Mahler's dramaturgy of sonata form : the late symphonies

Abstract

Gustav Mahler is often considered to be a dramatist of music. The idea that his music can tell a story has been widely recognized. Drawing on a biographical or a biography-related approach, numerous scholastic efforts have been made to investigate the content of his narratives. However, inquiries on the content have overshadowed the very question of its formation in music. Subsequent to Seth Monahan’s extensive study on Mahler’s symphonic sonata forms, we see a comprehensive interpretive framework of Mahler’s musical drama. Monahan believed that the traditional model of sonata form can be used to account for the narratives in all of Mahler’s early- and middle-period symphonies. Nevertheless, such a paradigm is said to lose its explanatory power after the Sixth Symphony. The extended tonal practice emerging in Mahler’s late maturity has posed a challenge to the understanding of the narrative in these late works. The possibility of having more than one tonic in extended tonality diminishes much of the sense of the one and only tonal center, which results in the apparent collapse of the traditional sonata scheme. Analysts are hence reluctant to apply the concept of sonata form when addressing the narratives in Mahler’s late symphonies. This, however, does not imply that sonata form can no longer be used to understand Mahler’s late symphonic narratives. The characteristics of sonata form are still present and thus shall have their own functions in his late works. The present thesis argues that the concept of sonata form continues to play a significant role in constructing the late Mahlerian symphonic narratives. Sonata form does not withdraw all at once from being the paradigmatic musical plot, yet it assumes its function in a very different way in Mahler’s late works. It is driven below the musical surface, staying as an underlying dramatic backbone that governs the narrative of the extended tonal process. Chapter One begins by presenting issues about articulating the narrativity in Mahler’s music. Chapter Two addresses the problems in understanding Mahler’s conception of form in the late symphonies. I identify the changing notions of form and content inherent in Mahler’s compositional thought, which clarifies the ambiguous relationship between form and tonality that appears to have completely separated after the Sixth. Chapter Three offers an analysis of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, where the disengagement from the traditional sonata scheme begins. Tension generates between the conformity to the traditional sonata form on the surface and the emergence of the new narrative engine drawn on the double-tonic complex. Chapter Four shows the full realization of a different narrative construct in the first movement of the Ninth. Sonata form is reinterpreted as a set of “tonal rhetoric” that governs the tonal drama of the double- tonic complex. The ambivalence between classical and modern practices that stretch across Mahler’s late symphonies is finally resolved with the complete integration of sonata form into extended tonality. It is in this hybridity we find Mahler’s modernist tendency towards his late life.