| This dissertation explores how Arnold Schoenberg's engagement with the music of Gustav Mahler may have left traces of influence on his own music, and how an understanding of recognizably "Mahlerian" elements and their derivation from Romantic aesthetics might provide a guide to stylistic continuity in Schoenberg's post-tonal compositions. That Mahler aided and was idolized by Schoenberg and his circle is a commonplace in the epistemology of both composers. Schoenberg's writings abound with pregnant but opaque references to Mahler, for whom he advocated in print and through performances. His interest is striking because it registered before the elder composer was widely esteemed, outstripped his concern for other composers of Mahler's generation, and was sustained to the end of his life. I believe that hesitancy of previous scholars to interpret Schoenberg's interest as a sign of substantive musical influence stems from methodological barriers to tracing continuity between tonal and atonal music, and a superficial understanding of how such influence might manifest itself.;I begin with the most thorough "biography" to date of Schoenberg's engagement with Mahler, maximizing the circumstantial context for influence by linking his evolving reactions to Mahler's music, their personal relationship, and the "Mahler idea" developed in statements by Schoenberg and other members of his circle. I then trace three areas where Schoenberg's own post-1908 music may reflect identifiably "Mahlerian" practices, which I define in an evolving historical context: in developing variation, where Mahler's music mediates between the Romantic organicist tradition and Schoenberg's particular view of Motivenlehre; in orchestration, where Schoenberg adopted an ideal of transparency and heterogeneity developed by Mahler in contrast to the practice of Richard Strauss; and in harmony, where Mahler and Schoenberg experimented with quartal harmony in works composed in close succession. These three angles of continuity between the composers are used to analyze passages in works by Mahler that reflect Schoenberg's analytical priorities, including the Seventh Symphony, Ninth Symphony, and Das Lied von der Erde, and in works by Schoenberg where stylistic markers or resonances of Mahler are most audible, including the Chamber Symphony, op.9, Five Pieces for Orchestra, op.16, and Serenade, Op.24. |
