TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF Nietzsche for Mahler and many of his contemporaries, it is crucial to realize that Nietzsche was seen not as just another figure in the history of Western philosophy but rather as someone who personified an endpoint and also the chance for a new beginning. Around 1900 Nietzsche's name was synonymous with a fundamental crisis that indicated the end of Western metaphysics. One did not read Nietzsche; one “experienced” his thought.1 Nietzsche had come to be associated with “the death of God,” a maxim he first put forward in his 1882 book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), the title of which Mahler would borrow for an early version of the program for his Third Symphony. While Nietzsche's thinking was certainly directed against the church as an institution, his atheism was more comprehensive, in that it questioned the validity of any kind of normative claim, be it ethical, aesthetic, or cognitive. Nietzsche was a nihilist who dared to question not only the “truths” of Christianity but also the materialist and positivist foundations of mid-nineteenth-century science and philosophy, along with their ideals of scientific “objectivity.” Many also saw Nietzsche as a rebel against the middle class's morals and lack of ingenuity2 who countered conventional bourgeois moralizing with a new vitalism.

Such radical ideas made Nietzsche into a cult figure for a new generation of artists and intellectuals, among them Siegfried Lipiner and his close friend Gustav Mahler. To understand Nietzsche's significance for Mahler, it is necessary to reconstruct the critical impulses underlying the former's works. But it is also important to realize that criticism represents a starting point for Nietzsche. While a critique of Western metaphysics underlies his philosophy, the fin-de-siècle generation of artists to which Mahler belonged was more interested in those aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy that articulated a new beginning, in his “sweeping visions of cultural and political redemption.” It is part of the paradoxical nature of Nietzsche's thinking that despite all of the criticism they contain, Nietzsche's works are “ideological” in the sense that they intend to prescribe a post-metaphysics way of life. It is important to take these critical and reconstructive impulses in Nietzsche seriously when looking at the texts in Mahler's Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies.