The Status of the Subject in Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Abstract

A discussion of Mahler's music in terms of its articulation of a musical subject risks some obvious dangers. Not least, it risks sliding into the very ideology of which it seeks to provide a critique. Even the coincidence of the two words Mahler and subjectivity suggests a clich6 of popular aesthetics that constitutes the antithesis of this paper. Such clich6s have their origins, in part, in the programmatic panderings of nineteenth-century composers themselves. The blame, however, lies not so much with the composers as with the dominant mode of reception. Put simply, for an age in which the uniqueness of the individual subject is a central principle in aesthetics as much as politics, music is necessarily heard as addressed both to and from the individual. On this level, I suggest, our own age differs little from the nine-

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