UCLA

In the twenty-first century, knowledge of Gustav Mahler’s work as a conductor is largely limited to his work in the German romantic repertory, with particular affinities for the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Wagner, alongside his advocacy of his own music. But a closer look reveals that Mahler’s musical curiosity—both in the opera house and the concert hall—extended quite far beyond nineteenth-century German music. In this dissertation, I will spotlight the Bach Suite Mahler edited and assembled as a piece of music in its own right, and will discuss it as a symbol for Mahler’s complicated relationship with music of the past and with his own identity as expressed in his famous quotation “Ich bin dreifach heimatlos: als B�hme unter den �sterreichern, als �sterreicher unter den Deutschen und als Jude in der ganzen Welt.” (I am three times homeless: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew in the entire world.)The focus of this dissertation will be fourfold: a survey of available literature about the Suite; a discussion of the implications of musical appropriation and the cultural circumstances surrounding Mahler’s decision to assemble his own Suite rather than perform one of the existing Bach Orchestral Suites; some thoughts about the implications of performing such a Romantically-inflected edition of the music of Bach in an age of historically-informed performance; and some practical considerations for rehearsing and performing the suite as keyboardist and conductor, as I did with UCLA Philharmonia in the spring of 2019. (Video of the performance accompanies this dissertation in ProQuest and the University of California’s repository, eScholarship. It may also be accessed directly via the following link: https://vimeo.com/337853300/519b69cf76.)