By Benjamin M. Korstvedt

“The postwar fate of Mahler’s legacy in Vienna, long his musical home, was both significant and revealing. His works experienced a brief revival there in the immediate aftermath of the war. Within weeks of the defeat of the Nazi regime, the occupying authorities organized a few performances of his symphonies under the direction of two conductors who had been silenced by the Nazis, Robert Fanta and Joseph Krips. These concerts were charged with political significance as symbols of a new beginning after the defeat of Nazism.“

“Renewed Discrimination Against Mahler”?
An Episode in Postwar Austrian Politics

The tremendous growth in popularity of the music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) in performance and especially on record during the 1960s and 1970s has achieved almost mythical status. Not only did performances and recordings of Mahler’s symphonies begin to flourish as never before, but his image was radically transformed. He went from being widely regarded as a composer of sprawling, idiosyncratic, often self-indulgent symphonies that belonged only on the fringes of the repertoire, to being seen as a composer of urgent importance who brought the long tradition of the Germanic symphony to its great and tragic climax. His music was felt by many to be urgently relevant to the predicaments and psychology of contemporary life. Mahler found an unexpectedly warm welcome in the youth culture of the 1960s, especially in the USA, and his Jewish identity was proudly embraced by many as central to his musical aesthetic and message. The phrase he is said to have uttered, “My time will come!,” was invoked so often, usually with the implication that his time had finally come, that it threatened to become a mere slogan.

This “Mahler boom,” as I have just described it, was essentially an American and, to a slightly lesser extent, a British phenomenon. In German-speaking Europe, Mahler’s music and reputation also underwent great evolution in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Some of the issues were similar: Mahler’s role in music history, his modernism and the aesthetic value of his symphonies were all up for debate. But the stakes were higher, because cultural politics and historical circumstances weighed more heavily. A few of his works, notably Das Lied von der Erde and the Second and Fourth Symphonies, had enjoyed considerable success in Austria before 1938, and his oeuvre had gained esteem in modernist circles in the 1920s. But his music was also actively denounced by some as ‘degenerate’ and its performance, along with that of other Jewish composers, was banned by the Nazi regime.

The postwar fate of Mahler’s legacy in Vienna, long his musical home, was both significant and revealing. His works experienced a brief revival there in the immediate aftermath of the war. Within weeks of the defeat of the Nazi regime, the occupying authorities organized a few performances of his symphonies under the direction of two conductors who had been silenced by the Nazis, Robert Fanta and Joseph Krips. These concerts were charged with political significance as symbols of a new beginning after the defeat of Nazism. A plaque commemorating Mahler’s return to Viennese concert life was even erected near the entrance to the Vienna Konzerthaus with the inscription: “On 3 June 1945 the art of the great musician returned to Austrian cultural life” (“Am 3. Juni 1945 wurde die Kunst des groszen [sic] Musikers dem österreichischen Kulturleben wiedergegeben.“).

Despite this optimistic proclamation, over the following decade performances of Mahler’s symphonies in Vienna remained uncommon. For example, before 1955, these works appeared on the concert programs of the Vienna Philharmonic on average less than once a season; the majority of these were led by Bruno Walter. Walter (1876-1962), a onetime Mahler protégé, had become the leading advocate of his music in the US and later again in Europe. In fact, during the 1940s and early 1950s, the cultivation of Mahler’s music was centered in the US and Britain, due in large part to the efforts of Walter and other Jewish émigré conductors, notably Otto Klemperer, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, Jascha Horenstein, Paul Kletzki, and William Steinberg.

By and large, in the 1950s and 1960s the enthusiastic embrace of Mahler’s works in Austria, as well as in Germany, was limited to the cultural left and the musical avant-garde. Many Austrian music lovers remained steadfastly unpersuaded of the musical value of Mahler’s symphonies. Moreover, for some cultural conservatives, antipathy toward the revival of Mahler could channel lingering postwar resentments, even some colored by a hint of anti-Americanism and bitterness at the success of visiting émigré musicians. A review of a 1955 concert by the Vienna Philharmonic under Walter, for example, deplored the inclusion of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony on the program. The critic repeated the criticism, first made in the composer’s era, that the “the work’s banal Volkstümlichkeit” ultimately undermined the composer’s “serious aspirations.” The review concluded with the sardonic observation that if nothing else the concert “made it clear once again that not only racial prejudices, but also other things played a part in the fate of Mahler’s work.” In this context, the phrase “other things” betrays a not-so-subtle suggestion that Mahler could safely be rejected on musical grounds, without scruples about the residue of the openly antisemitic criticism he and his works had suffered. The review concluded, with a final sarcastic barb, that the true quality of Mahler’s music was already plain to see “after 1945, when the joyfully welcomed Mahler-Renaissance remained unsuccessful.”¹

Mahler’s advocates had to overcome such attitudes in Austria and Germany in the 1950s, where social and political tensions stemming from the Nazi era remained strong and largely unresolved. These tensions played out with remarkable intensity around the commissioning and editing of the article on Mahler for the major postwar German music encyclopedia, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. MGG, as it is commonly known, had been first planned in the early 1940s as a “general encyclopedia of music.” It began to appear one volume at a time in 1949 and took more than a decade to complete. It was soon regarded as the most authoritative reference work in the field of musicology, a status it held until appearance of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980.²

The general editor of MGG was Friedrich Blume (1893-1975), a prolific, highly accomplished German musicologist who prospered under the Nazi regime as well as in West German academia after the war. Blume was never a member of the Nazi party but was able to rise to positions of considerable influence in the Third Reich, partly on the strength of his 1939 book, Das Rasseproblem in der Musik [The Race Problem in Music] which cannily handled this ideologically crucial topic without compromising his intellectual rectitude too profoundly.³ Blume’s political views and musical judgments were essentially conservative, if not reactionary, as became starkly evident in his handling of the article on Mahler for the MGG.

Since work on MGG progressed one volume at a time, it was not until the mid-1950s that the planning began for the volume that would contain the entry on Mahler. The Austrian musicologist, editor, and music theorist Erwin Ratz (1898-1973) had already offered to write the article. Ratz was an extraordinary figure. He had been a student of Arnold Schoenberg, among others, and was firmly rooted in the tradition of Viennese musical modernism epitomized by Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Ratz considered himself apolitical, but he had no sympathy for the Nazi movement. In fact, during the time of Nazi rule in Vienna he helped save the lives of several Austrian Jews by sheltering them in his apartment; Ratz and his wife Leonie were both posthumously recognized for these courageous efforts, receiving the title of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. In 1955 Ratz became the founding president of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft (IGMG), a position held until his death. He was also the principal editor of the new complete critical edition of Mahler’s works that the IGMG began shortly after its founding.

Ratz may have seemed a very apt choice for the Mahler article in MGG, but almost immediately differences developed between him and Blume. Friction between them quickly became intense as both men revealed themselves to be difficult characters. Blume assumed a stance of aloof authority, while Ratz was prone to become contentious and self-righteous. The tensions between them were not simply personal but were heavily inflected by their sharply opposed personal histories, cultural politics, and aesthetic biases. Ratz, who had behaved with true honor during the Nazi era, deplored the lingering presence of musical values and scholarly attitudes that had flourished during that time. He also must have resented Blume’s shrewd willingness to adapt himself to changing political circumstances following both 1933 and 1945. Soon their differences proved too great to overcome. They eventually ceased corresponding directly and instead communicated through third parties. In the end, Blume angrily withdrew the invitation to write the Mahler article from Ratz; at the last minute he turned instead to Hans Redlich (1903-1968), an Austrian-born British musicologist.⁴ Redlich, who was from a prominent liberal Jewish family, quickly produced a new article, which appeared in 1960 in Volume 8 of MGG.

The prolonged, contentious series of exchanges between Ratz and Blume that led to this outcome was as extraordinary as it is revealing. Ratz had first broached the topic of the authorship of the MGG article on Mahler with Blume as early as 1954, but it was only in October 1958 that he was formally invited to write it. Disagreements arose from the outset. MGG specified that they wanted an article of only five columns in length, not the twelve Ratz proposed.⁵ Ratz replied that not only was this too little space for “the most significant German symphonist of our century” but, as he demonstrated by painstakingly tabulating the length of a dozen articles from earlier volumes of MGG, it was markedly less than that already given to musicians of distinctly lesser significance.⁶

Ratz worried that publishing an article of such terribly short shrift “will undoubtedly be perceived as renewed discrimination against Mahler.”⁷ He added pointedly that “in West Germany today the influence of National Socialist literature is unfortunately so widely and incomprehensibly tolerated that such a radical abridgement of the article ‘Mahler’ can easily be misunderstood in this sense.”⁸ Blume replied evasively, “Please don’t speak of discrimination against Mahler,” and offered to allow Ratz six columns for his article.⁹ This did not satisfy Ratz. After another round of correspondence, complete with Blume’s assurances that this had nothing to do with politics but was simply a matter of space, they settled on eight and half columns—surely to the satisfaction of no one involved.

From this sour start, interactions between Ratz and Blume steadily declined. The discord reached its height in the spring of 1959. On 27 March Ratz had duly submitted a typescript of his article of the agreed-upon length but with “the proviso that no change or abridgement of any kind will be made.”¹⁰ When he received the proofs, he was shocked to discover that Blume had made substantial changes to the text without consulting him. As he had earlier, Ratz counted carefully; of Blume’s twenty-seven changes, Ratz was willing to accept twenty-three, albeit with two of them “under protest.” But four he found simply “unacceptable”; for these, he supplied revised wording that he could accept.¹¹ When Blume resisted these changes, Ratz threatened to create a public scandal.¹² With that, Blume decided to drop Ratz and turn to Redlich, whom he regarded as both more sympathetic to his point of view and more compliant.

Blume contended, not without some justification, that Ratz’s article advocated for Mahler too one-sidedly to be suitable for a reference work such as MGG. But deeper points of conflict existed between Ratz and Blue over musical and aesthetic issues. These points are indicative because they touched on fundamental issues that were being negotiated more widely in the cultural discourse of German-speaking Europe in the 1950s. The issues at stake can be isolated most clearly by comparing the four passages Ratz would not accept in Blume’s redaction with the revised wording he proposed.¹³ In one instance, Ratz corrected a serious factual error introduced by Blume’s statement that Mahler “never heard” the Eighth Symphony performed; in fact, the premiere of the Eighth in 1910 was Mahler’s greatest public success as a conductor of his own work. In the other cases, Ratz’s reworkings reaffirm key points in his view of Mahler’s significance. For example, he restored a passage Blume cut that referred to the impact of “the heavy blows of fate that Mahler suffered after completing the Eighth.” Here Ratz pointed to the events of Mahler’s annus horribilis, 1907: he resigned his position as director of the Court Opera in Vienna, exhausted by ongoing disputes with management and increasingly harsh, often anti-Semitic, criticism in the press; he then signed a lucrative contract to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in New York; weeks later his four-year-old daughter Maria Anna died of scarlet fever; and finally, he was diagnosed with a chronic heart infection, which led to his death less than four years later. For Ratz these fateful developments catalyzed a process of spiritual as well as musical “ripening, the fruit of which are the two works [Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony] in which Mahler reached the height of perfection.” These two works are not only his most boldly modern in musical style and expression, but they are unflinching confrontations with the themes of loss, despair, and departure. For Ratz, Mahler’s deepest value lay precisely there; but for Blume, Mahler’s creative output peaked with the grandly affirmative Eighth Symphony.

In the other passages Ratz also pushed back against Blume’s efforts to change his message. In each case, Blume sought to diminish the modernity and existential urgency that Ratz ascribed to Mahler’s music by tying it primarily to nineteenth-century paradigms rather than to tendencies that foreshadowed developments to come. For example, Blume tried to blunt the importance Ratz placed on Mahler’s role as an influence, and later advocate, of the atonal neue Musik pioneered by Schoenberg and Webern. Instead, he claimed that Mahler “saw it as his task to preserve the legacy of Anton Bruckner and to develop it further.” This interpretation glosses over Mahler’s deep ambivalence about the quality of Bruckner’s symphonies; moreover, it subtly derogates the originality and expressive innovation Mahler achieved. Ratz’s proposed rewrite emphasizes Mahler’s epochal historical as well as musical significance:

In order to do justice to Gustav Mahler’s artistic personality, we must recognize the historical situation in which this most important German symphonist after Bruckner was placed. He stood at a decisive turning point in the history of humanity, which naturally was also reflected in music. The radical change in musical language at the beginning of our century, the inner necessity of which had to lead to the abandonment of tonality, was the inevitable consequence of our entry into the age of extreme moral and physical danger.

Similarly, Blume’s revision soft-pedalled the philosophical claims of Mahler’s symphonies, conceding only that “just as Beethoven’s last instrumental works were not mere tonal games, Mahler’s music is always a new confrontation with the problems of humanity”. Ratz’s formulation was much more pointed. He extended Blume’s sentence with words that both directly linked Mahler’s message to Beethoven’s self-conception and affirmed its contemporary relevance:

Just as Beethoven in his last instrumental works was not merely concerned with tonal play—we need only think of his statement: “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy,” which draws a clear line against all purely artistic playfulness—Mahler’s music is also always a new confrontation with the problems facing humankind.

Given the political and historical context of that time, it is no surprise that Mahler’s identity—national, ethnic, and religious—would be at issue. What is surprising is how this transpired. Given his generally progressive attitude and his righteousness during the Nazi era, it seems surprising that Ratz felt a need to downplay Mahler’s Jewishness. His reasoning, as he explained it to Redlich, may appear convoluted. He wrote that “Jewish friends” has suggested “that it would not be advantageous for Mahler if a non-German or an emigrant were to write this article [for MGG], because given the current mentality in Germany, Mahler would immediately cease to be regarded as a German composer. . . and the matter would be dismissed as a Jewish affair.”¹⁴ In other words, he worried that centering Mahler’s Jewish identity, which in fact had been a conflicted matter for Mahler himself, would now have the effect of marginalizing the significance of his musical message and diminishing its universalism.

Blume, however, apparently disagreed, perhaps paradoxically—or perhaps not— given his earlier writings on musical “race theory.” His choice of Redlich to replace Ratz certainly suggests as much. Redlich’s account of Mahler in his 1955 book, Bruckner and Mahler, begins with a truly remarkable discussion of the impact of “the tragic restlessness imposed upon him as a member of his race,” which concluded that “the relentless struggle of his powerful mind with his frail body was clearly the result of the oppressive conditions suffered by Jews throughout the north-eastern part of old Austria.”¹⁵ In contrast to Ratz, and surely to Blume’s satisfaction, Redlich’s MGG article devoted substantially more attention to Mahler’s activities as a conductor and correspondingly less to his achievements as a composer, emphasized his indebtedness to Bruckner, and downplayed his anticipation of modern developments, both musical and socio-political. It does not, however, make much of Mahler’s Jewishness. After mentioning it in the first sentence (“his parents were not very wealthy Bohemian-Moravian Jews, eager to assimilate into the German-Austrian cultural tradition”¹⁶), Redlich turns to Mahler’s Jewish character only in a final sentence that both confirms and belies Ratz’s worries about this topic:

Regardless of whether one calls this [modernistic] tendency Hasidic (as Max Brod did) or sees it as a prophetic dream of the great political-military conflicts of this century (as the undersigned does), Mahler’s art (in its greatest moments) possesses a sense of anxiously anticipated cosmic hubris that holds up a mirror to future generations in the tonal parable of an often feverishly excited, visionary music.¹⁷

In the context of Germany and Austria in the 1950s the divergent interpretations of the significance and character of Mahler’s music of Blume and Ratz—and later Redlich—crystallized lingering tensions stemming from the Nazi era and its aftermath. Blume’s avowal that his standpoint was purely apolitical but interested only in musical matters embodied a mode of cultural conservatism that flourished in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, he not only minimized the modernist, prophetic qualities of Mahler’s symphonies, but preferred to remain silent about their fate in the Nazi Germany. In fact, not surprisingly given his own personal history, he seemed content to regard the end of the war as a Stunde Null that offered an opportunity for a clean break with the horrors and crimes of the immediate past. Ratz, in contrast, believed that active critical engagement with the past, the Nazi past above all, was the only way to achieve a valid historical reckoning, the true Vergangenheitsbewältigung that was needed. He was keenly aware that the existing German literature on Mahler was not only scant but largely conveyed negative, often prejudicial, judgments that affirmed “the old biases of the years 1933-1945.” He believed it was imperative to acknowledge this reality, both in the name of historical rectitude and to help enable Mahler’s still vital message to breakthrough, particularly as his centenary was to arrive in 1960.¹⁸

In this way, then, this dispute over a seemingly trivial issue—the tone and content of an article in a music encyclopedia—set politically charged values on a collision course in a way that reflected fundamental cultural divisions in postwar German and Austrian society. As had happened repeatedly from his own time onwards, Mahler’s reception in Austria and Germany—and in somewhat different ways in the English-speaking world as well—became, in effect, a microcosm of a process of sociopolitical negotiations of much broader significance.

Author Biography

Benjamin M. Korstvedt is the George N. and Selma U. Jeppson Professor of Music at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His most recent book, Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He is also the author of Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy (Cambridge, 2010) as well as numerous publications on the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, symphonic aesthetics, compositional process, music criticism, reception history, and musical culture in late nineteenth-century Vienna, interwar Austria, and during the Nazi era. His current project, which builds on research supported by a grant from the BIAAS, is entitled “Bruckner and/or Mahler: Changing Images of Two Austrian Composers in the Mirror of Sociopolitical Change in Austria and the United States, 1918-1996.” It explores how these two composers and their music were interpreted and appropriated across the upheavals Austria and Austrian culture underwent in the twentieth century.

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References

(1) “Weißes Maß und Künstlerische Reife. Philharmonisches Konzert unter Bruno Walter,” a review signed “Dr. -t-k,” Wiener Zeitung, 8 Nov. 1955, from a newspaper clipping included in the papers of Erwin Ratz, held in the Archive of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in Vienna. (“Und so zeigte es sich aufs neue, daß nicht nur rassische Vorurteile, sondern auch noch andere Dinge im Schicksal des Werkes Mahlers mitspielen. Dies hatte man ja auch bald nach 1945 feststellen können, als die freudig begrüßte Mahler-Renaissance ohne Erfolg blieb.”)

(2) A wholly new, modern version of MGG was published between 1994 and 2007.

(3) Pamela Potter discussed the political and ideological positioning of Blume’s “race theory” in Most German of the arts. Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the end of Hitler’s Reich (Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 184-188.

(4) He was the son of Josef Redlich (1869-1936), an Austrian lawyer and Liberal politician of considerable importance.

(5) MGG was unusual in that it was not organized by pages but rather by columns, two of which, each numbered separately, appear on each page.

(6) Unless otherwise note, the information about Ratz’s drafts and revision of his MGG article is derived from materials held in the IGMG archive in Vienna. I thank the President of the IGMG, Professor Christian Utz, for providing me with generous access to these materials. In addition, Dr. Antonia Teibler provided me with helpful information.

(7) “. . . der zweifellos als neuerliche Diskriminierung Mahlers empfunden werden wird,” letter of 26 February 1959. Quoted in Roman Brotbeck, “Verdrängung und Abwehr: die verpasste Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Friedrich Blumes Enzyklopädie Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart” in Musikwissenschaft – eine verspätete Disziplin?: Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen Fortschrittsglauben und Modernitätsverweigerung ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 347–384, here p. 367.

(8) “Der Einfluß der n.s. Literatur ist heute in Westdeutschland leider so breit und unverständlicherweise toleriert, daß eine so radikale Kürzung des Artikels ‚Mahler‘ leicht in diesem Sinne mißverstanden werden kann,” letter of 26 February 1959. Quoted in Hartmut Krones, “Selbst Egon Wellesz konnte nicht vermitteln. Erwin Ratz, Mahler-Gesellschaft und Mahler-Artikel der MGG,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 65/2 (2010): 20-35, here p. 24.

(9) “Bitte sprechen Sie nicht von einer Diskriminierung Mahler,” letter of 6 March 1959. Quoted in Roman Brotbeck,

(10) Letter of 27 March 1959, quoted in Krones, “Selbst Egon Wellesz konnte nicht vermitteln,” p. 25.

(11) Letter of 5 June 1959 to Wilfried Brennecke, an editor with MGG; a carbon copy is in the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library, F13 Wellesz 1511/6.

(12) He had already mentioned this possibility of reverting to this tactic in a 27 March 1959 letter to Wellesz, Austrian National Library, F13 Wellesz 1511/5.

(13) The IGMG archive holds a copy of Ratz’s handwritten list of Blume’s changes with notes on each, a copy of the proofs with his corrections and emendations, as well as new versions, both in handwritten and typed form, to replace the four passages he found unacceptable in Blume’s redaction.

(14) Quoted in Roman Brotbeck, “Verdrängung und Abwehr,” p. 367.

(15) H.F. Redlich, Bruckner and Mahler, The Master Musicians series (London, 1955), pp. 109-110.

(16) “Seine Eltern waren wenig begüterte böhm[ische]-mährische Juden, eifrig bestrebt, sich der deutsch-österr. Kulturtradition zu assimilieren.” Hans Redlich, “Mahler, Gustav,” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 8 (Kassel, 1960), col. 1489.

(17) “Gleichviel, ob man diese Neigung (mit Max Brod) chassidisch nennt oder ob man sie (wie der Unterzeichnete ) als prophetischen Wahrtraum der großen politisch-militärischen Konflagrationen dieses Jh. empfindet, Mahlers Kunst eignet (in ihren größten Augenblicken) ein Gefühl bang erahnter komischer Hybris , das , im tönenden Gleichnis einer oft fieberhaft erregten, visionär erlebten Musik, nachkommenden Generationen den Spiegel vorhält.” Redlich, “Mahler, Gustav,” col. 1498.

(18) Quoted in Krones, “Selbst Egon Wellesz konnte nicht vermitteln,” p. 26