Ambivalent Elysium

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 te

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curiously, consistent with evidence that Mahler seems to have been in search of a method during the period of the symphony's composition. In that regard, Bonds explains that Mahler had originally set the folk poem eight years before the 1900 composition of the Fourth, perhaps intending it to be part of a package of Lieder that used other, similar poems. However, the verse that ended up in the Fourth was set aside and surfaced in the larger work almost unchanged. Further, Bonds cites Mahler's statement that the poem was meant to supply "the thematic basis, both literary and musical, for an entire symphony" (183). (The reader is left to infer that the peculiarly absurd contingencies of the text supplied the ideas of contrast, contradiction, irresolution, and ambivalence that dominated the music.) Contradictory and contingent as the musical and poetical themes are, they resonate at various points throughout the orchestration, and Mahler instructed at least one conductor in the fact that the music contained "thematic connections . . . so extremely important for the idea of the work" (184). Such connections were part of the symphonic conventions of the 19th century, and in that sense Mahler's musical structure was very much of its tim

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