ites little observations that are loaded with inconsistencies--such as the fact that St. Martha is cooking for everybody in heaven, Herod (how did he get into heaven?) and St. Luke are butchers, and St. Peter has gone fishing. The poem appears to have been chosen for its recitation of oddities, just as the music of the Fourth is riddled with violent contrasts and orchestrations that contradict the lighthearted tone of the vocalized text (181). Further--and importantly--the contradiction between light text and violent orchestration "is never resolved" (181). Thus dissonance becomes a major theme of Mahler's Fourth, and Bonds suggests that the subtext of the poetry in it is that the happy little oddities of heaven are arrived at on
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