“The Hand that Writes”: The Scriptorial Unfinishedness of the First Movement of Mahler’s Tenth

Abstract

Since Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Roman” (“Novel”), in his book Mahler: Eine Musikalische Physiognomik (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy), it has become commonplace for scholars to study the narrativity of Gustav Mahler’s music. However, insufficient attention has been given to the analysis of narrativity within the compositional process, in light of the trend in textual studies called “genetic criticism.” In this article, I seek to fill this gap with the hypothesis that the compositional process of the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony can be compared to that of a narrative, from a structural and hermeneutic point of view. To detail and support that hypothesis, starting with the discussion in the literature on musical narrativity, I first theorize some key aspects of Mahler’s narrative-like activity during the compositional process. Then I will explain how these aspects work in the compositional process of the three most important musical ideas in the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth. Ultimately, I suggest that the outcome of this narrativizing activity is the composer’s attempt to represent in the movement the act of its creating through meta-referential play, which corresponds to that of modernist novels—in particular, Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Keywords

• 19th century
• 20th century
• genetic analysis
• genetic criticism
• hermeneutics
• mahler's compositional process
• mahler's tenth symphony
• musical narrativity
• gustav mahler
• alma mahler