IN EXPLAINING HIS Eighth Symphony to contemporaries, Gustav Mahler called it a “gift to the entire nation” (Geschenk an die ganze Nation). He thereby helped create a genealogy for the work that would have occurred to few people on the basis of the music alone, and simultaneously provoked a number of questions. Mahler refers to a tradition of composing works for national occasions, but does he identify with that tradition or distance himself from it? Characterizing the Eighth as a “gift” to the “nation” does not necessarily mean that Mahler intended it to be a piece of national music. But he certainly wanted to write music that engaged critically with the tradition of composing for national occasions.

One legacy of Mahler's membership in the Pernerstorfer Circle (discussed in the introduction to this study) was his interest in the political dimension of German culture rather than in Austrian particularism — although, like other former members, by 1906 he had long distanced himself from the circle's nationalist and conservative political ambitions. In the following I examine the debates about the national function of culture in Germany and Austria around the turn of the century, and in particular the role that Goethe and his works played in this debate. There was of course a powerful musical tradition of composing works for national occasions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to referencing this tradition in musical history, though, Mahler's comment on the Eighth Symphony also evokes a literary paradigm. Throughout the nineteenth century, Goethe and Schiller were the focal points in a prolific discourse on the national functions of German literature. The last three decades of that century in particular were marked by a lively debate that conceived of Goethe's Faust as a “national” text — a debate in which Wagner and Nietzsche happened to be key figures. While Mahler's literary and philosophical interests were firmly rooted in his student days in the 1870s, I want to show that in his critical reading of German cultural history, he ultimately takes a stance against the nationalist and conservative functionalization of art so characteristic of the cultural climate during his student days in general and the Pernerstorfer Circle in particular, a mobilization of art that by 1900 had gained a clear anti-Semitic dimension.