Page - 227 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler Imagine the “Jews” markers of this “Oriental” music was Mahler’s use of the solo oboe, exactly the instru- ment that for Strauss became the orchestral voice of the Jews ? Mahler’s nostalgic and sentimental use of that instrumental sonority (understood by his contemporaries as a “typically Jewish” musical tone) is parodied in the harsh and mocking quality of the “Jewish” music in Salome. But there is an even more telling moment in Mahler’s internalization of this im- age of the Jews’ hidden, perverse discourse. Mahler once characterized a journalist in Paris to his wife as being so “perverted” that “Strauss might one day set him to music.” Mahler had internalized the negative associations between Jews and homo- sexuals present in Salome, a work that overshadowed the first performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, produced in the same year. He understood that he remained merely a Jew, with his own “perverted” discourse, while Strauss could capture the essence of this discourse and thus the leadership of the cultural avant-garde through his setting of Salome. This was not merely the reading of the difference between the “insider” and the “outsider” by one acculturated (indeed assimilated) Jew. At least one “Jewish” observer saw in the two composers the “eternal conflict between the successful-blond (Strauss) and the fateful- dark (Mahler).” This dichotomy, made by one of the coaches at the Viennese Court Opera, Thomas Mann’s Jewish brother-in-law, Klaus Pringsheim, points to the internalization (and projection) of Mahler’s sense of difference, a sense of difference, which heightened his need to see Strauss’s Salome performed in his house to show that he was not merely one of those loud, gesticulating Eastern Jews. Rather, he was part of the world of the avant-garde, distanced from the world of the characters, of their perversion, of their contaminated discourse. In Mahler’s case, Strauss’s opera magnificently served its function as a litmus test for an assimilated Jewish identity. Here we have the ultimate musical re-reading of the Viennese stereo- type of the “Jew” so hurtfully projected by Karl Kraus onto his Viennese “Jews,” the authors of the Neue Freie Presse, and perhaps internalized by his “Jewish” readers, such as Gustav Mahler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, Gustav Mahler : Erinnerungen und Briefe, Amsterdam 1940, p. 360. Klaus Pringsheim, “Zur Uraufführung von Mahlers Sechster Symphonie“, Musikblätter des Anbruch 2 (1920), p. 497.