In the early 1890s Mahler’s attempts to interest the German music publisher, B. Schott’s Söhne, in his large-scale works proved fruitless and the owner, Dr Ludwig Strecker, was content to publish a collection of songs, the 14 Lieder und Gesänge. Even for a major firm, with ample opportunity to use income from popular works to cross-subsidize more costly and risky ventures, the publication of new, innovative symphonies was unattractive. For Mahler one temporary solution emerged unexpectedly thanks to two Hamburg patrons who funded both the performance and publication of his Second Symphony.

However, this was hardly a satisfactory arrangement, as no orchestral parts were printed, and it was only thanks to the intervention of an old friend, Guido Adler, that Mahler finally saw his first four symphonies, Das klagende Lied and the Wunderhorn songs, published in practical and performable editions. The firm that undertook this large-scale project was not primarily a music publisher at all, but a printing company, the Erste Wiener Zeitungs Gesellschaft, and until recently the details of its agreement with Mahler were unknown. With the discovery in 2014 of a manuscript draft of the firm’s contract with Mahler this important step in the dissemination of Mahler’s music can be better understood.

The article presents a transcription and translation of the draft contract, and a commentary, drawing on other published and unpublished primary sources, that seeks to set the document in the wider contexts of the history of music publishing in Vienna and of the Erste Wiener Zeitungs Gesellschaft in particular, Austrian copyright legislation, and the publication of Mahler’s music.

This article offers a solution to a long-standing mystery surrounding the identity of a melody by Carinthian folkloric composer Thomas Koschat used by Mahler in his Fifth Symphony. It first places such musical reference in the broader scholarly context of Mahler and the volkstümlich. Evidence surrounding the chronology and sketches of the symphony as well as Mahler’s intersection with Koschat and the latter’s reception is assessed. Musical materials are analysed in order to identify the source of borrowing in Koschat’s Liederspiel Am Wörther See (1880), and to understand the key structural and expressive roles it plays in Mahler’s work. The article concludes by reflecting on the possible socio-cultural meaning and significance of this case of Mahlerian allusive practice.

A number of Mahler’s symphonies contain climactic accumulations and releases of musical-expressive energy that overspill conventional boundaries between the aesthetic and the sensational, the spiritual and the physical, high art and the popular. These might be said to define something of the ‘problem’ that his music represented for many of his contemporaries. They are still infrequently confronted in terms of their elaborately staged excess, as if mocking the metaphorical language of harmonically contrived ‘tension and resolution’ by revealing, in spite of conventional mockery of ‘programmaticism’, what such notionally formal or ‘theoretical’ language always implies. Even Lawrence Dreyfus’s recent exploration of the ‘erotic impulse’ in Wagner’s music was to some degree hedged by symptomatic analysis of Wagner’s supposed ‘decadence’, although it valuably opened up the field and offered insight into key features of post-Wagnerian, late-romantic music. Mahler himself, in a famous letter to Gisela Tolnay-Witt, situated these in the specific, socio-cultural characteristics of symphonic music in an era of mass consumption by ever larger numbers of people in ever larger spaces. The history and changing implications of these climactic moments in Mahler’s symphonies will be sketched here with reference to their often explicitly transgressive implications.

The present study has been prepared on the occasion of the publication of the New Anton Bruckner Collected Works Edition’s first volume, Thomas Röder’s score of the Linz version of the First Symphony. The article re-evaluates a fundamental precept of the old Gesamtausgabe of Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak – the supremacy of the readings in Bruckner’s autograph manuscripts over those in his first prints. It begins with a brief history of the “Bruckner-Streit” of the 1930s and 40s and a summary of more recent challenges to the Haas-Nowak policy. An overview of the composer’s relationship with the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk, who were responsible for the production of many of his early editions, demonstrates that they worked closely with him at first, but began to make alterations without consulting him towards the end of the 1880s. Distinguishing Bruckner from his editors in the Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies is difficult, if not impossible. From an editorial perspective, it is pointless because, in these scores, the composer accepted their suggestions and made them his own. Later publications are a different matter. The discussion leads inevitably to a re-examination of a clause in Bruckner’s will which exercised a controlling influence over the old Gesamtausgabe and remains a seminal factor in any editorial considerations regarding Bruckner. The article demonstrates that the composer never intended his will to have a bearing on post-mortem editorial issues or to dictate the hierarchy of versions of his pieces.

History has often viewed Brahms as a Janus-faced composer who turned his gaze backward to contemplate the accumulated riches of music history even as he sought late in his career to exploit new means of musical expression. On the one hand, he habitually collected passages from a long line of composers that breached the traditional prohibition against parallel fifths and octaves; he exchanged ideas with musicologists such as Nottebohm, Mandyczewski and Adler, and read early issues of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft; and he indulged from time to time in a distinctive musical historicism. But on the other hand, his music was embraced for showing a way forward for a number of next-generation composers who would contend with twentieth-century modernism, most notably of course Schoenberg, in his essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, but also Anton von Webern, whose transitional Passacaglia op. 1 was unthinkable without the precedent of Brahms’s op. 90, and whose aphoristic miniatures betrayed the concentrated expression and opening up of register in Brahms’s late Klavierstücke.

This essay considers one still relatively little-explored facet of Brahms’s historical gaze – his use of modes in his later music, and their potential for creating alternative means of musical organization that challenged, and yet were somehow compatible with, tonality. Examples considered include the first movement of the Clarinet Trio op. 114 and slow movement of the String Quintet no. 2 op. 111. Unlike Brahms’s earlier compositions that treat modes as signifiers of a style of folk music or simulated folk music, the later instrumental works seem to juxtapose principles of modal organization within the context of tonal compositions. Thus, in the first movement of the Clarinet Trio, eerie passages in fauxbourdon impress as allusions to a distant, archaic musical other, as if Brahms the historian were searching for the distant roots of his musical aesthetic.