Gustav Mahler’s Ich Bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen as Song and Symphonic Movement: Abduction, Over-Coding, and Catachresis

Abstract

While many have commented upon the manner in which Gustav Mahler quotes both himself and other sources in his music, this stylistic feature of Mahler’s composition has not, to my knowledge, been examined from the perspective of intertextuality. The many intertexts of Mahler’s music include: literary texts of his own creation as well as those by other authors, other musical styles and genres, musical compositions by other composers, and portions of his own oeuvre. Nowhere is Mahler’s musical intertextuality more informative than in the many and varied relationships between his songs and his symphonic compositions. The case of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen as poem, piano-Lied, orchestral song, and the Adagietto movement of his Symphony No. 5 is one such example. This essay will employ a semiotic methodology to examine: (1) the abductive process by which Mahler approached Rückert’s poem, (2) the practice of over-coding by which this poem became a piano-Lied, an orchestral song, and finally a purely instrumental symphonic movement, and (3) the manner in which the Adagietto of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 constitutes a catachresis, or misapplied metaphor, in relation to the text from which it originated.