‘The Ghost in the Machine’: Thomas Koschat and the

volkstümlich in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

Jeremy Barham

I quote from others, the better to express myself.

(Michel de Montaigne)

Mahler and the volkstümlich

Mahler’s music is replete with folk-, dance-, and military-music

references in the form of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic allusions,

and certain underlying structural and stylistic practices. Virtually

all who discuss Mahler acknowledge the allusions, and there have

been several more focused studies.1 The general consensus

1 See, for example, Georg Göhler, ‘Gustav Mahlers Lieder’, Der

Kunstwart 24/2 (1910), 146–48; Georg Göhler, ‘Gustav Mahlers

Lieder’, Die Musik 10/18 (1910–11), 357–63; ‘Fritz Egon Pamer,

‘Mahlers Lieder’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 16 (1929): 116–

38 and 17 (1930): 105–27; Ernst Klusen, ‘Die Liedertexte Gustav

Mahlers’, Sudetendeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 6 (1933),

178–84; Rudolf Quoika, ‘Über die Musiklandschaft Gustav

Mahlers’, Sudetenland. Böhmen Mähren Schlesien. Kunst

Literatur Volkstum Wissenschaft 1 (1960): 100–109; Franz

Willnauer, ‘Das Triviale und das Groteske im Werk Gustav

Mahlers’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 121/8 (1960), 238–41;

Helmut Strojohann, ‘Gustav Mahlers Verhältnis zur Volksmusik’,

Musica 14/6 (1960, 357–59; Ernst Klusen, ‘Gustav Mahler und das

emerging from this body of work is that though occasional identical

passages and a number of close similarities can be identified

between elements of Mahler’s melodic, harmonic and rhythmic

idioms and actual folk, dance and military music known to have

existed in the Bohemian, Moravian, Austrian and Southern-German

orbit in which he spent his formative years, there is no concrete

Volkslied seiner Heimat’, Journal of the International Folk Music

Council 15 (1963), 29–37; Ernst Klusen, ‘Gustav Mahler und das

böhmisch-mährische Volkslied’, in Georg Reichert and Martin Just

(eds), Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen

Kongress, Kassel 1962 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 246–51;

Edward F. Kravitt, ‘The Trend Towards the Folklike, Nationalism

and their Expression by Mahler and his Contemporaries in the

Lied’, Chord and Discord 2/10 (1963), 40–56; Siegfried Borris,

‘Mahlers holzschnitthafter Liedstil’, Musik und Bildung 5/1 (1973),

578–87; Monika Tibbe, Lieder und Liedelemente in

instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers, 2nd edn

(Munich: Emil Katzbichler, 1977); Vladimír Karbusický, Gustav

Mahler und seine Umwelt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1978); Mathias Hansen, ‘Zur Funktion von

Volksmusikelementen in der Kompositionstechnik Gustav

Mahlers’, in Rudolf Pecman (ed.), Hudba slovanských národu a její

vliv na evropskou hudebni kulturu [Music of the Slavonic Nations

and its Influence upon European Musical Culture] (Brno: Ceská

hudebí spolecnost, 1981), 381–5; E. Mary Dargie, ‘Mahler and Des

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evidence to indicate that Mahler deliberately set out to cite specific

sources. According to most commentators, it is more the case that

Mahler’s music is infused with the spirit, rather than being

dependent on the letter, of folk music, and that apparent instances

of ‘citation’ or allusion arose instinctively and accidentally out of

the composer’s deep well of half-buried, half-remembered

childhood experiences of local folk culture. In one of the more

recent considerations of the topic, for example, Renate Ulm

concludes, after Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht: ‘one can safely assume

that it was not Mahler’s intention to slip authentic folk music into

his works’, and goes so far as to say that even if it were, ‘[the

question of] whether he used models, and if so which exact ones,

Knaben Wunderhorn 1. The Folk-Song Heritage’ in Dargie, Music

and Poetry in the Songs of Gustav Mahler (Bern: Peter Lang,

1981), 109–30; Jon W. Finson, ‘The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s

Wunderhorn Lieder’, The Journal of Musicology 5 (1987), 91–116;

Ugo Duse, ‘Der volkstümliche Ursprung des Mahlerschen Liedes’,

in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds), Musik-Konzepte

Sonderband. Gustav Mahler (Munich: text + kritik, 1989), 159–79;

Constantin Floros, ‘Gustav Mahler und die “böhmische Musik”,

Musica 45 (1991), 160–168; Matthias Schmidt, ‘Komponierte

Uneinholbarkeit, Anmerkungen zum “Volkston” der Wunderhorn-

Lieder’, in Bernd Sponheuer and Wolfram Steinbeck (eds), Gustav

Mahler und das Lied. Referate des Bonner Symposions 2001

(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 51–68.

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has absolutely no significance for assessing the way that folk-like

song operates in the context of his works’.2

According to personal testimony from one of Mahler’s earliest

biographers, Richard Specht, ‘almost exclusively, those

impressions gained between the ages of 4 and 11 were decisive and

bore conclusive fruit in his artistic creativity … everything later

only rarely came to artistic fruition’.3 Yet Mahler almost never

identified precise sources for any of his references to folk/popular

music, preferring to speak in the most general terms:

So it is in music, that the songs which a child assimilates in

his youth will determine his musical manhood. … the

musical influences which surround the child are those which

have the greatest influence upon his afterlife and … the

melodies which composers evolve in their maturity are but

2 ‘Das “Gedudel der böhmischen Musikanten”. Mahler und die

Volksmusik’ in Ulm, Gustav Mahlers Symphonien. Entstehung,

Deutung, Wirkung (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 71–76; quotations,

73 and 76. See also Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 3rd ed.

(Munich: Piper, 1992), 195. All translations are my own unless

otherwise indicated.

3 Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin & Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler,

1913), 164.

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the flowers which bloom from the fields which were sown

with the seeds of the folk-song in their childhood.4

The Bohemian music of my childhood home has found its

way into many of my compositions. I’ve noticed it especially

in the ‘Fischpredigt’. The underlying national element there

can be heard, in its most crude and basic form, in the

tootling of the Bohemian pipers.5

If the fact of Mahler’s folk/popular-music influences can hardly

be disputed, there is no clear agreement about the meaning of such

compositional practice. For Max Brod it is not a matter of Mahler’s

desired assimilation into German culture, but rather of the

unconscious expression of his Jewish (Hassidic) ‘soul’,6 while for

4 ‘The Influence of the Folk-Song on German Musical Art. From an

Interview with the Eminent Composer and Director Gustav

Mahler’, The Etude (Philadelphia) May 1911, 301–2; quotations

301 and 302.

5 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans.

Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (London: Faber Music, 1980), 33;

Gustav Mahler. Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ed.

Herbert Killian & Knud Martner (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner),

28.

6 ‘Gustav Mahlers Jüdische Melodien’, Musikblätter des Anbruch

2/10 (1921), 378–9. Quoika disputes this ‘Zionist’ viewpoint on the

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Karl Komma it is precisely this Jewishness that enabled him

through the medium of folk appropriation to amalgamate the

different national music traditions of his early Czech and German-

Sprachinsel contexts.7 By contrast, both Jon Finson and Peter

Franklin liken the patent folk-like tone of the Wunderhornlieder to

Arnim and Brentano’s original aim of underpinning and promoting

a specifically German cultural identity and forging a recognizably

German ‘voice’.8 For others, the popular or the ‘trivial’, especially

when incorporated into the symphonic (and a distinction should be

made between the more direct assumption of the folk-like in the

early songs and the Wunderhornlieder, and its often more oblique

transformation in symphonies) acts as a ‘foil for the sublime’, in the

grounds that Mahler’s roots did not in fact lie in Eastern Europe

(‘Über die Musiklandschaft Gustav Mahlers’, 109). Karbusický

notes that itinerant East-European Jews travelled west from

Tarnopol to Bohemia performing Hasidic music at the Purim

Festival (‘Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness’ in Jeremy Barham,

ed., Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005),

195–216; see 203.

7 Das böhmische Musikantentum (Kassel: Johan Philipp Hinnenthal,

1960), 175.

8 See Finson, ‘The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn

Lieder’, 101; and Franklin ‘Mahler’ in The New Grove Dictionary

of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell

(London: Macmillan, 2001), 15, 602–31; 615.

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knowledge that though Mahler may have come from the ‘land’, he

also later outgrew these origins.9 Yet one of the most

thoroughgoing and careful scholars of this topic, Vladimír

Karbusický, notes that such sublimity and transcendence usually

associated with elevated ‘high art’ were for Mahler attainable

through the simplest musical means, and that the mere major triad

that so frequently formed the melodic and harmonic basis of his

folk-like tone was to him ‘proof of the existence of God; I need no

more’.10 Karbusický also reminds us of the highly contested notion

of ‘authenticity’ in folk repertoire. Highlighting the emergence of a

‘new style’ of sentimental and plangent folk music in the second

half of the nineteenth century forged by a growing economy of

street singers who would adapt familiar ‘classical’ folk repertoire

with ‘unstable intervals’ and ‘emotional surgings’, he notes both

that it was this music for which Mahler had a ‘sharp ear’, and that

it was a style long considered by folklorists to be ‘inauthentic’ and

‘corrupted’—part of a post-1848 tradition that, largely on the back

of increased urbanization, became ‘saturated with pseudo-folk

music and with professionally fabricated songs, made popular by

the then fashionable practice of community singing, and by the so-

9 Richard Batka, Die Musik in Böhmen (Berlin: Bard, Marquardt &

Co., 1906), 98.

10 A comment reported by Mahler’s friend Josef Foerster; cited in

Karbusický, Wie Deutsch ist das Abendland? (Hamburg: Von

Bockel Verlag, 1995), 120.

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called “shopkeepers’ output” of music’. 11 Unlike Henry-Louis de La

Grange who plausibly suggests that Mahler’s folk tone was a

product of his nostalgia for a lost age of innocence of the sort

promulgated more self-consciously and speciously by the turn-of-

the-century Wandervogel folk-revival movement—and also by the

1903 folk song competition sponsored by Berlin’s popular

periodical Die Woche—12 Karbusický thus rejects the idea of Mahler

idealizing some mythical notion of pure folk origins. He does so

partly because in the end such pure essence is non-existent or at

least unobtainable and partly because he believes that Mahler

called on relatively unprocessed folk sounds as the ‘voice of [his

milieu’s] raw everyday life’, to give ‘insight into the social

condition’, in which a mass music that negated originality and

evolution projected the sense of an ‘eternal present’, rather than a

prelapsarian past.13

11 Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 54 and 55; Jaroslav Markl and

Vladimír Karbusický, ‘Bohemian Folk Music: Traditional and

Contemporary Aspects’, Journal of the International Folk Music

Council 15 (1963), 25–9; quotation, 27.

12 ‘Music about Music in Mahler: Reminiscences, Allusions, or

Quotations?’ in Stephen E. Hefling, ed., Mahler Studies

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122–68; 140. See

Kravitt, ‘The Trend towards the Folklike’, 40–6, for discussion of

this movement and the song competition.

13 Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt, 70 and 88.

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The reality may be yet more complex, however, since as

Adorno’s hierarchical dialectics perhaps inadvertently claim,

folk/popular material in Mahler can be seen as both marked

irritants that ‘remain as sand in the mechanism of purely musical

construction’ and as a pliable reactant, an ‘unrisen lower’ that is

‘stirred as yeast into high music’.14 It can be both passive agent of

sentimental nostalgia and active agent of disruptive artistic and

social critique, in part because the turn of the twentieth century

was a highpoint of that era before empiricist notions of archival

preservation took hold, when folk traditions were constructed,

reconstructed, and re-imagined freely in increasingly eclectic

contexts of court, concert-hall, salon, Heuriger, street, and home

performance. Moreover, as a semi-outsider assimilationist hailing

from a culturally and politically subjugated and musically exploited

land, Mahler was aspiring to, and eventually reaching, a Vienna

that was caught between suppressed memories of the misery and

shame of the abortive 1848 democratic revolutions and the latter-

day stagnation of its Habsburg absolutism.15 Sensitive to the

relativity of ideas of ‘Echtheit’ and the nuances of musical value,

Mahler seems at one moment to be striving to build bridges and at

another to be relishing ironies of inevitable historical difference

14 Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 32 and 36.

15 See Duse, ‘Der volkstümliche Ursprung’ for further political

diagnoses of Mahler’s folk influences.

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and distance, the latter exciting critical indignation in the

contemporary reception of some of his songs’ perceived disparity

between material and treatment.16

It is interesting that (in summer 1900) Natalie Bauer-Lechner

reported Mahler’s annoyance at having inadvertently alluded to an

unidentified Brahms symphony and Beethoven piano concerto in

the first movement of his Fourth Symphony, realizing this too late

for the reminiscences to be removed,17 but that conversely, he

expressed no such qualms about his folk/popular music

appropriations. Indeed, given that he rarely acknowledged specific

sources of influence, it is doubly significant that in early summer

1901 he not only named a precise piece of music but also appeared

to be pleased that, like the Brahms and Beethoven, it had made its

way, initially unnoticed, into his Fifth Symphony:

Koschat’s theme ‘An dem blauen See’ [das Thema von

Koschat ‘An dem blauen See’] (by which was meant the

16 See Schmidt, ‘Komponierte Uneinholbarkeit’ for further

discussion of these socio-cultural complexities. See Kravitt, The

Lied. Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Universaity

Press, 1996), 118–20 and de La Grange, Gustav Mahler Vol. 2.

Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897 1904) (Oxford and New

York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 228–30 for examples of this

critical reception.

17 Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, 152; Erinnerungen, 163–4.

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Wörthersee), had found its way into the second movement.

‘I’m glad that it’s from Koschat rather than Beethoven,

because Beethoven developed his themes himself!’, [Mahler

said].18

This case gains further significance in light of the fact that Thomas

Koschat was a highly popular contemporary composer of

Carinthian folkloric music, and that this was therefore an instance

of the allusion to, or borrowing of, a vernacular music which

Mahler evidently came to know not in his youth but in his maturity,

although it may well have contained echoes of his childhood folk

culture. Given that Koschat’s music exemplified the ambiguous

kind of ‘manufactured’ folk music of the late nineteenth century

identified by Karbusický, and given that it has yet to be established

exactly which theme by Koschat Mahler is identifying, where and

why it made its way into the Symphony, and what role it plays, the

issues become all the more intriguing. This study contributes to the

discussion of Mahler’s appropriation of folk/popular/’trivial’ musics

by shedding new light on this hitherto enigmatic allusion or

quotation and its possible significance for understanding the Fifth

Symphony, a key work in his compositional development.

The Koschat allusion and the chronology of the Symphony

18 Erinnerungen, 193 (my translation); Recollections, 172.

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The principal problems associated with this instance of borrowing

or allusion are, first, that there is no such work or song as ‘An dem

blauen See’ by Koschat; and second, that there is confusion about

which movement of the Symphony Mahler was discussing. To begin

with the second problem: by ‘second movement’, it is not

immediately clear whether Mahler meant the ‘Stürmisch bewegt’

second movement, which together with the opening ‘Trauermarsch’

would eventually form the first larger ‘section’ (Abteilung) of the

three-section work (see Fig. 1) or whether, already thinking of the

first two movements as a single unit, he was thus referring in the

conversation with Bauer-Lechner to the third-movement Scherzo as

the second, larger ‘movement’ or section of the Symphony.

Fig. 1. Structural Outline of the Fifth Symphony

This difficulty is compounded by two things. First, the Koschat

comment comes in the middle of a conversation that is clearly

signposted as being about the movement on which Mahler was

currently working – the Scherzo third (individual) movement:

During these past days [ca. 4 August 1901], Mahler spoke to

me for the first time about his current work, his Fifth

Symphony, and in particular the third movement, which he

was then writing […]

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He remarked that Koschat’s theme ‘An dem blauen See’ (by

which was meant the Wörthersee) had found its way into the

second movement […]

Finally Mahler told me that the movement he was working

on was a Scherzo […]19

Is Mahler referring here to two different movements or to the same

movement, given that the Koschat comment is immediately

followed by the designation of the movement as Scherzo? Or could

Bauer-Lechner simply be mistaken?

The problem is compounded secondly because the precise

chronology of the work’s composition is open to some debate.

Bauer-Lechner’s report from summer 1901 suggests that Mahler

worked first on the Scherzo third movement (or second larger

symphonic section), and this is corroborated by Gustav Brecher,

assistant conductor at the opera and Mahler’s contact point with

the Peters publishing house.20 Although Mahler undoubtedly made

preliminary sketches for the whole work, frustratingly only one

page possibly from this earlier stage in the symphony’s

development survives, and this contains inconclusive material for 19 Erinnerungen, 192 and 193; Recollections, 172–3.

20 Reported in Alma Mahler, Mahler. Memories and Letters, eds.

Donald Mitchell & Knud Martner (London: Cardinal: 1990), 92.

See also Sander Wilkens, Mahlers fünfte Symphonie: Quellen und

Instrumentationsprozess (Frankfurt: Peters, 1989), 27.

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the Scherzo. Alma Mahler’s comment that in the following summer,

1902, Mahler worked on the symphony, of which ‘two movements’

had already been ‘completed’,21 is interpreted by Reinhold Kubik,

editor of the latest critical edition, to mean that the first two

Abteilungen or sections (that is, the first three individual

movements) were finished by this time.22 In the summer 1901

conversation with Bauer-Lechner cited above, apparently prior to

working on the short-score draft of the opening of the symphony,

Mahler was still referring to the work as ‘a regular symphony in

four movements’,23 suggesting that at this stage he expected to

write two movements either to precede or to surround the Scherzo

(an allegro opening movement and some kind of slow movement

perhaps), and a finale to follow it. It is possible that Mahler’s

burgeoning relationship with Alma (from November 1901) leading

to their marriage in March 1902 had at least something to do with

the subsequent expansion of the symphony to five movements with

the addition of the famous ‘Adagietto’ between the Scherzo and the

Rondo-Finale.24 Certainly by this stage, and probably by the end of

21 Memories and Letters, 42.

22 ‘Vorwort’ in Gustav Mahler. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische

Gesamtausgabe. Bd. V. Symphonie Nr. 5 (Frankfurt: Peters,

2002), i–xi; see ii.

23 Erinnerungen, 193; Recollections, 173.

24 See Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler. Volume 2. Vienna:

The Years of Challenge (1897-1904) (Oxford & New York: Oxford

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summer 1901, after the conversation with Bauer-Lechner, it would

seem that the opening of the work had developed into a larger

section divided into two movements. This assumption appears to

make reasonable sense of a convoluted picture, until we consider

the title page for what looks to have been a completed short score

draft of the Scherzo movement which came to light from the

Moldenhauer Archive some twelve years ago, clearly dated August

1901 Maiernigg (the scratched out word has been identified as

beendet (‘completed’), and labeled 2. Satz (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Title page of short-score draft of Scherzo movement

(Moldenhauer-Archiven, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Mus.

ms. 22740)

In light of this source, and if Bauer-Lechner is accurate, it seems

that, both during and even after completing the drafts of the

Scherzo in summer 1901, Mahler himself was unsure whether he

was producing a movement that would occupy second or third

place in the structure. This might explain the apparent confusion in

Bauer-Lechner’s or Mahler’s account, and lead us in a certain

direction with regard to the Koschat question. There is, however,

University Press, 1995), 816–17, and Donald Mitchell, ‘Eternity or

Nothingness? Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’ in Donald Mitchell &

Andrew Nicholson, eds., The Mahler Companion (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2002), 236–325: 315–17.

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another possible explanation for the confusion. But in order to get

to that we need to go back and address the first principal problem I

mentioned above in relation to the possible identity of the Koschat

piece used by Mahler, around which this whole issue revolves.

Mahler and Thomas Koschat

Thomas Koschat (1845–1914; see Figs. 3 and 4) was in many

respects Mahler’s mirror-image or alter-ego.

Fig. 3. Thomas Koschat

Fig. 4. Koschat ‘through the years’

Like Mahler he progressed from (semi-)rural and provincial roots

(in his case Viktring near Klagenfurt) to international recognition.

Like Mahler, this process involved achieving success in Vienna,

although Koschat settled there at a much earlier stage in his life,

serving for forty-five years as a member of the opera chorus (1867–

1912), latterly as its leader, as well as singing at the Hofkapelle,

the Cathedral, in three prominent choral groups—the Wiedner

Männerchor, the Wiener Männergesang-Verein and the

Akademischen Gesangsverein—and founding the eventually world-

famous Koschat vocal Quintet with whom he travelled the globe

(including like Mahler, the United States) in approximately 1200

concerts (see Fig. 5).

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Fig. 5. The Koschat vocal quintet

Fig. 6. Koschat’s first draft of ‘Verlâssen bin i’, 1871.

Moving, like Mahler, in Viennese Kaffeehaus circles where he

became acquainted with Wolf,25 Koschat spent summer vacations

on the Wörthersee, his beloved native area, as did Mahler from

1901 to 1907. They both also tangentially shared something of a

predilection for expressions of loss and leave-taking in their music

(for example, Koschat’s songs ‘Âbschied’, Op. 33b, and his famous

‘Verlâssen bin i’, Op. 4 no. 1; see Fig. 6):

In Austria there are few songs more popular among all

classes than the Kärnthner-Lieder (the songs of Carinthia),

of Thomas Koschat. Among them, too, there is none so sure

to excite the sympathies of an Austrian audience as that

beautiful little song, ‘Verlassen bin i.’ It is the complaint of

the typical young Austrian peasant, who, finding himself

deserted by his sweetheart, feels as lonely in the world as a

stray stone on the high-road. He walks out to the little

country church, kneels down inside it, and tearfully bewails

his love-lorn plight (weint sich aus).26

25 See Karl Krobath, Thomas Koschat. Seine Zeit und sein Schaffen

(Klagenfurt: Johannes Heyn, 1991 [first published Leipzig:

Leuckart, 1912]), 119–20.

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Unlike Mahler, however, Koschat led a long life, relatively free, it

seems, from personal and professional strife and from extensive

adverse criticism of his work (see fn. 64). Not only widely

recognized by the general public as the true voice of Carinthian

folk culture (regardless of the degree to which that voice, by

today’s standards, could be described as ethnographically

authentic), and honoured by fellow Heimat artist Peter Rosegger as

‘Volksliedmann’,27 he was also fêted by royalty and prominent

musicians, among them Liszt and Wagner, at whose Wahnfried

Villa Koschat performed, and who engaged him to sing in the first

Bayreuth Festival in 1876.28 As reported in the Musical Times and

Singing Class Circular in 1895:

KLAGENFURT. – The fiftieth birth-anniversary of the

popular composer, Thomas Koschat, was celebrated here

last month by the Kaerntner Sängerbund and other choral

societies, and amidst general rejoicings of the populace. The

proceedings culminated in a Volksfest, held in the vicinity of

the town, in which over ten thousand people took part.

Similar demonstrations took place recently at Vienna and

26 Sidney Whitman, The Realm of the Habsburgs (London: William

Heinemann, 1893), 207.

27 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 81.

28 See Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 124–6.

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elsewhere in Austria, where the composer’s songs enjoy an

immense popularity29

The Vienna celebrations were similarly recorded in the Monthly

Musical Record:

The simple, fresh, and characteristic melodies of the

Carinthian composer, Thomas Koschat, enjoy enormous

popularity throughout the Austrian empire. Slightly

anticipating the actual date, which is August 8th, the

Viennese celebrated the composer’s fiftieth birthday by a

grand Jubilee Festival (on June 23rd) in which forty-six vocal

societies, with about 1,400 singers, took part. The affair was

a truly popular success of the most brilliant kind.30

The poster shown in Fig. 7 was produced in Klagenfurt for the

celebrations in Carinthia, during which Koschat was named

honorary chorus master of the Kärntner Sängerbund, and given

honorary citizenship of Velden (a spa town on the Wörthersee), and

Klagenfurt, one of whose streets was also named after him.

Fig. 7. Koschat’s 50th-birthday celebrations (or 25th

anniversary as ‘Tondichter’), 1895.

29 1 September 1895, 614.

30 1 August 1895, 184.

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It is probable that Mahler sent the signed greeting card (Fig. 8) to

Koschat from Hamburg to mark the same occasion (since the

portrait dates from 1892, when Mahler was in his first or second

year at the opera there), at a time when he may already have been

considering the possibility of his future career move to the

‘Southern Climes’ of a Vienna where Koschat had long been

flourishing:

Fig. 8. Postcard from Mahler to Koschat, probably 1895

In stark contrast to Mahler’s modest burial service in 1911,

Koschat’s funeral shortly before the outbreak of the First World

War was accompanied by a choir of over 600 singers and

reportedly attended by thousands of people. But conversely, the

latter’s copious musical output of compositions and arrangements

seems now to be largely forgotten, at least outside his native

Carinthia and home town of Klagenfurt (where there is a Koschat

Society and Museum, a Koschat Männerchor, and various

memorials), and certain satellite pockets of interest. He does not

even merit an entry in the New Grove Dictionary (although he does

appear in recent editions of MGG31). It also seems that even during

Koschat’s lifetime, folkloric fatigue was in danger of taking root

31 Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2005; vol. VII, 1639. There was also some

recognition of the centenary of Koschat’s death in 2014, in the

media and concert life of the Klagenfurt area.

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within some of the more resentful quarters of a highbrow critical

fraternity, outside his immediate Viennese and Carinthian orbit,

which subscribed to a certain consensus of musical taste and value:

Thomas Koschat has given, with his ensemble party, some

well-attended concerts, he having become very popular in

Germany by his ‘Kärnthner Weisen,’ ‘Am Wörther See,’ etc.

But the performance cannot lay claim to artistic eminence,

and for that reason cannot expect serious criticism.32

Herr Thomas Koschat, whose hyper-sentimental and trivial

compositions unfortunately enjoy so great popularity, visited

us with his quintet party, and found, as usual, a large and

appreciative public. Criticism is quite out of place.33

Thomas Koschat, the Carinthian vocalist, has again visited

Leipzig with his quintet party, consisting, to the best of our

knowledge, exclusively of members of the chorus of the

Vienna Court Opera. He has given concerts at the Bonorand

garden Etablissement, and roused his audiences to the

greatest enthusiasm. To hear a few of such sentimental,

32 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1

September 1896, 202 and 207; quotation, 202.

33 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1

September 1898, 198–9; quotation, 199.

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sweet-scented Lieder is all very well; in the end, however,

they become very monotonous.34

Koschat was the Christian by birth to Mahler’s ‘converted’

Jew; the native Austrian with clear and unproblematic sense of

national identity and Heimat, to Mahler’s wavering Moravian-

Bohemian-Czech-Austrian-German forever in search of his Heimat.

He was the unpretentious, conservative, middle-class, late-

Biedermeier figure to Mahler’s apparently neurotic, one-time

radical pan-Germanist, aspirational, upwardly mobile Jewish

assimilationist, and disturber of the cosy and smug, whether

provincial or otherwise; and Koschat was the creator of

immediately accessible, mono-cultural popular music—in the form

of either occasional arrangements and transcriptions of original

Carinthian folksong, or, more commonly, compositions born from

the same fruit that were widely regarded as the embodiment of an

authentic folk spirit or assumed the nature of latter-day folk songs

themselves35—to Mahler’s composer of a difficult, lofty music

34 Anon., ‘Letter from Leipzig’, Monthly Musical Record, 1 August

1900, 172–3; quotation, 173.

35 Defending himself against (an unspecified) critique, Koschat

denied that he ever ‘composed’ folk song. Rather, like ‘thousands

of composers’, he ‘employed popular airs in fantasies and

paraphrases’, and built his own songs on ‘popular foundations’

(cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 83–4).

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22

struggling for recognition, often criticized for its inauthenticity,

pretensions, and its pluralistic cultural allusions, as was especially

the case with the Fifth Symphony.

Identifying the Koschat source and its role in the Symphony

Although, as mentioned above, there is no such piece by Koschat

precisely called ‘An dem blauen See’, it seems almost certain that

in Mahler’s conversation with Bauer-Lechner, one or other of them

was referring to Koschat’s ‘Carinthian Liederspiel’ Am Wörther See

(see Fig. 9) mentioned above by one of the Monthly Musical Record

critics, which was performed forty times at the Vienna Opera

between 1880 and 1912, including six times in 1898 during

Mahler’s tenure, although he did not conduct it.36 A note written by

Mahler in August 1899 to the tenor Fritz Schrödter on the matter

of the singer’s refusal to ‘lower’ himself to performing in Strauss’s

operetta Die Fledermaus corroborates at least the fact that Mahler

knew the Koschat work, and also gives a glimpse into Mahler’s own

understanding of generic musical hierarchies:

An operetta is simply a small and lighthearted opera and

many classical works are given this title. The fact that

36See the Vienna Opera online repertoire archive at: https://db-

staatsoper.die-antwort.eu/search/person/7207/work/681

(accessed July 2015).

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recently compositions without musical value have been

called operettas makes no difference. Johann Strauss’s work

surpasses them in every way, notably in its excellent musical

diction, and that is why the administration has not hesitated

to include it in the Opera repertoire. You, yourself, dear

Herr Schrödter, have often sung works that are far below

the level of Die Fledermaus—Am Wörther See, for

example.37

That Mahler had a penchant for street-, folk-, and popular music is

clear from his own music and from his comments cited in the

opening part of this study. However, as much as we might wish to

believe that Mahler embodied an early example of ‘postmodern’

cultural relativity and democratization, this may not have been

entirely the case. To be sure, he had a particular liking for the

sound of barrel organs, and some operetta,38 but his low estimation

37 Cited in de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, 182. Original

source not supplied.

38 For the former, see Recollections, 155 and Erinnerungen, 165

regarding an occasion in Klagenfurt, summer 1900; and Alma

Mahler, Gustav Mahler. Memories and Letters, eds. Donald

Mitchell and Knud Martner, 4th ed. (London: Cardinal, 1990), 135

regarding an occasion in New York, 1907/8. Although Alma writes

of Mahler’s inclination for operetta in Alma Mahler-Werfel, And

the Bridge is Love (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 35, she also

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of Koschat’s ‘Liederspiel’ should be seen in the context of his

unwillingness to accept the waltzes of Johann Strauss as ‘art’ even

though he enjoyed them: ‘they have as little to do with art as has,

say, the folksong “Ach, wie ist’s möglich den”,39 no matter how

moving it is’, Mahler is reported to have said. The relentless, un-

developing eight-bar phrases ‘cannot count as “composition” in any

sense of the word’.40 Koschat’s approach was certainly similar,

though as we will see he extended the technique to form a medley-

based narrative structure.

Fig. 9. Title page of Koschat’s Am Wörther See

described herself and Mahler as too ‘highbrow’ to purchase the

score of Léhar’s The Merry Widow, which they enthusiastically

attended, and recounted an occasion in 1907 in Doblinger’s music

shop in Vienna where presumably due to Mahler’s pride and

status he had to distract the salesperson in order that she could

look up a favoured part of the score on his behalf (Memories and

Letters, 120).

39 Mahler may have been referring to either the ‘original’

Thuringian folksong with text by Alexander Rost, dating from the

middle of the eighteenth century, or the 1827 version by Friedrich

Silcher with text by Helmine von Chezy. Both have regular

periodic phrase structures.

40 Recollections, 128; Erinnerungen, 134.

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25

Am Wörther See comprised an orchestral Vorspiel and nine vocal

or choral numbers interspersed throughout the part-sentimental,

part-comic staged story (also written by Koschat) of simple

Wörthersee folk, which tells of the overcoming of a lakeside inn-

owner’s objection to his daughter’s union with a seemingly

neglectful but in fact deeply patriotic soldier whose lack of

communication while away fighting in Turkey, it transpires, was

due to a spell lying injured in hospital. This is certainly

Wunderhorn territory, though couched in more blatant levels of

Kitsch, and less powerful, archaic or universalizing poetry. Indeed,

‘The Opera is becoming a music-hall [Tingltangl]!’ was the kind of

critique offered by newspapers in response to early performances,41

while the satirical journalist Ottokar Franz Ebersberg (writing as

O. F. Berg) of the Illustrierte Wiener Extrablatt suggested:

Rather the frightful musical witches’ Sabbath of the most

miserable Wagner imitator; rather the stalest mish-mash of

a musician of the future or the feeble melodic copying of a

foreign plagiarist, than the sounds of our homeland. For

these noble activities are no more than ‘music-hall’.

However much the heart is moved and the values of

homeland are evoked, whatever bears the stamp of Austria

is an abomination. If someone in France were to describe

the glories of their homeland as music-hall, they would quite

41 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 85.

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rightly be sent packing. With some satisfaction, then, we

welcome the report in a local paper that, in the face of

claims that Am Wörther See was not good enough for the

Opera House, His Grace Archduke Wilhelm has given his

public assurance to the composer Koschat that it has been

very well received in court circles. So, no more music-hall!

What would those who disdain a gift for the vernacular, the

leaders of opinion who seek to shun any trace of Heimat in

the Hoftheater, say to that?42

What, indeed, would Mahler say to that? My examination of the

source material of Am Wörther See (held in the Austrian National

Library in Vienna) in the form in which it was presented at the

Opera House, and of the published score and the surviving short-

score drafts of the Symphony (only two drafts exist, both of the

Scherzo) revealed no immediately obvious evidence of thematic

borrowing in the second or third movements.43 Without access to

preliminary sketches, it is impossible to know whether Mahler had 42 Cited in Thomas Koschat, 85.

43 I am grateful to Andrea Harrandt of the Österreichische

Nationalbibliothek and Maria Fuchs for supplying me with copies of

the Koschat manuscript and score materials; and I am grateful to

The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York, for

providing copies of Mahler’s draft short score of the Scherzo, held

in the Robert Owen Lehman Collection.

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anything specific in mind at that early point, which he subsequently

excised or reworked. However, Mahler implied to Bauer-Lechner

that this was a theme from Koschat that came somewhat

unconsciously and which lent itself to symphonic development,

rather than just being baldly quoted. Everything in the Scherzo is

‘kneaded through and through so that no little grain remains

unmixed and unchanged’, as he said in the same conversation with

Bauer-Lechner.44 For in typically Mahlerian fashion the Scherzo

movement is far more than a simple Scherzo and trio structure, but

rather a highly complex combination of this with elements of

episodic Rondo and subverted sonata-like developmental processes.

Furthermore, if Bauer-Lechner is correct, rather than ‘a’ theme,

Mahler speaks of ‘the’ theme from Koschat’s piece—the ‘An dem

blauen See’ theme. If we think along these lines, possibilities

emerge.

Am Wörther See ends with scenes of general rejoicing, singing

and dancing at a Seefest on the banks of the lake, for which

Koschat utilized a set of waltzes of the same name composed in

1878,45 now entitled ‘Wörthersee-Walzer: landesübliche Wechsel-

und Trutzgesänge’, and arranged for alternating, and eventually

combined, four-part female and male choruses (see Fig. 10).

44 Erinnerungen, 193 (my translation); Recollections, 173.

45 Am Wörther See. Kärntner Walzer mit theilweiser Benutzung von

Kärntner Volksliedern Op. 26 (Leipzig: Leuckart).

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28

Fig. 10. Page x of Am Wörther See piano score46

These ‘Carinthian Walzes’ from Am Wörther See, which ‘now and

again incorporate a finely seasoned Viennese touch’,47 retained,

and quickly developed further, an independent life of their own,

appearing in numerous editions, arrangements, and collections of

his work, such as the later example shown in Fig. 11.

Fig. 11. Contents page of Koschat-Album for voice and piano

(Leipzig: Leuckart, 1914)

46 Am Wörther See. Kärntnerisches Liederspiel in einem Akt

(Leipzig, F. E. C. Leuckart, n.d.). The subtitle of the ‘Wörthersee-

Walzer’ translates as ‘customary alternating songs’ (that is, sung

by lads and lasses in turn), and (lit.) ‘songs of defiance’.

Interestingly the latter term, which had a long history,

subsequently took on exclusionary fascistic and anti-Semitic

overtones in songs of National-Socialist Germany. But here it most

likely signifies a more localized pride in Austrian-Carinthian

culture, the triumph of youth over the father who falsely and

deceitfully tells his daughter that her soldier sweetheart is dead,

and a defiance possibly in the face of interlopers from a nearby

valley (for example, Stöfel, the hopeless son of a rich farmer from

Gailtal and the intended but rejected husband of the innkeeper’s

daughter).

47 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 76.

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29

Not only that, but the ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’s Introduction (slightly

altered) and the ensuing first Waltz are repeated at the end of the

work (simply labeled ‘Schluss’), to form a kind of Coda reprise, and

thus cementing their position as material that lends the work its

musical identity. If Mahler’s thematic allusions are to be found

anywhere, it is most likely to be in this signature part of the

Koschat Liederspiel.

The first thematic or motivic idea we hear in the orchestral

introduction to the ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’ is given in Ex. 1.

Ex. 1. Koschat, Am Wörther See, no. 9: ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’,

bars 6–14

The idea is taken up, adapted in intervallic shape, and inserted

within the melodic lines of the following opening Waltz or Wechsel-

Gesang, and then also appears in the third, fourth and fifth Waltzes

in its original and adapted forms (Ex. 2).

Ex. 2. Adaptation of the opening theme in First, Third,

Fourth and Fifth Waltzes

And, of course, it appears in the repeat of the opening introduction

and Waltz that occurs at the end of the piece. It seems credible to

suggest on this basis that the gently lilting Ländler material which

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30

provides the first significant change of mood in Mahler’s Scherzo

movement, from bar 136, may be the primary candidate for the

Koschat allusion, built as it is on the same or similar three-note

melodic idea, and using the same initial pitches as Koschat’s fourth

Waltz (see Ex. 3).

Ex. 3. Mahler Symphony No. 5, Scherzo, bars 131–45

We can see from Mahler’s short-score draft of the movement

how he had two attempts at working on this material (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Successive pages in Mahler’s short-score draft of the

Scherzo, marked ‘II’ and ‘III’ in blue pencil

It is striking in this draft that Mahler tended to like fitting whole

structural sections of music onto a single page as far as possible,

sometimes adding inserts to retain this pattern. That there are two

pages evidently labeled ‘II’, each containing different material,

might suggest that Mahler was unsure of the ordering of the

allegro quaver-based contrapuntal idea (first page ‘II’, bars 83–128

of the movement) and the Ländler material (second page ‘II’, bars

136ff. of the movement) that follows it. But the surrounding

continuity of the draft makes this highly improbable. We are left

with a page marked ‘II’ and one marked ‘III’ (Fig. 12), both of

which contain versions of the same Ländler material—in F major

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31

(with an indication in blue pencil that this should be changed to Bb

major), and in Bb major respectively—and it is more likely that the

former is simply an earlier version of the latter. Mahler’s somewhat

enigmatic annotation in blue pencil on the first of these pages: ‘II C

[written over what looks like ‘II b’ in ordinary pencil] schließt an II

b vorne an’ (‘II C fits in front of II b’) suggests the existence of

further sketch pages, now lost, and it remains unclear why he

should have numbered the page that clearly follows on (in terms of

musical continuity) from the first page ‘II’, also as page ‘II’ (or ‘II

C’). If there was a correlation for Mahler between Roman numeral

and structural features of the movement, rather than the numbers

simply indicating pagination (the number ‘VIII’, for example, later

in the draft, corresponding to bars 308–36 of the movement, clearly

refers only to part of that manuscript page; and Mahler may have

returned to these drafts at a later point to add or alter these

numbers, possibly as a guide to the next stage of composition),

then it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that in his 1901

conversation with Bauer-Lechner he might have been referring to

the ‘second (or third) section’ within the Scherzo movement in

connection with the Koschat allusion, and that she was not

sufficiently precise in her reporting of terminology, or had

misunderstood Mahler’s account.

Whatever the case, it is rewarding to trace the structural

narrative of these folk-inspired, likely Koschat-inspired, ideas,

because they play crucial roles in the trajectory of the symphony as

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a whole. Remembering that the Scherzo short-score draft was

completed before what were to be the first two movements of the

symphony, but that the chronology of any presumed earlier

sketching for the whole work (now lost) is necessarily unknown, it

is significant that, during the course of the finished work, the little

three-note figure appears initially in the second movement,

‘Stürmisch bewegt’ (Ex. 4). Whether or not by the time of his

conversation with Bauer-Lechner Mahler already knew that the

motive would appear in this movement, (thereby lending some

credence to, though not fully clarifying, her account), remains an

unresolvable question in the absence of evidence from earlier

sketches.

Ex. 4. Symphony No. 5, second movement, bars 169–75

Seemingly innocuous, in fact this and later appearances in the

movement always herald incipient structural breakdowns and/or

imminent intrusions of material of radically contrasting mood. In

this first instance, for example, the reprise of the movement’s

stormy, vehement opening music rapidly disintegrates after the

appearances of the motive, to be replaced by one of Mahler’s

lonely, monophonic solos, a melody which itself strongly resembles

a minor-mode variant of another distinctive vocal line in Koschat’s

‘Wörthersee-Walzer’, characterized by upward leaps (sometimes of

a ninth, which Fritz Pamer early identified as a distinctive folk-like

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ploy with similarities to the portamento upbeat in folk singing)48

whose text gently evokes the silvery light of the moon (see Ex. 5).

Ex. 5. a) Symphony No. 5, second movement, bars 188–203;

b) ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’, Fifth Waltz

The feature of a large rising interval followed by stepped descent

(or, in the Mahler, occasionally ascent) shared by these melodies

here (often involving appoggiatura functions) first occurs most

obviously in the final funeral dirge of the Symphony’s opening

movement, from bar 322. But it can be traced further back,

somewhat buried, in the movement’s core material: 1) the

preceding funeral dirge in the woodwind, bars 294–307; 2)

embedded in the very first appearance of the funeral dirge

material, bars 42–7; 3) in a secondary, closing horn phrase in the

opening funeral march section, bars. 24–7; and 4) at a key

transitional moment as funeral dirge and fanfare shift abruptly to

the first allegro section proper of the movement, bars 152–7.

Earlier in the second movement this idea is also briefly

foreshadowed by the isolated examples shown in Ex. 6, which are

similarly implicated in the breakdown of this movement’s

Stürmisch material, but then, from bar 78, become an insistent

accompaniment in the ensuing evocation of that final dirge of the

first movement.

48 ‘Gustav Mahlers Lieder’, 136–7.

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34

Ex. 6. Symphony No. 5, second movement, bars 68–82

Whether paired together or singly, these two ideas (the three-note

and rising-leap ideas) partake in remarkable formal events:

a) In the lead-up to rehearsal Fig. 15, thematically ushering in

the ray of volkstümlich light that previously had temporarily

penetrated the opening ‘Trauermarsch’s’ gloom (there at

rehearsal Figs 5 & 14). See Ex. 7a.

b) Thematically anticipating the abortive seven-bar chorale

outburst at six bars before rehearsal Fig. 18, and the more

substantial chorale at rehearsal Fig. 27, the latter illustrated

in Ex. 7b.

Ex. 7. Symphony No. 5, second movement, a) bars 261–8; and

b) bars 459–65

c) In the case of the rising-leap-falling-step idea, infiltrating

nearly all parts of the rest of the movement, until it becomes

the final motivic idea left in our ears (bars 523–7, reduced to

just the falling step in bars 533, 535–9, and, recombined with

the rising leap, closing the movement in bars 568–74).

Moving on to the Scherzo, where, in general, folk-like musical

topics are more brazenly displayed, not only does the three-note

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motive provide the building block for important contrasting

material to the horn-dominated and contrapuntal opening waltz

material of the movement as discussed earlier, but also within this

context it joins hands with the rising leap idea to form a

convincingly elegant Koschat-type adapted whole, as shown in Ex.

8.

Ex. 8. Symphony No. 5, Scherzo, a) bars 151–63, melodic

phrases;

b) bars 151-8 in short score with added 6ths and I-V

progressions indicated

From adopting an initial secondary role, this little complex assumes

relentlessly more significant functions in the musical argument,

and it does so with even greater structural intensity than in the

previous movement:

a) It helps to bring the music out of stasis after the second

breakdown of the movement’s main horn material, appearing

from bars 329, 400, 411, and 431 onwards (see Ex. 9).

Ex. 9. Scherzo, bars 429–36

b) It partakes in the horn-related material’s fast tempo and

ebullient mood from rehearsal Fig. 15, bar 448

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36

c) It insinuates or forces itself into the actual reprised horn

material in the woodwind from rehearsal Fig. 18, bar 516,

over ‘yodeling’ figures in the first violins (ex. 10).

Ex. 10. Scherzo, bars 514–20

d) It then assumes the horn material’s previously dominant,

primary structural role (in violins, rehearsal Fig. 21, bar 563)

after the third breakdown of that horn material (Ex. 11).

Ex. 11. Scherzo, bars 560–9

e) At b. 633, it does not ‘allow’ that main material to re-

establish dominance, by interrupting and vying with it (just as

it itself had twice been displaced earlier by the returning

horn material at rehearsal Fig. 7, bar 174 and rehearsal Fig.

17, bar 490), until its presence and validity seem to be fully

accepted at rehearsal Fig. 26 (bar 662) at Tempo I—now,

significantly, given initially to the horn, and appearing

alongside the ‘horn’ material which is now initially heard in

lower strings in a marked timbral exchange of the material’s

prior associations that has been emerging intermittently

during the movement (Ex. 12).

Ex. 12. Scherzo, bars 662–8

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37

f) Until the Coda, bar 764, which splits everything apart again:

not only the Koschat complex (bars 784–90) from the main

horn material (bars 791–8) which now alternate with each

other, but also the two halves of the Koschat complex

themselves—the three-note idea (bars 784–90) and the rising-

leap idea (bars 799–808), whose final falling step is left

manically to repeat over the concluding horn-material

flourish, itself now contorted tonally and outlining an

augmented-triad fanfare (bars 809–13).

Reflections and conclusions

An idea of the gulf that was perceived to exist between certain ‘art’

and ‘folk’ music is evident from the 1912 Koschat biography (one of

very few) cited earlier in this study, by his close colleague Karl

Krobath, who notably specifically contrasts him with Mahler, and in

the process, offers an intriguing early critique of the latter

composer:

Sensational pursuit of effect! [Effekthascherei]—I mean that

in the time of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, Koschat’s

muse is worlds away from this pursuit, indeed it is quite

unpretentiously simple.49

49 Thomas Koschat, 81. Koschat himself describes ‘Artifice,

affectation, exaggeration, mannerism, obtrusiveness, pursuit of

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Mahler was certainly no Bartók, Kodály, Cecil Sharp or Vaughan

Williams when it came to folk music, but, contra Krobath, it seems

that he did want to tap into the kind of aesthetic of the ingenuous,

offered by the likes of Koschat, and work it into his own symphonic

approach, especially in this work. ‘The return to simplicity’50 that

the culturally conservative Kaiser Wilhelm II perceived and extolled

in Koschat’s music in conversation with the Carinthian composer,

was not necessarily the same as a return to the simplistic, and

Mahler found adopting this creative approach to be no easy task. It

is notable that in the two volumes of Volkslieder für Männerchor

published in Leipzig in 1906 at the behest of the Kaiser who wished

to reinstate a folk-inspired tradition of national German choral

music in the face of what he considered to be the overly complex

music of the day—‘to capture the essential traits of the songs of the

folk, their directness, their truth, simplicity, unpretentiousness,

intimacy’51—contributions by Bruch, Humperdinck, Richard Strauss

effect’ as anathema to Carinthian Lieder (Erinnerungs-Bilder.

Gesammelte Feuilletons (Klagenfurt: Kleinmayr, 1889; repr.

Memphis: General Books, 2012)), 63.

50 Cited in Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 95. Einfachheit could also

imply the sense of homeliness that was at the core of Koschat’s

musical outlook.

51 Cited in Kravitt, ‘The Trend towards the Folklike’, 43. The

volumes were edited by Rochus Freiherr von Liliencron.

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and Ludwig Thuille stand alongside arrangements of works by

Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, as well as, in volume

2, four compositions and four arrangements by Koschat.52 Perhaps

unsurprisingly for political reasons, and because the idea of setting

out to write a folk song was anathema to him, there is nothing from

Mahler in the collection.

Although the ‘simplicity of its themes … built solely on the

tonic and dominant’,53 as Mahler noted, caused compositional

difficulties for him in the Scherzo movement, this trait nevertheless

entirely epitomized (though not uniquely) Koschat’s idiom, where

the I-V harmonic oscillation is virtually ubiquitous, in combination

with other characteristic features (see Exs. 8b (above), 13 and 14).

The entire opening section of Mahler’s Scherzo (bars 1–39),

constituting the main horn-based material, also comprises

repetitions and prolongations of six successive (II) V-I progressions

in the tonic D major, often with the bass line moving to E, the

second scale degree, before arriving on the dominant (see

Koschat’s description of this bass technique below), and decorated

throughout with the composer’s trademark diatonic part-writing

and Fortspinnung of the type that he would explore further in the

52 For a list of Koschat’s works and their published sources, see:

http://www.deutscheslied.com/en/search.cgi?

cmd=composers&name=Koschat%2C%20Thomas (accessed

October 2017).

53 Erinnerungen, 192; Recollections, 172.

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Ninth Symphony’s opening movement in the same key (see Fig.

13). Similar harmonic treatments are also to be found in later

reprises of this principal Scherzo material, from bars 174, 490, and

662.

Fig. 13. Repeated (II) V-I progressions in bars 1–39 of the

Scherzo

Ex. 13. Koschat, ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’, a) First Waltz; b)

Second Waltz: tonic-dominant oscillations, three-note idea

and added sixths

Ex. 14. Koschat, ‘Wörthersee-Walzer’, third Waltz: tonic-

dominant oscillations, three-note idea and added sixth

Mahler, whose harmony was described by Donald Tovey as ‘the

most diatonic that has been heard since classical times, though it

has no inhibitions whatever’,54 thus pays respect to this language—

whose simple harmonic oscillations form recurrent, generative

structural reference points for him—subtly extending it with

counterpoint, tonal exploration, and more complex voice leading at

various points in the movement, but retaining more than just

vestiges of the framework, with his melodic phrasing and gestures

such as the sweet added sixth ‘resolving’ to a fifth (perhaps the

54 ‘Mahler Symphony in G Major, No. 4’ in Essays in Musical

Analysis Volume VI (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 73–

83; quotation, 82.

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aforementioned ‘Viennese touch’) which both Koschat and he use

at or near the beginning of their waltzes (see Exs. 8b, 13 and 14).55

Koschat described the Carinthian melodic style as ‘zart-naiv’,56

employing one of Mahler’s favourite performance directions (‘zart’,

meaning delicate, tender, gentle or mellow) which, as Fig. 12b

shows, the composer used at the short-score stage to characterize

the Ländler-Waltz section of the Scherzo from bar 136 (Ex. 3). This

was eventually replaced with the more prosaic ‘Etwas ruhiger’

(‘somewhat calmer’) which also happens to be the marking used by

Koschat for the passage in his fourth waltz in Am Wörther See that

bears a close resemblance of pitch and key to Mahler’s Ländler-

Waltz (see Examples 2c and 3).57

55 See Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular style. The

Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1989), 224–5 and 230–35 for analysis of the

emancipation of the sixth as a crucial melodic and harmonic

feature of what he calls the ‘parlour modes’ in a line of

development from Mozart, through the Viennese waltz and

Tchaikovsky, to Kurt Weill and music-hall.

56 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 63.

57 In addition to ‘zart’ in the second waltz of Am Wörther See,

Koschat uses the marking ‘mit derber Zärtlichkeit’ (‘with clumsy

tenderness’) in the first waltz, ‘derb’ being a word used by Mahler

in his characterization of the folk-dance-inspired second movement

of the Ninth Symphony: ‘Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers.

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Further specific characteristics of Carinthian folksong

identified by Koschat in his own work, in the arrangements of

others,58 and in wider folk-music practice, may have found echoes

and re-workings in elements of Mahler’s volkstümlich practice too.

‘A particular idiosyncrasy … is that the melody is sung not by the

highest voice but by the so-called principal voice, also known as the

chanter [Vorsängerstimme]. Experience shows that a baritone or

low tenor is best suited for this’, Koschat notes,59 and this can be

seen in ‘Verlâssen bin i’ (Fig. 6). In light of this, one might

speculate about Mahler’s habit of transferring the Ländler or Waltz

motive that first occurs from bar 136 of the symphony’s Scherzo to

such a register in low strings, woodwind or brass—albeit not within

simple homophonic textural contexts but sometimes at significant

structural moments: see bars 138–9, 142–3, 400–402, 411–16, 460–

1, 633–4, and 638–9 (when it is vying with the main horn material

at Tempo I—see e) above), and 662–8 (when it is directly

juxtaposed with the horn material at Tempo 1 subito—see Ex. 12).

Koschat also explains that ‘in many Lieder it sounds very effective

and gives a well-rounded musical impression in a change of

harmony from tonic to dominant if the bass, rather than going

straight to the dominant note, shifts initially to the second scale

Etwas täppisch und sehr derb’ (‘somewhat awkward and clumsy’).

58 He specifically mentions ‘Decker, Baron Herbert, Herbeck,

Reiner, Metzger, Rader and others’ (Erinnerungs-Bilder, 61).

59 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 61–2.

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degree … and only later, not until the second or third quarter of the

bar, assumes the dominant’.60 Such a procedure is indeed at work

in the opening section of Mahler’s Scherzo as described above, and

in bars 151–3 and 157–8 of the first Ländler or Waltz section in the

movement (Ex. 8b). Comparison of this with bars 7–9 in the second

system of the short-score draft (Fig. 12b) reveals that in fact he

excised three circled dominant bass notes (and made similar

alterations in bars 13–14) precisely, it seems, in order to achieve a

putative Koschat-like part-writing effect.61 Koschat again: ‘A

characteristic speciality of Carinthian Lieder are the short grace

notes that the principal voice adds through a sharp snap of the

subdominant, dominant or octave, before ending on the

60 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 62.

61 Similar ascending bass lines can be found in the final movements

of the Third Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, as well as at the

beginning of the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, where

the resemblance to the above example is closest, although there

Mahler pointedly retains the intervening dominant pitches in the

bass. Given these family resemblances and the existence of many

other related models for such part writing among the concert

repertoire with which Mahler was familiar, it would be misguided

to claim that Mahler simply derived this bass-line effect directly

from Koschat. Nevertheless, there appears to be a persuasive

musico-cultural allusion at work in the Ländler-Waltz sections of

the Scherzo movement.

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fundamental note’, 62 to be seen in the introduction to the

‘Wörthersee-Walzer’ (Ex. 1) and in the upper vocal line of the Fifth

Waltz’s second section, sung by lads and lasses and marked

aufjauchzend (‘shouting for joy’, ‘exulting’) at the words: ‘What joy

it is, as soon as you hear music’. No significant investigation has

yet been carried out into Mahler’s use of such ornaments as an

expressive and idiomatic device, especially in his more colourful or

folk-related music such as the third movement of the First

Symphony, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, several of the

Wunderhornlieder, first movement of the Third Symphony, Scherzo

of the Sixth Symphony, and second movement of the Ninth

Symphony. Grace notes play an important role in the stylization of

the Fifth Symphony, incorporated first into the opening

movement’s Bohemian dirge where at bar 39, Mahler instructs that

they be played ‘as fast as possible’, and to a lesser extent in the

intervening passages of volkstümlich sunlight alluded to above, at

bars 127 and 314. In the second movement they are transformed

into the rapid glissandi of vicious lower-string, lower-woodwind and

horn stabs in the main theme complex (bars 9–10, 342–3), but also

appear in the intense string melody of the second theme complex

(bars 36, 45, 47, 49, 51, 54, 57, 59) and in the evocation of the first

movement’s final dirge mentioned above, alongside the ‘Koschat’

figure shown in Ex. 6 (bars 105–9, and later in the section at bars

123 and 131 before the sudden return of the opening material). In

62 Erinnerungs-Bilder, 62.

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the Scherzo the kind of wide-interval melodic effect described by

Koschat becomes more prevalent, often allied with crescendi, sf or

fp markings in the main horn material passages as a means of

emphasis and flamboyant characterization (first violin, bars 18, 35,

56, 58, 96). They later appear in bar 439 of the Ländler-Waltz as it

performs its structurally important role of restarting the musical

momentum (the beginning of this is shown in Ex. 9), and in bars

564, 572, 640, and 687–9 as that material crucially assumes

dominance and vies with the main horn material, expanding to a

dramatic double-stopped example at bar 661 in one of Mahler’s

typically sweeping, climactic ‘scene-changing’ scale-like gestures

occurring here immediately before the all-important point at Fig.

26, where Ländler-Waltz and horn material co-exist and exchange

instrumental setting (Ex. 12). Thereafter the ornament achieves

heights of lyrical intensity in the ‘Adagietto’, and reappears with

continued frequency in the ‘Rondo-Finale’ especially in passages

that rework the ‘Adagietto’ melodic material (from bars 205, 372,

386, and 642 onwards), and at the rhythmically intensified return

of the opening: ‘Plötzlich wieder wie zu Anfang (Tempo I subito)’,

bar 497.

Just as the line between what in today’s ethnomusicological

terms might be considered an authentic and a constructed folk

voice was perhaps always blurred or not even an issue for Koschat

and his followers, most of whom heard his music as unaffected

Heimatkunst—an acceptably commercial form of folk-music

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popularization—so was the area between the ingenuous and the

disingenuous a bone of zealous contention for many contemporary

critics of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.63 It did not particularly matter

whether the Koschat-like material was of a second- or third-order

folkloric nature, already distanced from layers of putative ‘original’

folk culture, a fact that tended to be overlooked according to

Krobath, who maintained somewhat spuriously that ‘Koschat Lieder

and original Carinthian Lieder are two mutually distinct spheres’,

but more imaginatively suggested that ‘The Koschat Lied is like the

fir tree that grows its roots in the same ground as, for example, the

neighbouring larch’.64

63 For further discussion of this critique see Jeremy Barham,

‘Mahler and Socio-Cultural Nomadism: The Case of the Fifth

Symphony’ in Arnold Jacobshagen, ed., Beiträge z. symposium

‘Ferne Heimatklänge – Gustav Mahler und die Moderne’ Köln May

2010 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011), 57–68; also available

here: https://surrey.academia.edu/JeremyBarham

64 Thomas Koschat, 91. Without revealing any specific sources,

Krobath briefly alludes to criticism from some quarters of the

‘salon’-like nature of Koschat’s folk tone, its ‘false sentiment’ and

even its ‘poisoning of the well of folk song’, all of which he

attributes to ‘feeble envy’. Success among the salons was in any

case for Krobath a measure of Koschat’s ability to be of wider

value to the people whilst remaining unaffectedly faithful to his

roots (Thomas Koschat, 79–81). Although such criticism does not

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The issue of this type of authenticity may not have mattered to

Mahler either since in his time artistic authenticity meant

something very different from later empirically derived notions.

Burgeoning philological exactitude in the study and preservation of

folk culture which risked fossilizing practice as museum-piece was

contemporaneously matched by powerful acts of reconstruction

and adaptation that perpetuated the notion of folk art as constantly

in flux at the expense of fidelity to its organic, pre-industrial

closeness to nature. A case in point was the sometimes radical

Mahlerian transformation of the Ländler, particularly in the context

of the generic Scherzo movement. In addition to Mahler’s pliable,

instinctive modes of folk expression, what was important in this

Symphony was the crucial narrative that this material enacted

throughout the work—a narrative that was more obvious to

contemporaries, but which has become submerged in the passing

of time, to be replaced by other familiar ones of darkness to light, C

sharp minor to D major, adagio to allegro, funeral march to

irrepressible rondo finale. This alternative narrative is one of the

changing hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’, a questioning of what these

seem to have been widespread in what was, after all, a pre-

ethnomusicological era, in a mirror image of each other, Koschat

is accused here of betraying the purity of authentic folk music,

while Mahler is frequently rebuked for defiling the high-art

sanctity of symphonic music with folk elements, ‘pure’ or

otherwise.

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categories even constitute, a re-negotiation of then-dominant

bourgeois Western-European cultural perspectives and models. The

type of material that embodied the musical-cultural-symphonic

‘other’—the ethnic, Bohemian-sounding, funeral dirge of the first

movement’s secondary material (first occurring from bar 34)—by

the end of the symphony has taken centre stage and come to terms

with, if not subsumed, ‘conventional’ or then widely understood

symphonic propriety in a bold assertion of an all-encompassing

folk-like diatonicism.65 The second movement and Scherzo play

important roles in generating these different perspectives along

this narrative’s path, and the catalyst seems to have been the

putative Koschat material incorporated intuitively as a ‘ghost in the

machine’ in Mahler’s musical thinking. This too enacts its own

localized narrative of infiltration, usurpation and fragmentation in

which both the opening Ländler-like horn material and its own

waltz character are posed and questioned, forming what for Donald

Mitchell is a ‘dialectical complex’ between ‘the primitive, peasant’

and ‘the ‘brilliant, worldly’.66

65 See Barham, ‘Mahler and Socio-Cultural Nomadism’ for a more

detailed account of this central, but latterly submerged, musico-

cultural narrative.

66 Gustav Mahler. The Early Years, rev. and ed. Paul Banks and

David Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1980), 211.

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Which voice, if any, the music, or through it Mahler, sides with

remains an open question, perhaps even the wrong question.

Indeed Julian Johnson suggests that the folk tone of the

Wunderhorn settings (which provided templates for Mahler’s

concurrent and later symphonic thought) constitutes the

composer’s deliberate ‘avoidance of the question of voice’.67

Whether a folk-like tone has been co-opted and distorted by

developmental art-music processes, or whether high-art protocols

have been liberated and disabused of their superior pretensions

becomes a moot point in light of the empirical ‘inauthenticity’ of

the borrowed Koschat material in the first place, and the fact that

the history of ‘high-art’ music is littered with examples of related

forms of appropriation (for example, Renaissance mass settings,

Baroque dance suites, the Classical symphonic minuet, Schubert

and Schumann’s vocal and symphonic forays into folk-like idiom in

the context of supposed ‘high-art’ practice, or other nineteenth-

century nationalist allusions to, and adaptations of, popular dance

forms), all of which had already paved the way for this aspect of

Mahler’s symphonic practice.

In a continuation of the distinctive attitude of objectivity that

E. Mary Dargie identifies in Mahler’s setting of Wunderhorn texts,68

67 Mahler’s Voices. Expression and Irony in the Songs and

Symphonies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),

100.

68 See Music and Poetry in the Songs of Gustav Mahler, 128.

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as Boris Voigt has recently suggested, the waltz idea in Mahler’s

Scherzo is not so much ‘played’ as ‘shown’, in the form of ‘icons of

waltzes’, so that ‘the waltz and its connotations become

thematized’ with all their bourgeois baggage of ‘impropriety …

aspiration … seducibility … delirium and death’ at work in what

Mahler himself saw as a ‘chaos’, ‘a raging sea of sound’ where

worlds are created only to be toppled forthwith.69 One of its earliest

reviewers, Hugo Leichtentritt, was sensitive to this idea of a

knowingly dramatic, culturally marked play with the nature of the

waltz genre: ‘The Scherzo is based on Viennese waltz melodies of

the popular type that are in the air in Vienna; coming from this

neighbourhood [Berlin] I could not convince myself of the

genuineness of their sundry impassioned outbursts’.70 Early critical

response to the Symphony in the Austro-German press was for the

most part much more vehemently negative, and the greatest vitriol

was reserved for the perceived effrontery with which Mahler

introduced the popular or trivial into the work. But one is never

quite sure exactly what these critics were lamenting: whether it

was Mahler’s apparent lack of etiquette in the way he treated this

69 ‘Das Scherzo der fünften Symphonie Gustav Mahlers als Reflexion

auf die gesellschaftliche Moderne’, International Review of the

Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41/2 (December 2010), 195–239;

quotations, 213 and 217. Memories and Letters, 243.

70 Untitled review of concerts in Berlin, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

72/10 (1 March 1905), 206–7; quotation, 207.

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popular music, either by presenting it in a state that was less

refined than that of other contemporary composers, or by toying

with the material as if to demean it, or whether it was simply his

using it, vulgarly ‘dressed-up’, in a symphonic context in the first

place and thereby ‘defiling’ a venerated genre, or at least

generating a ‘dichotomy between the concept of the “folk song”

and … artful, superabundant orchestral accompaniment’, as

Hanslick wrote in a 1900 review of a performance of

Wunderhornlieder.71 In accordance with political needs to

consolidate a sense of (‘greater’-) German identity and the

universality of the country’s national music, this critique (including

that of some Vienna reviewers) was often allied with condescension

towards minority or simply ‘other’ national-ethnic traditions used

as vehicles for Mahler’s compositional practice—anti-Semitism

never being far away from this line of argument too. Either Mahler

was being disrespectful to honoured Viennese popular/folk

repertoire or the same material was decried as unacceptably

Slavic, Magyar, Czech or possibly Judaic.72 Perhaps what this

71 ‘Theater- und Kunstnachrichten’, Neue Freie Presse (January 16,

1900), 8, cited in Finson, ‘The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s

Wunderhorn Lieder’, 102–3.

72 A particularly strong example of this vein of criticism can be seen

in Maximilian Muntz’s 1905 review of the Fifth Symphony in the

anti-Semitic and pan-Germanist Deutsche Zeitung. For excerpts of

the review, see Karen Painter, ‘The Sensuality of Timbre:

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generation of critics failed or refused to appreciate was that, as

Dahlhaus suggests, any appeal to ‘nature’ in art is always a

‘cultivated, second nature’, and that, through complex layers of

dissembling irony and bald sincerity, Mahler was in fact reflecting

back on them their own uncomfortable bourgeois resistance to, yet

suppressed longing for, the sentimentality of a distant,

mythologized and ossified folk culture—as the instantly gratifying

Kitsch of, say, an evening of Koschat’s rural Liederspiel at the city’s

Opera might offer—seen from a privileged urban perspective that

had no interest in the alien realities of rural, servile existence.73

Paradoxically, the artifice of Koschat, both specifically and as

emblem of a wider fashionable ‘recapturing’ of folk idioms and of

the pleasure-seeking popularity of the waltz, assumes a veneer of

realism through the artfulness of Mahler’s acts of reprocessing it in

Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the “Fin de siècle”’, 19th-

Century Music 18 (1995), 236–56; 244–5. See Alfred Rosenzweig,

Gustav Mahler: New Insights into his Life, Time and Work (transl.

and ed. Jeremy Barham; London & Aldershot: Guildhall School of

Music and Drama & Ashgate, 2007) for a little-known mid-

twentieth-century political and cultural attempt to rehabilitate the

Czech qualities of Mahler’s music.

73 ‘The Natural World and the “Folklike Tone”’ in Dahlhaus, Realism

in Nineteenth-Century Music, transl. Mary Whitall (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985), 106–14; quotation 107; see

also 108.

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a contrived symphonic arena. This is neither an elevating of the

trivial nor a coarsening of the concert hall, but an all-too-real,

rupturing collision of seeming incommensurables, of nostalgia and

presence, Austrian anxiety and ‘Wird schon werden’,74 in a search

for at least artistic, if not socio-political, revelation and change in

an Austro-Germanic world riven with static hierarchies as well as a

growing monolithic nationalism and ethnic exclusivity of the type

promoted in Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the

Nineteenth Century of 1899.75

Perhaps Mahler’s compositional practice in the end conveys a

different democratizing message of greater geo-political and

cultural significance—one that reveals what had always been the

inherent falsity of such categorical distinctions of folk/popular/‘art’

in the first place, and the pretense involved in the inherited

‘professional caste distinction’ whereby composers such as Chopin,

Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and even Brahms could write waltzes in

remarkably similar idioms to those of Joseph Lanner and Johann

Strauss, while at times tempering certain aspects of melodic style

74 ‘It’ll be all right in the end’. See Christian Glanz, Gustav Mahler

(Vienna: Holzhausen Verlag, 2001), 189.

75 See Guido Adler, ‘Gustav Mahler’ in Edward R. Reilly (ed.),

Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler. Records of a Friendship

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15–73; 42, for a

critique of the views propounded by Chamberlain in the context of

Mahler’s diverse folk influences and his early reception.

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and increasing overall constructive complexity to mark their

artistic ‘seriousness’.76 But as late as 1960, in describing the twin

poles of Mahler’s aesthetic as mutually dependent categories of the

‘trivial’ and the ‘grotesque’, Franz Willnauer suggested that the

‘moving sounds [Tonbewegungen] out of which Mahler fashions his

symphonic themes possess no melodic “dignity”’, and that the

catalyst for his destructive process of distorting ‘established

melodic ideas’ is banality.77 Mahler himself would consider this

view problematic in the absence of any qualifying ethical context:

This is a mystery to me. What does it mean: ‘trivial’? Either

something is born from a person’s genuine, vital feelings, in

which case it has the right to exist and will work effectively;

or it is false and a lie, factum, non genitum [made, not born],

78 in which case it will perish.79

76 Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 241–2.

77 ‘Das Triviale und das Groteske im Werk Gustav Mahlers’, 240.

78 An apparent reference, in reverse, to the Nicene Creed’s

description of Christ: ‘begotten, not made’.

79 Reported by Georg Göhler in conversation with Mahler, in

Göhler, ‘Programmheft zur Fünften Symphonie Gustav Mahlers.

Uraufführung der neuen Fassung’ (Leipzig: Musikalische

Gesellschaft, 9 January 1914), reprinted in Muziek & Wetenschap

7/1 (1999), 72–81, quotation, 73.

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The idea of Kitsch similarly requires careful treatment. For Milan

Kundera, himself ‘exiled’ from an oppressed, minority Czech

nation, Kitsch is the mirage which excludes the uncomfortable and

unacceptable in human existence—a political smokescreen of

fantasies and archetypes that flourishes in irony-free monolithic

and authoritarian regimes. Yet once Kitsch is acknowledged as a

‘beautiful lie’, it loses its power, ‘becoming as touching as any

other human weakness’, for ‘no matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an

integral part of the human condition’.80 Is Mahler exalting notions

of Kitsch-laden Heimat only to look beyond them or behind them?

Narrowing his cultural focus in order to face outwards, Koschat has

been described as ‘showing the path to rich veins of pure gold’,

offering stability and comfort as a ‘composer of the people’ whose

music ‘rises above all political borders’ and assumes an ‘ideal

familial bond linking all [German] brotherhood’ at a time when

humankind was becoming oppressed by the machine age.81 By

contrast, Mahler—as an exiled Bohemian, adopted Austrian and

aspiring German—widens his cultural outlook in order to refocus

more keenly and critically on the inner life, challenges the

deceptively reassuring but ultimately constraining and potentially

fascistic machinery of the monolithic state, ethnic purity and

cultural proscription, and becomes thoroughly socio-politically

80 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London: Faber and Faber,

1984), 256.

81 Krobath, Thomas Koschat, 2, 79 and 91.

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implicated as a migrant, multi-faceted individual artist in an

unstable, pluralistic world.

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