Seite - 226 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Sander L. Gilman theater, the presentation of the perverted sensuality, as incorporated in the figure of Salome, is morally repugnant.” 0 The censor objects to the “perversion” of the subject matter, a perversion seen as “Jewish” by readers such as Kraus. The correspondence between Mahler and Strauss shows Mahler’s unalloyed en- thusiasm for the opera and Strauss’s energetic desire to have it produced in Vienna. Mahler clearly thinks of the opera as the major work produced by Strauss up to that time. In his exchange of letters with Strauss he is full of praise for the opera and its libretto. If we look at Mahler’s personal correspondence, other concerns appear. In 1894, prior to his baptism, Mahler writes a long letter to his sister Justine in which he mocks Strauss as the new cultural “pope,” the new Wagner, and understands that “his [Mahler’s] being Jewish is closing all of the doors” to his advancement. This sense that Mahler was less successful than Strauss because of the prejudice of the society against him as a Jew echoes in Mahler’s behavior after his baptism. He would often ask his wife to “stop him when he emphasized his speech with too much gesticu- lation,” a clear sign of his Jewishness. The arch-conservative music critic Rudolf Louis, in 1909, coupled the charge of Mahler’s innate “Jewishness” with a related one : “If Mahler’s music would speak Yiddish, it would be perhaps unintelligible to me. But it is repulsive to me because it speaks with a Jewish accent [jüdeln].” This is to say that it speaks musical German, but with an accent, with an inflection, and above all, with the gestures of an Eastern, all too Eastern Jew. So, even to those whom it does not offend directly, it cannot possibly communicate anything. One does not have to be repelled by Mahler’s artistic personality in order to realize the complete emptiness and vacuity of an art in which the spasm of an impotent mock-Titanism reduces itself to a frank gratification of common seamstress-like sentimentality [an gemeiner Nähmädel- Sentimentalität]. ” Mahler is not only merely a Jew, but his work is “speaks” in Mauschel and is at the same time feminine. It appears to be male and Titanic, but is merely the impotent product for (and of) a seamstress’s sentimentality. For the Fin-de-siècle writer such as Weininger, Jews and women, especially women of the lower class such as seam- stresses, have no aesthetic sensibility. Strauss was quite aware of this ambiguity and played upon it in his setting of Salome. Is it merely accident that one of the clearest 0 Cited in Clemens Hoslinger, “‘Salome’ und Ihr Österreichisches Schicksal 1905 bis 1918“, Österreichi- sche Musikzeitschrift 32 (1977), p. 301. Hena Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler-Richard Strauss : Briefwechsel 1888–1911, Munich 1980, p. 152. Egon Gartenberg, Mahler : The Man and His Music, New York 1978, p. 47. Cited from Nicolas Slonimsky, ed., Lexikon of Musical Invective : Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time, Seattle 1965, p. 121.