Mahler Lecture #11

Jeremy Barham: Mahler and Benevolent Shandyan Humour

The influence of Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne (1713–68) on later traditions of German romantic literature, philosophy, and irony is evident from the encomia of Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Mahler’s enthusiasm for the humour in Sterne’s magnum opus Tristram Shandy (1759–67) also places him in a wider context of musico-literary intersections stretching from Scarlatti, CPE Bach, and Haydn, to Beethoven, Wagner, and Wolf. Sterne’s radical comedic deployment of narrative digression, interruption, Illusionsstörung, and eccentric prose has particularly strong resonance with Mahler’s subversive musical idiolect. Both share a preoccupation with self-referentiality, using convention against itself, and for intrusive gestures that undermine hermetic systems. Examples demonstrate Mahler’s manipulation of material in Sterne-like musical puns, comic incongruities, and narrative games.

Jeremy Barham is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, UK, where he is also Director of the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research. He is editor of, and contributor to, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, Rethinking Mahler, and the Nineteenth-Century Music Review journal issue ‘Mahler: Centenary Commentaries on Musical Meaning’. His most recent publications include the guest-edited issue of 19th-Century Music ‘Mahler, Sex, and Gender’, and The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era (both 2024). He is currently working on a volume of translated Russian scholarship on Mahler, and a journal issue for Music, Sound, and the Moving Image on the use of Mahler’s music in film prior to Visconti’s Death in Venice.