Introduction: Topic and Topic Theory in the Nineteenth Century

Introducing topic theory in his monumental monograph Classical Music (1980), Leonard

Ratner defines “topics” (also topoi and topos) as “a thesaurus of characteristic figures” which are

“subjects for musical discourse” specifically employed by eighteenth-century composers to

evoke emotions.1 Such a definition, although frequently quoted, is a mere generality which

cannot fully illustrate the intricacies of historically diverse topics against a particularized context.

It renders topic theory tantalizingly ambiguous, overlooking its developmental dynamics from

the eighteenth century onwards and its power to synthesize with musical forms. This paper re-

examines topic theory and reconsiders the inseparable relationship between topic and form in the

nineteenth century by contextualizing them in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

That topic theory is generally applied to eighteenth-century music is evinced by the

recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014). The entire book devotes

only one chapter to nineteenth-century music without any notable acknowledgement of research

on twentieth-century music, even though numerous scholars have already conducted topical

analyses in that period for next to a decade.2 Such a case is by no means incidental. Nor is it an

unconscious neglect by the reputed topic theorists. Rather, I suggest, it tellingly brings to the fore

the question of the applicability of topic theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century music.

The problems of topical analysis in twentieth-century music lie primarily in the analysts’

decision to bypass the variegated development in nineteenth-century music, which results in an

1 Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer

Books, 1980), 3–9.

2 Julian Horton, “Listening to Topics in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford

2 Julian Horton, “Listening to Topics in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 642–644.

1

analytical stagnation. As Jessica Narum comments, “As the nineteenth century progressed into

the twentieth, the same individualization of harmony that fostered non-tonal music was

paralleled by an individualization of musical topics.”3 Such “individualization,” however, is

anything but revelatory. Raymond Monelle, when discussing Bach’s Fugue in A flat, explores

the tropological relationship between the subject and countersubject as well as their topics.4

Robert Hatten also emphasizes the troping of topics in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and

Schubert.5 In every sense, these are concerned with the composers’ “individualized”

manipulations of topics, which can date back to as far as the late seventeenth century.

The bypassing of nineteenth-century topics by topic theorists necessitates a

reconsideration as to what perspective one should take when perceiving twentieth-century topics.

Scott Charles Schumann suggests that while twentieth-century listeners “recognize the stylistic

conventions” of “traditional” topics, the topics retain the composers’ individualized

expressivity.6 This is, however, no exception in nineteenth-century topics. The argument even

engenders more questions: What are “traditional” topics? Why are nineteenth-century topics not

a tradition in twentieth-century music? Can they be a tradition, after all? It is difficult to answer

them when nineteenth-century topics have not yet been more rigorously explored, and it would

3 Jessica Narum, “Sound and Semantics: Topics in the Music of Arnold Schoenberg”

(Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2013), 3.

4 Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 198–206.

5 According to Robert Hatten, “Troping” is “the bringing together of two otherwise incompatible style types in a single location to produce a unique expressive meaning from their collision or fusion.” Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004), 68.

6 Scott Charles Schumann, “Making the Past Present: Topics in Stravinsky’s Neoclassical Works” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2015), 12.

2

be an act at stake if one hastily dived into the topics in the following century without

acknowledging the complexity of topics in the nineteenth century.

Speaking of topics and topic theory in nineteenth-century music, too, is no easy task, for

we can hardly escape from the implication resulted from the “structuralist” perspective which

scholars have employed in analyzing eighteenth-century music.7 Couching their arguments

largely upon the notion of the “signifier” and “signified,” scholars did not realize, by

appropriating Saussure’s terms, the profound consequences of subjecting topics to a

homologous, even apples-to-apples interpretation. They fall prey to a self-contained vantage

point, correlating certain preordained musical characteristics with the already-established ideal

topics, which integrationalists, who beg the question as to whether signs can exist independently

of the perceivers and regard communication as a process, would consider as “non-entity.”8

Monelle attempts to explicate topics with excruciating detail of socio-cultural history and

acknowledges their complexity and changeability, but he could not escape from a top-down

perspective by, for example, focusing on the signified-signifier relationship between the hunting

horns and the noble and ignoble hunts.9 In other words, he delimits the possibility of a

composer’s going beyond such a relationship. Contrary to an integrationalist (perhaps also a

post-structuralist) point of view to which I subscribe, topic theorists like Monelle seem to be

working within a confined structural system in and by which topics are internally defined, only

7 I am using the term “structuralist” to denote a paradigm-specific, signifed-signifer

relationship within a topical system enacted since the eighteenth century.

8 For a more thorough discussion of integrationism (vs. segregationism), see Roy Harris, Signs, Language, and Communication: Integrational and Segregational Approaches (London: Routledge, 1996).

9 Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006), Chapters 3–5.

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to find that such a system is a fixed Procrustean rule. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that

twentieth-century topic analyses consciously bypass nineteenth-century topics, for the topics

then are so individualized that the nineteenth century becomes a period of neutralization where

theorists could hardly find a yardstick against which a topic can be measured in the following

century. In consequence, twentieth-century topic theorists have recourse to eighteenth-century

paradigms.

However, while the eighteenth century is a period for topical establishment, topics in the

nineteenth century are ad hoc creations, that is, a constantly developing discourse, but not an

object that signifies an external object or is signified by any, however temporarily. As Michael

Leslie Klein points out, a topic is an ideal type while musical signs are tokens.10 A topic does not

contain any meaning in itself but is to be construed from a bottom-up perspective. That is to say,

a topic is “created in and by the act of communication.”11

By refining topic theory and analysis in the nineteenth century and examining topics from

a bottom-up perspective, one can witness how composers manipulated topics that in effect

“introversively” spurs the perceivers on forging their own definitions of various topics. It is thus

essential to understanding topics in the nineteenth century, for this would in turn shed new light

on the topical analysis afterwards.

10 Michael Leslie Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), 62.

11 Harris, Signs, Language, and Communication, 7.

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Process of Reification: Topics and Form in the Nineteenth Century

Topical analysis in nineteenth-century music seems to be even more revealing than it is in

the previous century. In the nineteenth century, composers were more aware of using topics as a

compositional tool, conferring on them an authorial voice that is different from that in the

previous century and simultaneously evoking a sense of reminiscence in the listeners. At the

same time, composers took advantage of the fact that listeners at that time were more sensitive to

temporal and topical organization, thus being able to discern and appreciate the deliberate

manipulations of topics and their relationship with form in the music.12 As Eduard Hanslick

argued, “[The truly musical listener’s] attention is so greatly absorbed by the particular form and

character of the composition.”13 It is the play between form and topic that demonstrates this

listening practice.

Sadly, scholars have paid scant attention to such a relationship, perhaps due to the

difficulty in reifying the two obscure concepts. On the one hand, form is considered a “spiritual

principle,” as Carl Dahlhaus posits, that is, an ideology which gives authority to a myriad of

forms such as sonata-allegro, rondo. On the other hand, as Klein observes, topics are ideal

tokens.14 How can topics and form be reified?15 Furthermore, do topics impact form or vice

versa?

12 For a more thorough discussion of Hanslick and nineteenth-century listening, see Mark

Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 104–115.

13 Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics, translated by Gustav Cohen (London: Novello and Company Ltd., 1891,) 124.

14 Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 62.

15 Carl Dahlhaus, “Some Models of Unity in Musical Form,” Journal of Music Theory 19, no. 1 (1975): 4.

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Even though these questions may have led Wye J. Allanbrook to doubt its possibility of

doing so, there are two lines of enquiries as far as topic and form are concerned.16 William

Caplin, whom I call “functionalist,” attempts to relate topic to form by means of formal

functions. Caplin believes that topics themselves are and have to be “form-defining.”17 He

develops a “Universe of Topics,” outlining specific topics and their potential formal relations

that can possibly frame the temporal qualities of beginning, middle, or ending.18 However, he

acknowledges the shortcomings of this generalization and questions the definite linkage between

topic and form.

“Expressionists,” on the other hand, avoid formal schemata such as sonata form, binary

form, and more, focusing more on the expressive trajectory of topics that helps generate an

overarching structure in music. Hatten’s notion of “expressive genre,” for example, can be seen

as an alternative to explaining the indefinite relationship between formal functions and topic. He

defines expressive genres as a “category of musical works based on their implementation of a

change of state schema (tragic-to-triumphant, tragic-to-transcendent) or their organization of

expressive states in terms of an overarching topical field (pastoral, tragic),” offering much

flexibility to individual musical form.19 In the same spirit, Adorno’s “material theory of form”

specifically divides Mahler’s work into four characters, that are, “breaking through,”

16 Wye J. Allanbrook, “Two Threads through the Labyrinth: Topic and Process in the First Movements of K. 332 and K. 333,” in Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, eds. Wye J. Allanbrook and Jenet M. Levy (New York: Pendragon, 1992), 170.

17 Caplin, “On the Relation of Musical Topoi to Formal Function,” Eighteenth Century Music 2, no. 01 (2005): 115.

18 Ibid.

19 Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 290.

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“suspension,” fulfillment,” and “collapse,” through which he put premium on the characteristic

nature of form rather than the preordained, abstract formal functions.20 They may, however, have

downplayed some composers’ adaptation of “traditional” formal structures particularly in

nineteenth-century music when musikalische Formenlehre (theory of musical forms) was then in

its full swing.

In the face of such dichotomy, I propose a reconciliation between the discussion of

formal functions, expressivity, and topical development in nineteenth-century music. I argue that

topic and form are in fact an indispensable symbiosis—topics are the raison d’être that generate

form dynamically, and the attendant formal trajectory would define and make sense of topical

utilization. The way of unfolding topics in an overarching structure becomes a topic sui generis

in the nineteenth century. Caplin notes the inevitability of examining the relationship between

topic and form in his later article: “The appearance of any given topic must ultimately be

integrated into the compositional fabric in ways that conform to the structural goals intended by

the composer.”21 Furthering Caplin’s thought, in the following sections, I will use the first

movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony as an example to illustrate that it is this symbiosis

whereby topic and form are reified as a structural and rhetorical entity.

20 Adorno posits that every category of material form is innately characteristic, and it is the nature of such a characteristic that defines form. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For the discussion of this theory, see Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler and the Symphony of the 19th Century (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014), 79–80.

21 Caplin, “Topics and Formal Functions: The Case of the Lament,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka, 449.

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An “Inverted Sublime”: First Movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony

Stephen Johnson, when discussing the compositional process of the Fourth, posits that the

concept of writing the Fourth Symphony is a symphonic humoresque “turned upside-down” on

Mahler.22 Johnson might be missing the point here, for his comprehension of humor lies merely

in its most surface semantic level, suggesting a comical complexion hovering in mid-air in the

symphony.23 He might have misread Mahler’s Fourth Symphony without contextualizing humor

in Mahler’s vein, just as scholars construe nineteenth-century topics without creating them.

To understand Mahler’s humor, we have to see how German Romantic writer Jean Paul

defines it.24 He believes that while humor is one form of manifestation of romantic poetry,

humor differs from the romantic poetry by virtue of the fact that the former is not sublime, but, to

use Paul’s brilliant term, an “inverted sublime,” (umgekehrte Erhabene) where the essence lies in

the very contrast between finitude and infinitude that in turn creates an infinity without

purposiveness.”25 In other words, to Paul’s mind, humor is a destructive force, a laughter in

which pain and greatness abide.26 Different from Kantian aesthetics, humor is not a sensible

22 Stephen Johnson, Mahler: His Life & Music (Illinois: Sourcebooks MediaFusion,

2007), 82.

23 According to OED, “humor” is “the quality of being amusing, the capacity to elicit laughter or amusement.” “Humour | humor, n.” OED Online. December 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/89416?rskey=bnoKRP&result=1 (accessed January 09, 2016). Johnson might subscribe to this definition of humor.

24 Peter Revers observes that Jean Paul had a profound impact on Mahler’s ideational process, which coincided the initial intention of Mahler’s composing his Fourth Symphony. Peter Revers, “Song and Song-Symphony (I). Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies: Music of Heaven and Earth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. and trans. Jeremy Barham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103.

25 Peter Banki, “Humor as the Inverted Sublime: Jean Paul’s Laughter Within Limitations,” Parrhesia 21 (2014): 58–68.

26 Jean Paul, Werke, 132; Hale, 94.

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pleasure in Mahler, but an infinity of contrast between everyday world and the infinitude.

Humor of Mahler’s ideational process therefore does not “turn upside-down” in his final

composition, as Johnson claims. It is his music.

This furnishes a useful starting point for my topical analysis on the first movement of

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, where “innocence” and “childlike” abound in literature.27 Perhaps,

to my knowledge, the only scholars who have made reference to Jean Paul’s concept of humor

and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony are Jens Malte Fischer and Julian Johnson. They, however, do

not go further to illustrate the concept’s overarching narrativity, nor do they relate it to topics.28

Mahler seems to have regarded humor as a topic itself by abstracting its eighteenth-century

etymology as a celebrated prose often associated with wit to a mordant sense in the nineteenth

century, epitomizing an ironic dialectic between the material and immaterial world that Jean Paul

suggests.29

Topics, Form, and Humor

If we are to create a discourse regarding the triangularity between formal functions,

expressivity, and topical development in the first movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, we

have to begin with the discourse on topical creation from an integrational perspective.

27 See for example, Ryan R. Kangas, “Classical Style, Childhood and Nostalgia in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 8, no. 02 (2011): 219–236; Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 175, 199.

28 See Fischer, Gustav Mahler, translated by Stewart Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 336–337 and Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125–134.

29 Helen Chambers, Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Studies in Prose Fiction 1840-1900 (New York: Camden House, 2007).

9

Let’s get off the ground with the opening topic. Mahler himself claimed such an opening

figure as “the bells of the Fool’s Cap” (Figure 1).30

Figure 1 Fool’s Cap (mm. 1–3)

The topic, being self-sufficient for its internal dialectic, functions as an “inverted sublime” that

partakes of a struggle between nature and non-nature, the finite and the infinite. In fact, it is so

inherently contradictory that it saturates and becomes a neutral presentation of a dialectic world

that Mahler would like to present to the audience, a dialectic that is never heard of in his prior

symphonies.

As Adorno observes, the opening sonority is not so much “artistic” as “functional.”31 I

interpret his claim in two ways. On the one hand, the topic is subject to the customary

presentational function of an introduction in a sonata-allegro form, providing the audience with

an unprecedented world of topical dialectic. On the other hand, it creates the presentational

function due to its unparalleled topical meaning. As such, what Caplin claims with regard to

certain topics and their inherent form-defining property may not be applicable to the present

case, for this is a novel topic that no one has ever created. He addresses the issue that some

topics may be associated with certain formal functions, but he may have discounted the

possibility that in fact, nineteenth-century composers, although bounded by certain relationally

tenacious topics, say, Mannheim rocket, had the freedom to generate new topics with new formal

functions. It is therefore less a prescriptive process than a creative one, and we, as listeners,

30 Herbert Killian, ed., Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner

(Hamburg: K.D. Wagner, 1984), 202; English trans., 182. Cited in Fischer, Gustav Mahler, 334.

31 Adorno, Mahler, 82. Cited in Bonds, After Beethoven, 186.

10

ought to read those topics every time anew. I will illustrate the three appearances of the opening

topic in the movement in relation to form and humor as follows.

When the Fool’s Cap motive first returns in m. 72, we are mired into a formal confusion.

Instead of a false recapitulation, it is an adulterated version of a reprise. Filled with weird topical

juxtapositions, it subverts the clear dialectic that the inception presents. This drives home the

notion of humor. Jean Paul’s humor is in fact a reversal of Mahler’s exposition. The topics

employed, such as dance and military, are clothed in an eighteenth-century fashion. The

movement’s rapt cheerfulness is teeming with nostalgic simplicity. Thus, the beginning is a

verisimilitude that floats on the surface of a crystal clear contrast between the two worlds, but it

is not until this uncanny false recapitulation that one can unveil its veneer. In other words,

Mahler seems to take Jean Paul’s humor one step further by insinuating that humor originates

from sheer happiness at the outset, yet subverting this implication in the false recapitulation.

Understood in such a way, the tension of humor between Jean Paul and Mahler somewhat

resembles a figure-background perceptual dilemma in Gestalt psychology. This anamorphic

perception, however, bestows on the formal function a new layer of epistemological “falsity.”

The opening topic reappears in m. 102 as if the Fool unmasks himself when he rings the

Cap in the development section. But at this very moment, it becomes nothing but a neutral topic,

just as the opening one. It is defined by the subsequent nightmarish phantasmagoria, subverted

topics, and the harmonic vagrancies. At the same time, it inaugurates the development section

with its inner dialectical force camouflaged by a seemingly neuter veil.

Ultimately, its appearance in the recapitulation in m. 298 seems to go into a wrong place

with fragments of dance topics but not the dance in the style of the primary theme in the

exposition. It is not until m. 310 that the music returns to its original clothing, yet the primary

11

theme is then jettisoned. It is a little joke of Mahler: his being the Fool himself, ringing his Cap

and altering the path to which it should have led. Pastoral as the closing theme may seem, it is

less a topical resolution than a tonal one, for the closing theme in the exposition is already in G

major. The composer stretches out the topic, placing the first violins in high registers as if trying

to compensate the previous jest that he made by alluding again to heavenly bliss. It is

nonetheless so perfunctory that it turns itself into sarcasm.

From the above, we could observe that every instance of the recapitulation of the Fool’s

Cap creates formal functions in the sense that they are ambiguous, musically and semantically. It

is a double-edged sword that defines and destroys the customary sections in the symphony.

Laurence Dreyfus has rightly claims that such a motive is in fact “a much larger ideational

process,”32 which can be construed as the interplay between topic, form and humor.

Topics as Narrative Voices

Mahler also takes advantage of employing various topics in a bid to narrate the music’s

voices. Julian Johnson has extensively discussed how Mahler’s pluralistic yet self-conscious

voices express the tension between the composer’s artificiality and authenticity, and how such

voices at once problematize the narration itself.33 I would pursue a different line in examining

how Mahler capitalizes on topics to narrate humor, which is innately annihilating.

32 Laurence Dreyfus, “Allusive Representations: Homoerotics in Wagner’s Tristan,” in

Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 167.

33 See, for example, Julian Johnson, “The Status of the Subject in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” 19-Century Music 18 (1994-5): 108–20; “The Breaking of the Voice,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 8, no. 2 (2011): 179–195; Mahler’s Voices.

12

From the exposition to the development section, we could observe a change in narrative

voice in regard to topical development. Ostensibly, a reverse topical development is at play here.

With hindsight, the topics carefully plotted in the exposition seem to have derived their materials

in this topical reservoir, if not a hodgepodge of uncoordinated topics that makes the section “self-

sufficient,” as Donald Mitchell observes.34 This phantasmagoria, however, is not an end itself but

a process. Unlike the exposition having no topical development but an alternation of the dialectic

worlds, the development section drives the infinite heaven into another infinite Purgatory. It is a

process of revelation, annihilation, and negation; at once, it is a process of recuperation,

retrieving the child from his innocence and foisting a striking reality on the child’s pristine hope

towards life after death. Perhaps it explains why Philip Barford describes the first movement as

“deceptively innocent.”35 The development section is in fact not a reversal of topical

development. The topics are not developed but are unveiled. It is a mere change of the

perspective of narration. There is always one, and only one voice of humor.

Another case in point would be the transition in mm. 32–37 (Figure 2). It is relatively

short, but topically pivotal. Not only does it help the music transit from the primary theme to the

secondary theme, it facilitates a change in the nature of voice. The transition is, as it were, a

“neutral” one. Its Beethovenian military syncopation and Hadynesque dance-like figures are

styleless on purpose: it is not Mahler’s voice, nor is it the Fool’s. It is both historical and

ahistorical—it is just there. Donald Tovey observes, though in a more general sense, “We cannot

say that his music is reminiscent, for our chief objection to it is that no other composer has had

34 Donald Mitchell, “‘Swallowing the Program’: Mahler’s Fourth Symphony,” in The Mahler Companion, ed. Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213.

35 Philip Barford, Mahler Symphonies and Songs (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1970), 33.

13

the effrontery to proceed further with the ideas that give Mahler his simple gestures.”36 Mahler

is a “liberator” of the eighteenth-century topics.37 Thus, the topic here in the transition is more of

a topical neutralization after the topical establishment in the primary theme. It is a mediation

between a third-person voice at the outset and a first-person-Mahlerian voice in the secondary

theme: the cantabile. The topic in transition is in line with both the continuation and destabilizing

function of a normative transition, but it is not concerned with motive or harmony, but with

narrative voices.

Figure 2 Transition as a neuter topic (mm. 32–37)

Source: Vienna: Universal Edition, n.d. [1911]. Plate U.E. 2944.

The end of the movement is the summation of Mahler’s plurality of voices. The coming

of the primary theme in the coda in the recapitulation and its eighteenth-century Beethovenian-

36 Tovey, Symphonies and Other Orchestral Works: Selections from Essays in Musical

Analysis (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2015 [1981]), 381.

37 Ibid.

14

like ending with the military topic is an utter confusion, if not the climax of the composer’s

humor (see Figure 3). Based on its neuter topical status, I would regard it as a tonal closure, but

simultaneously a topical conundrum. Mahler, unlike Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony” to “teese

the geese,” seems to use the neuter eighteenth-century topic to camouflage any real answer as to

the composer’s choice between the finite and infinite world, and this inexactness rightly

accentuates the movement’s humor as an “inverted sublime,” shedding light instead on the

contrast between the polarities. On the one hand, this use of an eighteenth-century topic indicates

an intentional anonymity, a sense of “ahistoricality” and “atemporality” in relation to the

universality of the subject of life after death. On the other hand, Mahler is the one who

manipulates the music on a higher level, perhaps exerting his influence of his own vision into the

subject. Humor may in the end be the pretext, even subterfuge, for the composer’s self-

effacement, vacillation, and a kind of escapism to confront the eschatological subject that had

beleaguered him since birth.

15

Figure 3 Topical conundrum in the end of first movement (mm. 345–349)

Source: Vienna: Universal Edition, n.d. [1911]. Plate U.E. 2944.

16

Form as Topic

In retrospect, the so-called “sonata-allegro” form is but a topic that allows self-mockery.

On the surface, topical development goes hand in hand with the formal function. The first and

second subject groups in the exposition suggest a genuine heavenly life by alluding to blissful

dance topics, but intrusions in the epilogue and the development suggest a life after death

otherwise. The recapitulation is seemingly a resolution of the exposition. The heavenly life is

gaining its upper hand over the material intrusion by gradually assimilating the material topics

into the heavenly one. But the above analysis has demonstrated that, after all, nothing has truly

resolved, nor is there anything “heavenly” at any rate. Those are Mahler’s humor, which portrays

the celestial life as fleeting stars coming by in an eternal darkness. In the end, the form itself is

perhaps a topic to be derided—being a Platonic ideal, just as being so innocent as a child that one

would believe in an eschatological paradise. The movement, after all, is less concerned with the

alignment or misalignment between topic and formal function than the symbiosis between topic

and form that constitutes an overarching, sardonic sense of humor in the music.

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Conclusion: Breathing the Air of Free Will

Arthur Schopenhauer has once made a remark on “form without content,” which he

believes is the “true essence of things”:

All conceivable exertions, excitations, and externalizations of the Will, all of those processes of the human psyche which Reason places under that broad negative concept, Feeling, are expressible in the generality of their form alone, without content; only in accordance with the thing-in-itself, not its appearance; only the innermost spirit, as it were, not the body.38 Nineteenth-century topics share the same ideational process. They are an expression of

form but not content. They are innately a generality. Their spirit does not exist but is to be

discovered in relation to their formal organization. On the one hand, topics may change their

meaning by virtue of their formal functions, and on the other hand, they may in turn influence or

even create formal functions. Thus, it may be apt for James Zychowicz to posit that “narrative,

when it occurs in Mahler’s music, need not be bound to a detailed program, but exists in the play

of musical ideas that may occur within a movement or recur from movement to movement.”39

This challenges the surrogational thought that in Mahler’s music ought to be construed with a

program. My analysis, in essence, creates an overarching program by means of the triangularity

between formal functions, expressivity, and topical development.

The question “where does topic theory stand in relation to nineteenth-century music?” is

after all a non-question. As seen in Mahler’s case, applying topic theory to nineteenth-century

music involves in no small measure the analyst’s own creative process, which takes advantage of

a topic’s innately broad definition. Topics are generated as a new, contextualized discourse in

every piece of music by means of form. In other words, topic theory in the nineteenth century is

38 Adorno, Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 360.

39 Zychowicz, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 32.

18

liberated, embracing the churning out of topics rather than being confined in a descriptive

cocoon. Bruno Walter stated: “[The Fourth Symphony] was indeed a world of his [Mahler’s]

own, probably no one else ever had breathed that air.”40 We can see it as the air of topical free

will, of humanity. After the confinement in the eighteenth century, topic and topic theory in the

nineteenth century are concerned more with how a topic is generated, organized, and perceived

than with an elusive ontological question as to what a topic is.

40 Walter, Gustav Mahler, translated by Walter Lotte Lindt (New York: Knopf, 1966), 50.

Cited in Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies (New Jersey: Amadeus Press, 1997), 114.

19

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.

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