ABSTRACT
For various reasons, Mahler’s symphonies added levels of sophistication and confusion to the late nineteenth-century aesthetic debate centring on supposedly well-defined categories of ‘programme’ and ‘absolute’ music. The close intermingling of song and instrumental music in actual or virtual vocal symphonic movements 2 the provision and withdrawal of verbal explanations and titles, the proximity to Strauss and the generic dallying with tone poem, the spiritual and technical allegiance to Wagner, the pregnant borrowings of – or allusions to – other musics including those of popular/folk origins, and most of all the extreme deformation of nevertheless strongly evoked, inherited structural paradigms through the gestural force of momentary rupture or prolonged extensions, all contributed to his music’s challenge to the socio-cultural propriety of ‘high-art’-music performance and consumption in the concert halls of bourgeois Europe.
