Stephen Downes: After Mahler:
Britten, Weill, Henze and Romantic Redemption

This is not a book for the general music-lover. Some of it requires score-reading skills. Some of it reads like a Master's thesis — or a compendium of extracts from other people's theses.

But Downes has something to say, and I'm glad to have read it.

The first thing I learned is that Mahler himself viewed some of his music as being ironic. When it sounds folksy and straightforward it may be masking disillusionment. When it sounds as if the world has ended it may be breathing life into the embers of hope.

Downes explores these ironies, and the relationship between "Romantic redemption" and anti-Romanticism, not just in Mahler but in three composers who admitted to being strongly influenced by him: Britten, Weill and Henze.

In Britten's case the conflict is more specifically between the naive and the perverted. For Weill it was a conflict between expressionism and parody. Henze's conflict was between a German symphonic rationalising approach and an Italian liberal ecstasy.

The three composers following Mahler have to compete for space, however, with musicologists and explainers, such as Theodor Adorno and Arnold Whittall. If all the quotations from musicologists were removed, Downes' book would be considerably shorter. This seems unfortunate to me. The points to be made don't require that many quotations.

The quotations aren't the only off-putting ingredients. Downes tends to use more and longer words than are necessary, making his point harder to grasp. For example:

Fragmentations and discontinuities on the surface of Henze's music combine with polyglot signals suggesting intertextuality in the Kristevan sense — providing a dynamic dimension to structuralism (through intersections, transformations and juxtapositions which are textually and politically subversive) and, furthermore, generating an intensified, celebratory heteroglossia, a transposition of various signifying systems stimulating reading or listening beyond overt, intentional allusions.

If words like "intertextuality" and "teleological" don't often come up in your conversations, you might feel uncomfortable with this book. But much is being said behind the academic excesses.

Back