In the chapter titled "Ambivalent Elysium," Bonds develops the idea that Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a response to--and commentary on--Beethoven's Ninth. Whereas Beethoven's Ninth is dense and complex, Bond argues, Mahler's Fourth is ostensibly spare from an orchestration standpoint and suffused with "innocence" (175). However, the dissonances that surface in the Fourth amount to an exploration of and answer to Beethoven. How that comes about constitutes the substance of Bonds's text.
Mahler's Fourth begins with the sounds of sleigh bells and ends with a childlike song, which establishes the attitude of innocence. While that may hardly seem equal to the task of commenting on Beethoven's Ninth, the fact is that the Fourth makes a project of "countering grandeur with intimacy, optimism with ambivalence" (175).
Each in its way, Mahler's first three symphonies emulate the Ninth in the way the musical themes are developed from movement to movement. With the Fourth, however, Mahler addresses the Ninth by adopting the theme of joy and grafting it onto a vocal arrangement. Critics have noted, not always benevolently, that the Fourth seems to be a "willful distortion" or "deliberate misreading" of the Ninth, but the best way to interpret those judgments is to view the Fourth as something of a chamber-music version of the lushly orchestrated Ninth that is as deliberately contingent as the Ninth is embedded in certainty.
The contingency surfaces most strongly in Mahler's choice of text for the soprano solo that is in counterpoint to the chorale of the Ninth. That text is a German folk poem, "Das himmlische Leben," about a childlike description of life in heaven, a perfect utopia in which earthly villains and saints have been transfigured and all is joyful (178-81); Bonds provides both German and English versions of the text. However, whereas the Ninth's "Ode to Joy," from Schiller, celebrates the brotherhood of mankind, the folk poem rec...