegelian historicism of François-Joseph Fétis), and Sanna Pederson (on
the conflicts between Romantic and Hegelian constructions of music at mid-
century), moreover, complicate the whole issue of the idealist framework of
Romantic theory, and the Romantic theoretical framework of nineteenth-century
music. According to Biddle, Schelling’s philosophy of art articulates a model of
musical structure as organic structure in which immanent meaning emerges from
the relations between corporeal realities and the organizing totality of the absolute
subject. Biddle claims that Schelling’s ideas grounded the theory of autonomous
music and the internal structural analysis that emerged from it. But his analysis
also makes obvious that the description of autonomous, organic musical structure
was originally conceived as the embodiment of a deeper reality, that music,
like the other fine arts, was imagined as depicting, or giving corporeal shape
 integrating music into intellectual history 317

to, the dynamic self-fashioning of the Absolute, that the immanent structures
of musical form gave voice to a transcendent subjectivity. If Schelling’s views
implicitly or explicitly informed the ways in which early nineteenth-century
listeners constructed musical experience then the subjectivity they enacted in
that experience was experienced as an expression of a deeper identification,
as a discovery of essence rather than as an emancipation from identity and
representation. Musical experience revealed absolute subjectivity as the ground of
individual subjectivity. This tendency is made very clear in Bonds’s reconstruction
of idealist and Romantic aesthetic philosophies—including that of Schelling.
Listening to music was presented as participation in a privileged movement
of knowing that reached toward and fleetingly embodied philosophical truth,
the truth of totalizing synthesis This truth was intimated in experiences of the
sublime that the conceptual and representational structures of empirical and
rational philosophies could never encompass.17
The essays by Christensen and Pederson, however, also indicate that Schelling’s
aesthetic philosophy and its particular way of construing musical form as the
articulation of subjectivity was in conflict throughout the first half of the century
with the Hegelian theory that subordinated musical experience to the progressive
articulation of organic totality and subjective autonomy in the self-conscious
structures of rational speech. For Hegelians like Fétis, the structures of musical
form represented particular organizations of subjectivity in historical cultures,
ordered in a progressive sequence moving toward more rational and thus more
universal articulation. As Pederson reminds us, and as Bonds tends to forget, it
is important to recognize that the so-called “Romantic” theory of autonomous
self-relating musical structure had a discontinuous history grounded in shifting
historical contexts. It was marked by conflicts with opposing perspectives.
Constructions of musical experience were historically contingent and demand
contextual analysis. At the same time, these essays on the philosophical framing
of theories of musical form reveal that, for most of the nineteenth century,
theories of self-structuring dynamic subjectivity as the appropriate form of the
arts remained theories of representation of a reality that these arts embodied and
performed, but did not constitute. In performing subjectivity, music performed
a script written elsewhere. Nineteenth-century theorists may have argued over
whether or not music performed this script better than the other arts or other
cultural forms, but they never, or rarely, doubted that music derived its power
to enact subjectivity from its function as the representation of an infinite subject
or absolute existential ground of some sort. The construction of music as the life
of a subject structuring and restructuring itself in a series of temporal “presents”
may be a useful fiction from our perspective, but the evidence provided in

17
Bonds, Music as Thought, 29–62.
318 john e. toews

these essays indicates that musical experience of subjectivity was certainly more
like a revelatory encounter with the immanent essence of existence for most
nineteenth-century European intellectuals.
The second group of essays engages in a close reading of accounts of musical
structure in exemplary classical works (symphonies of Beethoven and Berlioz)
by contemporary reviewers like E. T. A Hoffmann, Robert Schumann and
the influential contributors to the first important journal of public musical
criticism—the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. What is revealed in each of these
cases is that contemporary critics structured their analysis of the musical work
according to a specific mode of communicative and historical hermeneutics,
best exemplified by the theories of the Romantic theologian and cultural critic
Friedrich Schleiermacher. The music was imagined as shaped by the motives and
genius of the composer. What was experienced in the act of listening was an
interaction with Beethoven’s or Berlioz’s subjectivity, not an identification with
the musical subject per se. Or rather the musical subject was interpreted in terms
of the composer’s intentions and creative power in expressing and communi-
cating a personal conception of the underlying infinite ground of subjective
life.
Brian Heyr’s analysis of a contemporary review of Beethoven’s Eroica is
especially interesting, because he reverses the direction of the nineteenth-century
hermeneutic method he has historically reconstructed in order to develop his own
theory of constructive interpretation, in which the listener creates the meaning
of the musical structure in the process of listening and relistening. The meaning
of a piece, he claims, is constituted by a constantly shifting reinterpretation of
the narrative pattern between memory and the future as we learn to connect
our expectations to the moving musical horizons that define our experience of
being in the music. The listener in this model does not simply project subjective
meanings into the dynamics of the musical experience. What happens instead is
a type of dialogue or interaction with the increasingly familiar and predictable
narrative flow of the notes. It is this dialogic experience that turns an arbitrary
subjective construction into an experimental life shaped in a certain way by the
musical structure. But contemporaries of Beethoven or Berlioz did not construct
their musical experience in this fashion. They claimed to experience an encounter
with another subjectivity, not just an interaction with a constructed framework
(a fictional universe) for experimenting with possible identities (fictional “I’s”)
within themselves. It is this disjuncture between the construction of music as
thinking by the idealist and Romantic theorists and poststructuralist theories
of the movement of subjective agency beyond identity and representation that
is missing in Bonds’s work. One consequence is that Bonds seems hapless in
producing some understanding of how the actual musical compositions may
 integrating music into intellectual history 319

have operated as creative productions demanding constant reinterpretations and

reconstructions by generations of listeners.
A third group of essays in Musical Theory in the Age of Romanticism further
develops the theme of historical anachronism in musical criticism by rereading
specific nineteenth-century theories of musical structure—sonata form (analyzed
by Peter Hoyt and Scott Burnham) and the leitmotif (analyzed by Thomas
Grey) in their original historical contexts. The analysis in the essays of this
section goes in the opposite direction to those of Part I. What is perceived as
informing the construction of theory is not so much preconceptions about the
essential structures of experience as it is the messy realities of musical practice.
Both sonata form and the leitmotif, it turns out, became more philosophical,
schematic and universalizing the greater the distance from their origins. Later
simplifications of sonata form toward binary structures ignored the complex
and subtle theorizing based on intensive engagement in contemporary music by
early theorists like Antoine Reicha and A. B. Marx. Listeners seeking a thread
of narrative orientation in the complex maze of Wagnerian music—music that
had abandoned traditional architectonic and melodic patterns—constructed a
network of musical memory associations to structure their experience, and thus
helped bring about the elaboration and stylization of a compositional practice
increasingly dependent on a network of motivic relations. What emerges here
is the way that aesthetic theory should not be read à la Bonds as a set of
philosophical preconceptions about subjective agency applied to the passive
musical object (the Beethoven symphony), but as a struggle with the agency
of musical compositions like Beethoven’s symphonies. The creative imagination
of Romantic philosophers emerged in interactive relations with aesthetic works,
and as a labor of construction that constantly struggled to shape itself in relation
to the worlds of constructed aesthetic objects.
Although the contributors to Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism clearly
intend their scholarship to help reveal anachronistic interpretation and lack of
historical self-consciousness in our musical experience of nineteenth-century
classics, only one essay (Heyr’s piece on Eroica) really attempts to use these
perspectives to analyze a composition in order to show us the way its musical
structures organize subjectivity in historically specific ways, and only one essay
(Pederson’s “Romantic Music under Siege in 1848”) connects the theoretical
debates about music in culture to broader and more specific historical contexts
of not just musical discourse but also theoretical discourse about music. However,
historicism within musical culture and the historical analysis of musical culture
are central to Celia Applegate’s Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s
Revival of the St Matthew Passion and the extended discussion of Mendelssohn’s
musical historicism in Steinberg’s Listening to Reason.
320 john e. toews

ii. music and memory: historical self-consciousness in

the organization of subjectivity
One of the defining qualities of the fictional subjective agency that organizes
itself in musical discourse is the ability to listen to the past, to shape its present
actions in an imaginary dialogue with remembered and reconstituted musical
shapings of subjectivity in past eras or cultural moments. An obviously defining
characteristic of nineteenth-century classical music is its historicism, its self-
conscious revival, remembering and appropriation of the musical monuments
of the past in the organization of its own structures and in the creation
of a canon of historical works, a constructed tradition that organized both
the private cultivation and the public performance and consumption of art
music. Applegate’s Bach in Berlin focuses on an event, the public performance
of J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Berlin Choral Academy under the
direction of Felix Mendelssohn on 21 February 1829, an event conventionally
considered both an expression and a cause of the emergence of musical historicism
in the nineteenth century. Applegate does not question these claims, but
aims to reconstruct the social and cultural developments that transformed a
public concert into a historical event of such resonance and significance, to
explain the conditions that made the event both possible and comprehensible.
“Mendelssohn’s revival, more than any other single event,” she writes, “laid the
foundation stone for the ‘imaginary museum’ of musical works of the past and
made music, Bach’s music, German music, as essential to what it meant to be
German as the language itself.”18 The driving issue in this sentence, and in her
book, is how musical historicism organized subjective agency into a powerful
experience of subjective identity, specifically national identity, how the public
performance and consumption of musical remembering shaped and enacted the
construction of collective memory that grounded the temporal continuity and
thus supra-individual reality of the “we.” I will return to this issue below, but
musical historicism was more than an instrument for the formation of national
identities, as Applegate would readily admit, and her analysis of its historical
presuppositions deserves separate consideration.
The central chapters of Bach in Berlin provide a wide-ranging, solidly
documented reconstruction of the social and cultural developments involved
in the emergence of a public culture of serious art music in the Protestant
areas of northern and central Germany during the half-century before the
Berlin performance of Bach’s Passion music in 1829.19 This reconstruction
takes the form, first of all, of a sociology of musical institutions, audiences,

18
Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 2; original emphasis.
19
This part of Applegate’s work should be read alongside David Gramit, Cultivating Music:
The Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley:
 integrating music into intellectual history 321

players, teachers and publicists. The 1829 performance took place in the concert
hall of a musical academy and was performed not by a church choir or an
ensemble of court musicians but by a mix of devoted amateurs and professionals
who had emerged as a significant social component of civil society after the
reforms of the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. The performance of
1829 and its public impact was made possible in part by the fact that both
performers and audience were prepared to imagine themselves involved in a
process of self-cultivation through artistic means. The meaning of the work
performed was mediated to an audience of educated listeners and readers through
both a well-developed musical pedagogy and ongoing public discussion in the
burgeoning print culture of journals and published writings. Applegate traces
the multiple, interacting developments through which musical performers were
gradually transformed from artisans into self-conscious artist–professionals, how
the context of performance shifted from church, court and town square to
public concert venues or the intimate settings of family life, how amateur music
associations emerged as voluntary forms of communal self-education within the
freedoms of an emerging civil society after 1800, and how journals and journalists
used the moralizing power of the fine arts as a major component of their
program of public cultivation. In all of these areas Applegate tends to emphasize
the conditions of imagining individual cultivation as an identification with the
community of the cultural “nation,” vaguely defined by overlapping linguistic,
ethnic, religious boundaries. Less forcefully presented are the attempts to ground
this identification specifically in a construction of a self-conscious relation to
a past that was not only “discovered” as different, but also rediscovered as an
expression of an essential continuity that transformed difference into identity.
The chapters where this issue is more closely addressed and which zero in more
specifically on how musical subjectivity was organized through a dialogue with
the past are the chapters that focus with more analytic and interpretive intensity
on the questions of “why Mendelssohn?”, “why Bach?” and “why the St Matthew
Passion?” In fact all three questions really merge into one. What were the reasons
for Mendelssohn’s conviction that the music of Bach was the historical foundation
of his own generation’s attempt to organize and perform their individual and
collective subjectivity through music and how did his choice, interpretation and
performance of the St Matthew Passion articulate that conviction?

University of California Press, 2002), which provides a more general, systematic and
theoretically informed analysis of the same phenomena, and critically examines the
tension between, on the one hand, the claims that musical experience was essential to the
cultivation of human subjectivity per se and, on the other, the interest in directing musical
experience toward the construction of exclusionary identities, not only of nationality, but
of class and gender as well.
322 john e. toews

Aside from a few suggestive comments in personal letters, Mendelssohn did

not analyze or discuss the reasons for his choice or interpretation of Bach’s
great choral masterpiece. Clearly he was virtually unique within the world
of composers and conductors of his time in his access to both Bach’s scores
(through family connections and musical education) and to the institutional
means to perform the larger choral works (through his intimate relations with
the Berlin Choral Academy directed by his personal teacher Carl Friedrich
Zelter and with the talented professional instrumentalists, singers and potential
publicists who frequented his family circle). One can also assume that he shared,
perhaps even stimulated and encouraged, his friends’ growing conviction that
Bach’s compositions were not just complex, learned contrapuntal structures
through which serious music students, at least in Berlin, honed their technical
skills and learned the principles of harmonic structure and composition, but
musical universes in which they could experiment and perform the spiritual
and emotional content of their own subjectivity. The most revealing articulation
of Mendelssohn’s relation to Bach’s music that expresses both his recognition
of its irrevocable pastness as a musical form and his concern to rescue the
spiritual content that animates its historical forms and makes them into inspiring,
educational, dialogic partners in the subjective processes of identity-construction
in the present, occurs in his contemporaneous musical compositions. It is here, in
the piano pieces that turn Bachian fugal exercises into Romantic “characteristic”
pieces or expressive tone poems, in the Chorale Cantatas (Mendelssohn composed
nine between 1827 and 1831) that remake Bach’s liturgical pieces for the sensibility
of the modern individuals in concert halls longing to still their subjective
longing in communal harmonies or transcendent consolation, in the Oratorio
Saint Paul, thematically and structurally oriented to the famous Bach chorale
cantata Wachet Auf, and perhaps most clearly in the Reformation Symphony in
which Bach fugues and chorale harmonizations are ultimately integrated into a
Beethovenesque symphonic resolution that transforms an appropriation of the
past into a projection into the future, that Mendelssohn made the reasons for
his choices and interpretations aesthetically available to the listener. In his pared-
down version of the St Matthew score (from three and a half to two hours—a
version that favored chorales over choruses and the recitatives of the biblical text
over poetically constructed arias) he performed what he imagined as the spiritual
essence of the piece—a dramatic story of suffering and salvation in which the
pain and sorrow of alienation was overcome by participation in an immanent
spiritual community (a community of subjective identification) sustained by
the will of a loving, all-powerful, transcendent father. Applegate’s analysis of
the intensely emotional responses to the 1829 performances indicate that it was
this story of death, resurrection and the creation of spirit-filled community that
resonated in the ticketholding audience and transformed them at a benefit concert
 integrating music into intellectual history 323

in a public hall into a “sacred” community. But ultimately it is Mendelssohn’s

own music that contains the subtlety and depth of his historical consciousness
and self-examination and might illuminate the historical meaning of the 1829
performance of the St Matthew Passion for us. Applegate’s study is a powerful
contextual analysis of this musical event; it frames the act with the material
and cultural conditions that made it possible, but the act itself—the music—is
missing.
Considering Michael Steinberg’s general argument about the need for
historians to focus on the analysis of how the dynamic structures of music
articulate and enact the organization of historical subjectivity, it must come
as somewhat of a surprise that his own chapter on Mendelssohn’s musical
historicism is also missing any serious musical analysis. This is especially
surprising since Steinberg categorizes Mendelssohn’s “canny” historicism as
the epitome of the Biedermeier period between Beethoven’s abstract heroics of
subjective emancipation and Wagner’s tendency to subordinate subjective agency
to exclusive ideological identification—a period when nineteenth-century art
music came closest to his normative idea of a thinking and reflective subjectivity
always struggling to transcend the fixation of representation and identity. On the
one hand Steinberg asserts that Mendelssohn’s music combined the principle of a
modern subjectivity, emancipated from fixed identities and engaged in a constant
movement of self-formation, with a subtle, multiple, layered and inclusive
conception of community as something historically fashioned and constantly
refashioned. But despite the self-reflection and irony in this music of subjectivity
that treated the past not with conservative nostalgia or abstract rejection, but
as a dimension of living consciousness that was constantly in a process of re-
imagining itself, Mendelssohn, in Steinberg’s view, believed in the possibility of
ordering the past in a fully conscious fashion (thus the lack of “uncanny” elements
in his performance of the subject’s relation to the past). Mendelssohn’s music
articulated not so much the adventure of subjectivity in experimental motion but
the resignation of a subjectivity that had already found an ordered relation to the
past, and believed that the historical integration of agency and identity was not a
utopian project but an ongoing reality. Thus Steinberg sees Mendelssohn’s music
for the stage production of Sophocles’ Antigone as settling for a position that
defends neither the statist ethics of Creon nor the personal subjective morality of
Antigone but performs a compromise in which both positions are seen as having
legitimate historical claims. As in his discussion of Mendelssohn’s relation to Bach
and the Protestant Baroque, however, Steinberg does not proceed to an analysis
of how this kind of extra-musical resolution works itself out in the music. What
he misses is the tension of unreconciled oppositions and the excitement of an
experiment in motion. He thus inadvertently falls back, despite all his admiration
for Mendelssohn’s considered positions about the organization of subjectivity in
324 john e. toews

relation to the past, into the conventional judgment that Mendelssohn’s music
is not that interesting, somewhat glib, and perhaps even shallow. Mendelssohn,
he says at one point, was too much a historian as a musician. He had worked
through the most important issues regarding agency and identity in relation to
the past by the time he sat down to compose his works, with the paradoxical result
that compositions that officially eschew “representation,” and transform extra-
musical realities and identities into aesthetic possibilities, ultimately turn out to
be, or are experienced as, representations of an already achieved resolution.20
My own view is that Steinberg is wrong about this and that more careful
musical analysis of what goes on in Mendelssohn’s compositions would have
made this clear. What Steinberg experiences as the presentation of already
achieved resolution is in fact a complex position of how lack of resolution,
or a tense balancing of multiple, dynamic possibilities, can be sustained by
the musical subject. In Mendelssohn’s compositions the relativity and constant
transformation of subject positions and communal identifications is sustained
by a faith in a transcendent will that both grounds subjectivity and sustains it
as subjectivity through its various transformations. In Mendelssohn’s musical
world this transcendent ground is the will of the father that must be illuminated
and discovered through an interpretation of the words of revelation. In his
claim that this “resolution” is already there when the music begins Steinberg is
right. But it is there only as an item of faith, and needs to be performed in the
music to become real. The drama of the music lies in the battle to discover and
experientially affirm the knowledge that grounds both autonomy and integration,
and to sustain that knowledge against the constant temptation to fall under the
spell of particular historical, cultural identifications that claim exclusivity and
fail to recognize the historical relativity of all specific religious and communal
identities. This is a musical historicism that differs from those of Beethoven or
Wagner, but it is a historicism that comes into being in the music, and can only
be illuminated through an analysis of the dynamic structures of Mendelssohn’s
musical compositions. This does not mean that one cannot talk or write about
it anymore than one must surrender the right to talk about the construction of a
particular historical self-consciousness in the aesthetic forms of the “I” shaping
itself in the dynamics of a novel like Madame Bovary or Bleak House. As an
aesthetic construct, the work has its own voice, as Steinberg constantly reminds
us, and that voice is usually (inevitably?) more subtle and multidimensional
than the voice of its author as we might come to know it through other textual
evidence.

20
Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 95, 122.
 integrating music into intellectual history 325

iii. agency becomes identity: music as the site for the

formation and expression of national consciousness
The discussion of Mendelssohn’s musical historicism by Steinberg and
Applegate continually gravitates toward a focus on the way in which the
musical experience and imagination of both audience and participants enacts
the organization of subjectivity as essentially communal, or integrates individual
subjects into an inter-subjective community, how it produces not just a
consciousness (mediated through the freedom of aesthetic form) of the
emancipation of subjectivity from externally fixed or determined historical
forms, but draws emancipated subjects into new possibilities of integration, re-
creating historically determined identities as self-consciously chosen identities.
The question of how music could become a privileged site for the cultivation
and performance of national identity organizes Applegate’s study and emerges in
Steinberg’s attempts to rescue German classical music from this fate and to reveal
the historical contingency of its appropriation for national identity-formation.
Both write in the shadow of the history of the German classical-music tradition
in the twentieth century: its appropriation by ethnic and racial nationalists who
transformed “absolute” music into a synonym for German music, and its partial
or selective purification after 1945 through the rehabilitation of the ideology of
autonomous music as a universal form transcending the mundane, contingent,
corrupting influence of nationalist particularity. The music of Johannes Brahms
was most effectively rescued from nationalist appropriations in these latter efforts
(more effectively than the music of Wagner, or even Bruckner) and reinstated as an
exemplar for autonomous “absolute” music, but a recent study by the historical
musicologist Daniel Beller-McKenna, entitled Brahms and the German Spirit,
questions the legitimacy of this ideological purification and claims that Brahms’s
music should be understood as an expression of the German cultural and political
nationalism that shaped the perspectives of the composer as well as his audience
during the period of German unification and the imperial triumph after the
creation of the Bismarckian Reich in 1870–71. Beller-McKenna’s argument here is
not just about the appropriation of Brahms’s music as distinctively German but
about its contingent particularity as German music. The music itself, he claims,
transforms subjective agency into national identity.
Beller-Mckenna’s general claims about the centrality of German national
identity in Brahms’s works are based in part on a judgment that Brahms’s
treatment of the German Lutheran Bible as a kind of urtext of German culture
turned all of the music he composed to biblical texts into statements about
German nationality, and in part on descriptions of the specific historical contexts
of the production and performance of some of Brahms’s major texted works. His
extensive analysis of Brahms’s collections of biblical passages does produce some
326 john e. toews

interesting insights. The passages Brahms collected and used were usually stripped
of their theological content, and selected for their expression of earthly moods,
desires and hopes. In fact it would seem that according to Beller-McKenna’s
own analysis it was Brahms’s music that framed the meaning of these selections
rather than the other way around. At the same time the connections drawn
between historical contexts and musical forms, although sometimes suggestive,
often seem to fall into very broad analogies open to conflicting interpretation.
What is powerful in the book is Beller-McKenna’s ability to tease out complex
narrative patterns of structural relations through the detailed analysis of musical
form.
At the core of the book are two chapters that dissect Brahms’s well-known Ein
deutsches Requiem (Opus 45, completed in 1868) and his now virtually unknown
Triumphlied (Opus 55, 1871) as musicalizations of an apocalyptic paradigm of
historical development, first as expectation and hope and then as triumphant
fulfillment. The Requiem is conventionally related to Brahms’s personal attempts
to come to terms with and seek consolation for the personal losses of his mentor
and musical father Robert Schumann,who died in 1856, and his biological mother,
who died in 1865. From this perspective the biblical passages are appropriated and
musically framed to express the human psychology of loss, grief, commemoration
and consolation. Steinberg tends to hear the Requiem and interpret the paradigm
of transformation it performs in this way. The representation of personal grief and
the hope for external consolation through either conquest of the world or loving
acceptance by the world are “resolved” through a revelatory experience of music
itself as the site where militancy and consolation, masculine control and maternal
love, are reconciled. Beller-Mckenna, however, reads the patterns of temporal
and structural relations in the piece within a paradigm of apocalyptic cultural
transformation. Inconsolable grief and irresolvable conflict find their resolution
in the hope for a radical change within social and cultural structures of immanent
community that will create a New Jerusalem or second Paradise where the
divisions of temporal life will be dissolved in a timeless eternity. His analysis of the
music does suggest a cessation or at least partial suspension of normal temporal
order in the outer movements and an experience of alienation and longing
accompanied by intimations of promised fulfillment in the five inner movements
of the Requiem. The key to the interpretation of this apocalyptic pattern of
subjective longing and articulated hope for a home in which that longing will
finally be stilled is seen in the political context of Brahms’s composition—
the movement toward German national unification under Prussian Protestant
leadership during the 1860s.
Beller-Mckenna wants to argue that the Requiem represented Brahms’s
powerful personal identification with the German nation (as shaped by the
linguistic foundations and Protestant perspectives of the Lutheran Bible). The
 integrating music into intellectual history 327

work is thus an expression of Brahms’s conscious and perhaps also unconscious

commitments and identifications. Steinberg, however, hears a combination of
personal and collective subjectivity reflecting on itself within the music, giving
voice to what he describes as a first-person plural of the “people,” but not
representing a preformed exclusionary unity of nation-state or confessional
church, or even collective German cultural identity or “spirit.” By comparing
Brahms’s Requiem to the requiems composed by Verdi (1874) and Dvořák (1890),
Steinberg suggests the emergence of a counter-Wagnerian musical rhetoric in the
late nineteenth century that examined the issue of collective national experience
and voice but resisted the incorporation of subjectivity into national identity
and maintained the separation and interaction of personal, cultural and religious
dimensions in the discourse of subjectivity. Beller-Mckenna, however, draws
his comparisons to Brahms’s later work—especially the Triumphlied composed
after the defeat of France and the creation of the new German Empire. From
the perspective of this triumphalist representation of accomplished national
identity defined by the defeat and exclusion of the “other,” Ein deutsches Requiem
does begin to look more like a premonitory dream of national fulfillment.
Beller-Mckenna’s convincing analysis of the Triumphlied as a purely expressive
declamation of achieved resolution without the structural dynamics of tonal
tensions, conflicts and progressive movement, as a composition he describes as
“one great ending”21 without internal development, however, also highlights how
different the Triumphlied is from the music of Brahms that has maintained itself
in the classical canon. Like the Requiem, the Triumphlied assimilates parts of the
tradition of sacred music—Handel’s Halleluja Chorus, the Lutheran chorale Nun
danket alle Gott—as a way of connecting German military victory over France to
divine judgment and the successful constitution of a community of the saints,
but other aspects of the historical appropriation of the sacred tradition evident
in the Requiem are absent in the Triumphlied. The biblical narrative of suffering
and hope, of loss and recovery, of alienation and reconciliation, is missing,
leaving only the celebration of arrival. Applegate noted that the emotional power
of Mendelssohn’s revival of the St Matthew Passion was due in large part to the
subjective enactment of this circular journey (from Eden to the New Jerusalem) of
the soul through the formal transformations of musical structure. A traditional
religious experience was revived and performed as an aesthetic experience in
the dynamic forms of the music. But “salvation” occurred here as an aesthetic
experience. The integration of individual subjectivity into a spiritual community
occurred within the musical experience. Music allowed individuals to explore
such possibilities collectively but it did not represent their extra-musical merger,
or express an already constituted historical identity. What Steinberg sees in the

21
Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit, 126.
328 john e. toews

musical universes of composers like Mendelssohn and Brahms is an ability to

maintain the balance and tension between autonomy and integration, longing
and resolution, suffering and consolation, by never allowing art to surrender to
representation or expression. The problem with Brahms’s Triumphlied, and with
much of Wagner, is that they collapse these distinctions.
But there is clearly a problem in this perspective. The power of the narrative
of loss, longing and recovery, of exile, alienation and homecoming, is sustained
by the belief that the fiction of resolution is a real experiential possibility, that
aesthetic experience as aesthetic experience is a real experience that tells us
something about our true selves and our historical possibilities. What happens
to musical structure when this belief begins to disintegrate, when composers
and performers and audiences lose their belief in the metaphysical grounds of
the musical narrative, when musical experiences of resolution and reconciliation
are immediately recognized not as immanent possibilities but as empty dreams,
grounded in futile longings? In many ways this question informs the final chapters
of nineteenth-century classical music and is expressed in the works under review
in discussions about the meaning of the music of Gustav Mahler.

iv. reconstructing subjectivity without identity:

mahler and modernism
Michael Steinberg concludes his history of the performance of subjectivity in
nineteenth-century art music with a condensed, dense and somewhat cryptic
discussion of the nine completed symphonies Gustav Mahler composed between
the mid-1880s and his death in 1911. The symphonies are divided into two groups,
each constituting a distinctive chapter in the interaction between subjectivity and
the various possibilities of identity, or “representation,” as Steinberg prefers to
call the state of subjectivity’s capitulation to, or engulfment by, powers and
ideologies that universalize historically contingent possibilities. The musical
structures and dynamics of the first four symphonies perform the journey of a
homeless outsider seeking the identity of a home through a maze of possibilities
(musical representations of resolution or reconciliation) that both tempt and
threaten the subject, and can be alternatively resisted, obeyed or transcended. In
this period Mahler’s work obviously continues the nineteenth-century tradition
of enacting subjectivity as a quest for identity, although with a distinctive capacity
to articulate musically the emotional immediacy of both the agonies of alienation
and the seductive attraction of dreams of fulfillment tied to Arcadian, maternal
and religious references.
Steienberg’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Musical Unconscious” to
highlight another constant element in Mahler’s work. For Mahler the problem
of representation lies less in memories drawn from historical tradition and
 integrating music into intellectual history 329

embedded in the self-referential network of Western art music than in the

uncontrollable and repressed unconscious desires and fears ultimately rooted
in natural and psychic depths that transcend the individual self. The fall into
representation is enacted by the musical subject acting out these powers. Mahler’s
ability to produce aural enactments of the emotional drives, longings and
dreams of the alienated psyche that were not dependent on expert knowledge
of the classical-music tradition but resonated more immediately within the
psyches of a general concert audience became one of the sources of his
contemporary popularity (alternatively judged as a socially radical populism
or as unsophisticated vulgarity) as well as his ability to maintain his influence
among audiences divorced from the original contexts of the music’s production
and performance.
Steinberg, however, focuses on the important transformation that occurred
around 1900 and which began to be enacted in the Fifth Symphony. In
the last five symphonies he sees a change from symptomatic acting out of
unconscious desires in dream images of fulfillment to a conscious working out
of, and analytic engagement with, the sources and consequences of surrender
to representation and ideology. The mutual respect and admiration apparently
expressed in the famous meeting between Mahler and Freud in 1910 provides a
touchstone for Steinberg’s interpretation. After 1900 Freud and Mahler shared
a common agenda—to protect and affirm subjectivity against the temptations
of representation or identity even under the most extreme emotional pressures
to capitulate to the unquenchable longing for surrender to some supra-personal
meaning. The music in these last years, Steinberg argues, becomes itself an
affirmation of life as an interminable working through of the temptation to
abandon subjectivity for a permanent identity.
The collection of essays published in the Bard Festival volume on Mahler edited
by Karen Painter—Mahler and his World—provides discussions of both historical
contexts and musical structures that illuminate the somewhat abstract claims of
Steinberg’s conclusion. Leon Botstein’s revealing historical reconstruction of the
reception of Mahler’s music in the twentieth century posits a radical disjuncture
between meanings (psychological and therapeutic) attached to Mahler in his post-
1960s revival and the more edgy and ironic, more political and culturally critical,
meanings that were heard in Mahler’s music in the time and place of their origin in
fin de siècle Europe. Music that had originally disturbed and unsettled audiences,
by undermining the viability of their strategies to achieve psychic integration and
an affirmative identity for their homeless subjectivity, later seemed to provide
therapeutic consolation for lost and suffering souls. Botstein’s analysis is complex,
but the general thrust of his analysis appears to substantiate Steinberg’s argument
that Mahler’s music enacts a critique of ideology similar to that of Freud. Other
essays devoted to situating Mahler in his original historical context reenforce
330 john e. toews

this particular interpretation of how the cultural content of the formal dynamics
in Mahler’s music might be construed. Talia Becker Berio’s “Mahler’s Jewish
Parable” examines Mahler’s insider–outside status as an assimilating Jew at a
moment of increasing anti-Semitic exclusion as the foundation of his musical
performance of a subjectivity both longing for integration and resistant to the
ideological integrations that were offered. Essays by Charles Maier and Karen
Painter reveal a possible political framework for Mahler’s musical performance
of subjectivity. Maier describes how Mahler’s public roles as musical director
and conductor involved an engagement with audiences that aimed not only
to deconstruct nostalgic ideologies of reconciliation and identity, but also to
construct, in an activist, recognizably progressive manner, the listening public as
a new form of cultural community. Like Freud’s apparently paradoxical role as
the charismatic creator and director of the psychoanalytic movement and thus
fashioner of new identities for the analyzed, Mahler’s focus on the individual
psychic process of identity-formation and identity-unraveling implied the hope
for a new kind of affirmative community of the ideologically disabused. His
massive musical structures with their often simplified appeal to the psychic
conflicts of Everyman, rather than to the expert knowledge of the musical
cognescendi, thus suggested a desire to involve mass audiences in the historical
experience of subjectivity enacted in his art. Finally, an essay by Peter Franklin
on gender implications in Mahler’s musical discourse suggests that, like Freud,
Mahler imagined the organization of subjectivity as a constant exploration of
both feminine and masculine identities in the never completely resolved or fixed
gendering of subjectivity.
The four essays devoted to structural and formal analysis of specific musical
works and/or passages tend to confirm the suggestions of the contextual essays.
In this case at least, historical analysis of the extra-musical context of the worlds
in which Mahler composed, performed and was performed, and formal analysis
of the autonomous musical universes within which he explored the interaction
between subjectivity and identity, cooperate, or at least interact, in ways that open
up convincing interpretations of the meaning of the works. Essays by Camilla
Bork and Peter Revers on Mahler’s settings for Friedrich Rueckert’s lyrical poetry
suggest that Mahler’s contextually defined personal crisis and transformation
in 1901 produced a shift in musical form that is consistent with Steinberg’s
claim of a turn toward a disillusioned, self-reflective, ironic stance in relation
to possibilities of identity and resolution as well as toward the construction
of aesthetic affirmations of inconclusive, interminable subjectivity. A study of
Mahler’s late style by Stephen Helfling confirms this pattern. The overall effect
on the reader is that Mahler’s musical works, like the novels of Musil, Mann or
Proust, are an integral part of the history of subjectivity as it evolves from the
emancipation of the modern subject, through the transformations and crises
 integrating music into intellectual history 331

of identification, to the self-critical analysis of psychic reality as an ongoing,

interminable performance of subjectivity.22 In the process of undermining the old
narratives of movement toward resolution and identity that provided temporal
meaning to human existence, there emerged new kinds of modernist narratives
driven by the emergence of a critical self-consciousness regarding the source of
the desire for meaning. One could say that the new insight was that narrative
meaning can only be found in the story of a search for meaning that culminates
in the recognition (and potentially in the affirmation) that all human meanings
are constructs imposed on a meaningless reality.
Perhaps the time has come not only to include the history of music as
both an autonomous and a central element in the standard intellectual and
cultural histories of modern Europe, but also to reimagine the textual and visual
elements in those histories from the perspective of the history of music. Forms
internal to music seem to be able to embody or enact the flow of subjectivity
through the construction and deconstruction of identities more convincingly,
more “experientially,” than other cultural forms. Knowledge of these musical
forms might open up obscured dimensions in areas dominated by texts and visual
images. The construction of masculine and feminine identity in Freud’s texts,
for example, could be enriched and complicated by examining his texts as sites
where subjectivity is performed in a constant negotiation with representations
of masculinity and femininity, rather than as expressions or representations
of identities already preformed outside the text. Listening to Mahler might
illuminate Freud’s texts as much as reading Freud illuminates Mahler’s music. If
music can really teach us to listen, then historians can only gain from listening to
music. And intellectual historians, whose work is focused on reconstructing
the processes of past thinking, should pay special attention to the ways in
which listening to music creates possibilities for engaging texts in a way that
not only emphasizes context, encounter and dialogue rather than assimilation,
expropriation and transparency, but also reanimates narrative form as a constant
movement of reflection from memory to expectation.

22
There is an insightful comparative analysis of the role of modernist irony in Mann and
Mahler in Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 186–213.