Mahler's time came (to resort to the most pious article of the Mahlerian's faith) at the point when scholarship in general was prepared to take Karl Kraus's vision of the Viennese apocalypse seriously. Biography and interdisciplinary studies found in Mahler's music, and the traditions of explaining it, a readily understandable method of working which combined motivic analysis and a seductively verbalized 'content'. This method bequeathed to Mahler studies a curiously particular character at a time when music analysis was coming increasingly under the influence of American-based theoretical systems. A tentative reaction inevitably took place, largely in analysis journals rather than in sustained expositions of the systems themselves; it is idle to look for references to Mahler in the pedagogical