Musical allusions as an aesthetic principle (and not "creative impotence," as some critics sought to present it) were a part of Mahler's artistic creation from the beginning. At least at the start of his career, Mahler could count on the familiarity of his Viennese audience with certain musical ideas, no less than with numerous quotations from works of Schiller, Goethe, or the Antiquity, which belonged to the standard education of central-European bourgoisie. The first song from his cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is based on a citation from Schubert's Mainacht, a song often performed in the circle of Mahler's friends. The poetic images in Mahler's text are also similar to those of Schubert's poet, Hölty. In the same song there is a second connection, to Marschner's "Romanze vom bleichen Mann" from the opera Vampyr. The third song is permeated by motives from the Ring, especially from Götterdämmerung. Allusions to motives are made at appropriate points in the text; for example, the phrase "nicht bei Tage, nicht bei Nacht, wenn ich schlief" ("not by day, not by night when I was asleep") is set to the descending chromatic line of the "Sleep" motive from the Ring. In the final song, apart from Wagner, Mahler quotes Schubert's Wegweiser and, most obviously, a lengthy excerpt from Donizetti's opera Don Sebastian in which a character witnesses his own funeral. The latter, a march theme Mahler remembered from performances heard ten years before, alludes to the mood of his character at the end of the cycle. The orchestral postlude consists of a twice repeated progression, a stepwise ascending minor third, common to all three of Mahler's models, Schubert, Wagner, and Donizetti.

Works: Gustav Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Das klagende Lied.

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Mirna Polzovic