AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

156 saturday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
an! ” Certainly, the scene is discussed in synopses, and Millington reminds us that Beckmesser
interrupts Walther because he mistakes the form of the song. But, surprisingly, the scene has
not been analyzed as central to understanding the work as a whole. If, however, one hears
“Fanget an! ” as a deliberate intrusion of the tristan style, with harmonic language and melodic
tropes drawn explicitly from that opera’s act 3, then one finds specific musical support
for the argument that Walther is an intruder from the world of modern music, and, suddenly,
a hermeneutic window opens upon the opera as an ironic gloss on the tristan experiment.
Walther’s trial song is an exasperatingly self-involved exercise in uncontrolled chromatic
improvisation, from which even Wagner is now ready to take whimsical distance. The Flieder-
Monolog finds Wagner, through Sachs, listening to tristan, triangulating “Fanget an! ” with
the more straightforward “Am stillen Herd” in order to point the way to the eventual winning
prize song, and thus creating the kind of structural bridge among moments that characterizes
Wagner’s mature operatic style. Hearing “Fanget an! ” as a parody of the tristan style further
renders Sachs’s famously ironic act 3 quotation of tristan’s opening phrase, and the King Mark
motive, as more significant and characteristically organic than if they were mere passing references.
The deepest parody in Wagner’s great comedy is thus of Wagner himself.
WHEREFORE THE HARP?: AN OPERATIC
MODEL FOR MAHLER’S ADAGIETTO
David Kasunic
Occidental College
During the summer of 1901, while at work on the Scherzo movement of what will become
his Symphony No. 5, Gustav Mahler shares the following with his friend Natalie
Bauer-Lechner: “There is nothing romantic of mystical about [this symphony]; it is simply an
expression of incredible energy. It is a human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his
life. It is scored accordingly; no harp or English horn. The human voice would be absolutely
out of place here. There is no need for words; everything is expressed in purely musical terms.
Furthermore, it will be a regularly constructed symphony in four movements, each of which
exists for itself and is self-contained, linked to the other solely by a related mood.” By the time
he completes this symphony, in 1902, Mahler has added what he calls a “love letter” to Alma,
the famous Adagietto movement, which he has placed after the Scherzo third movement as a
prelude to the Rondo-Finale fifth movement. While the Adagietto still preserves Mahler’s earlier
characterization of the symphony by not supplying any singing, it alludes (as others have
observed) to Mahler’s songs and arguably quotes the “glance music” from the second act of
Wagner’s tristan und isolde. And while we have no night-evoking, Tristanesque English horn,
the harp plays throughout the movement. But if this is not the sound of Orpheus’ nocturnal
wailing (an association Mahler seems intent on avoiding), then wherefore the harp?
This paper answers this question by examining an area of compositional influence overlooked
by Mahler scholars, and that is the influence that Mahler the opera conductor exerted
on Mahler the symphonic composer, an influence that Mahler himself hints at in his remarks
to Bauer-Lechner. By considering the operas that Mahler championed and conducted
as possible compositional influences, a likely inspiration for the Adagietto springs forth: the
Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. Mahler was the first to conduct this
opera outside of Italy, and after Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, it was the second most performed opera
during his directorship of the Vienna Hofoper, from 1897 to 1907, with 131 performances.