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Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in FindeSiecle Vienna

No-one doubts that Gustav Mahler''s tenure at the Vienna Court Opera from 1897-1907 was made extremely unpleasant by the antisemitic press. The great biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, acknowledges that ''it must be said that antisemitism was a permanent feature of Viennese life''. Unfortunately, the focus on blatant references to Jewishness has obscured the extent to which ''ordinary'' attitudes about Jewish difference were prevalent and pervasive, yet subtle and covert. The context has been lost wherein such coded references to Jewishness would have been immediately recognized and understood. By painstakingly reconstructing ''the language of antisemitism'', Knittel recreates what Mahler''s audiences expected, saw, and heard, given the biases and beliefs of turn-of-the-century Vienna.