Formalising Star Clusters: Sonata Process and Breakthrough Function in the Adagio of Mahler's Tenth Symphony

Abstract

This article revisits the long‐standing issue of form in the Adagio of Mahler's Tenth Symphony (1910) in light of recent developments in Formenlehre and neo‐Riemannian theory. I consider the movement's sonata properties, as discerned by Kofi Agawu (1986) and Richard Kaplan (2005), by exploring the applicability of William E. Caplin's form‐functional theory (1998) and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Sonata Theory (2006) in a post‐Wagnerian tonal environment, construed in terms of Richard Cohn's hexatonic systems (1999) and Julian Horton's model of orbital tonality (2018b). While the argument posits a hexatonically orientated conception of form based on what I theorise as hexatonic tension, special attention is given to the idea of breakthrough as an analytical and hermeneutic point of reorientation: conceived after Janet Schmalfeldt's concept of becoming (2011), the breakthrough initiates a retrospective reinterpretation of the Adagio's tonal universe and consequently turns its form into a diatonically orientated sonata form. The article thus explicates the formal function of breakthrough based on Adorno's aesthetic formulation, propounding a chromatically inflected model of sonata form in response to Seth Monahan's call for a novel framework for Mahler's late works (2011). Together they constitute a foundation of a theory of fin‐de‐siècle modernist symphonic sonata form.