2024 Gustav Mahler’s Sound conference

Spoken Paper Presentation | Toblach, Italy

To be published as part of volume 1 of the new book series Mahler Dimensionen (https://www.gustav-mahler.org/en/research/mahler-dimensions).

This chapter examines Gustav Mahler’s orchestrational choices in his final orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, as reflections of social constructions of gender in the early twentieth century. I critically consider Mahler’s compositional decisions in light of contemporary analytical approaches to orchestration, gender, and sexuality. In order to contextualize Mahler’s gendered orchestration, I begin by examining some of the critical commentary on Mahler’s lived experience with gender and sexuality. Given these biographical considerations, I propose queering the orchestrational binary established by the composer in his music, invoking both Mahler’s non-normative decisions and our contemporary hermeneutic agency. Then, I analyze two songs from Das Lied von der Erde. “Von der Schönheit” represents a theoretical baseline as it presents a stark orchestrational differentiation between (and navigation across) masculine and feminine conceptions of gender. In “Der Abschied,” gender fluidity is implicated by orchestration itself in a final transition that refers back to the orchestrational language of “Von der Schönheit.” Finally, I contemplate how the chamber version of the song cycle initiated by Arnold Schönberg and completed by Rainer Riehn simultaneously reifies and neuters the gender dynamics embedded in Mahler’s original score. My hope is that these music-analytical ideas can contribute to the broader discourse surrounding critical gender studies and Mahler’s lived identity, a discourse which tends to eschew formalist music analysis.