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Reveille for the Eternal Rest. On Antiwar Music by Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler's creative output was strongly influenced by the soundscape of the Moravian town of Iglau, the seat of a military garrison, where he lived almost from his birth in 1860 until he went to study in Vienna in 1875. There is a well-known anecdote that Mahler, as a four-year-old with an accordion around his neck, was so fascinated by local military music that he chased them along the streets (Bauer-Lechner, 1923). The first opus of the six-year-old Mahler was already a combination of polka and funeral march (Malte Fischer, 2011), the germ of grotesque and dysphoric march types (Grimalt, 2020) with an abundance of martial references that will dominate his mature works. Fascination with the sound of military music did not diminish Mahler's awareness that "soldiering and war are the downfall of humanity" (Hanheide, 2010) ; yesterday's proud and cheerful military musicians can become mere cannon fodder as soon as tomorrow, and Iglau was generously providing cannon fodder to the monarchy before the eyes of the boy composer. Therefore, it is not surprising that Mahler's music, with its hybridity of form, isotopies, irony, grotesque, and significant instrumentation, abounds with embodiments of heroism and anti-heroism, soldiering and desertion, euphoria and dysphoria, empathy and apathy, salvation and condemnation, life and death. A formal, technical, and semiotic analysis of the song Revelge (1899), which can be considered paradigmatic for Mahler's opus, will show that it is a masterful example of anti-war Weltanschauungsmusik (Danuser, 2009).

Gustav Mahler, worldview (Weltanschauung), heroism, anti-heroism

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