Beyond Romanticism

5. Mahler

In Gustav Mahler's later works it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between evidence of the culmination of the "theme-and-variations" form, and its very dissolution. Mahler develops elaborate themes at great length, introduces new thematic ideas along the way, and cuts back and forth between them in subtle ways, never quite fulfilling the classical requirement for thematic recapitulation on route to resolution. You might say that variation has become an end in itself in Mahler's mature works, and that the lyrical mode has triumphed over large-scale form. That is the somewhat restricted sense in which Mahler can be called modernist, even though he did not experiment as much with chromaticism: an unceasing musical flux is the desired effect, and with it the loss of a sense of firm foundation. His refusal to offer musical resolution was subsequently inspiring to many modernist composers. We might also go so far as to claim that Mahler employs a "Freudian" mode of introspection, with the music offering up a systematic account of inner psychological processes for public examination. Listen to the closing passages of the Ninth Symphony, for example, where the entire movement is based on a premonition of death. 

This is indeed the outer limit of late Romanticism, but in the dissolution of tempo and the grudging return to the tonic reference, it hints at the future possibilities of modern composition.

(Another composer who ought to be featured here: Alexander Zemlinsky, Mahler's Viennese contemporary.)