2023 Society for Music Analysis Annual Conference

Spoken Paper Presentation | Oxford, England

This presentation extends the concept of Mahler’s “farewell finale,” an idea first introduced by Donald Mitchell to describe the dramatic conclusions of several of the composer’s song cycles. By exploring connections between Mahler’s song cycles, such as Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Kindertotenlieder, and his late symphonic works, I reframe the latter in the image of the former, challenging the typical view that the late symphonies constitute a radical shift in compositional means and expressive style. For several scholars (e.g., Hefling, Mitchell, Danuser, Newlin, and Jameson), the late symphonies represent Mahler’s reckoning with his own, personal mortality following his diagnosis with a serious heart condition. I show that the finales of the late symphonies present Mahler’s more general contemplations on human mortality and the afterlife. In the symphonic works following the tumultuous year of 1907, Mahler returned to the farewell finale trope that had served his expressive agenda in less turbulent times, creating a long-term ideological through line in Mahler’s oeuvre.

Mitchell’s farewell finale corpus includes poetic references to grief, nature, and death, conveyed by a slow funeral march topic, a quasistrophic formal design, and culminating in a dramatic dissolution of thematic content and texture. This presentation establishes that the narrative expressive implications and formal principles of the farewell finale trope are resurgent in the finales of Mahler’s Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. This scholarship adapts the work of Caplin (1998) and Monelle (2006) to demonstrate these shared musical traits across two decades of compositional output.