Mahler's landscapes: Constructions of space in music and the visual arts in fin-de-siecle Vienna

At several prominent places in his works, Mahler composed music with distinctive spatial construction and symbolic links to the natural world. The opening of the First Symphony, the "posthorn" episode from the Third, and "Der Abschied" from Das Lied von der Erde share these features. They have spare textures, a wide disposition of instrumental forces, and the effect of temporal suspension. Their transparent textures allow the process of individuation and exchange between musical elements to come to the fore, especially in relation to timbre. This exchange highlights voices that work in synthesis with those that are juxtaposed. Mahler's music is defined spatially through this process. Through the metaphor of landscape, I propose that the above passages illustrate the diversity of Viennese fin-de-siecle visual culture through their ephemeral and laconic qualities. These artistic parallels occur most clearly in the landscape works of his artistic contemporaries, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.; Mahler's own landscape passages were part of an ideological argument involving ornamentation versus organic development, since they reflected ambiguously on the nineteenth-century tradition of teleologically-based symphonic forms. However, they derive their relevancy neither from static surface nor motivic development but by their capacity to suggest unique spatial relationships. The epic and reiterative passage in the First Symphony corresponds to the awakening of Nature and is a spatial reminder of this origin myth. The spatial disjunction of the "posthorn" landscape is used for elegiac purposes and symbolizes the elements of human memory as they are refracted in the a natural world. The "Abschied" passage initiates a timbrally and rhythmically nuanced recitative, in the form of subtle decays and articulated renewals. For Mahler, as for his artistic counterparts, the landscape form inspired both tradition and experimentation. Like Klimt's superimposed visual planes, which create a synthetic relationship between figure and ground, Mahler's music suggests incremental distances between subjects. The economy of his music relates also to Schiele's laconic subjects. In Mahler's landscapes, both types of experiments coexist.