MESSAGES BEYOND THE SCORE, OR ENCODED MEANINGS IN MAHLER’S SYMPHONIES 1 ECATERINA BANCIU 2 Motto: Mahler: „The more music develops, the more complicated the apparatus becomes to express the composer's ideas.” 3 SUMMARY. Could it be that the deliberately chosen solitude in the three Komponierhäuschen during the creative summers would isolate and, at the same time, free the composer from the music he had conducted during the seasons? Or, maybe just like the haunted castles, his symphonies will hide in their labyrinth forsaken musical personalities, leaving in the themes, sometimes just transfigured fragments, the evidence of the composer’s admiration and devotion for the broken destinies. For those who will discover the overwhelming force of his music only decades later, Mahler will be the revelation of perfection in his multiple and varied roles and original masks, as well as through the surprises generated by the meeting of themes he liked – the great and departed. The present study began from the impact of Mahler’s music, as he himself would have liked it; it is well known the fact that he refuted more than once the initial program of his symphonies and the deciphering of his anthropomorphic enigmas creates just as many connections between the pre-sign – research of triggering biographical or socio- political events, act-sign – the specific of communication and post-sign – their hermeneutic and historical interpretation. Keywords: Mahler, symphonies, symbol quotations. Mahler is considered to be one of the greatest symphonic composers prior to the First World War, followed by Sibelius, Elgar and many others. Nowadays, Mahler’s symphonies, together with those of Shostakovich, are analyzed most often, after Beethoven’s. Ma hler was criticized for his “frequent quotations”, his “triviality” (Henry -Louis de la Grange) but also for the “decomposing” (Adorno); some assertions of that time were caused by insufficient understanding of the symphonies, as well as by prejudice. Let us remember that nobody accused Mozart of vulgarity when he mocked composition blunders in Dorfmusikanten (A Musical Joke), K.522, or when he overlapped the aristocratic minuet with the bourgeois contradanza and the rustic Teitsch in Don Giovanni. Contemporary composers as well as those following him will often use quotations in his manner: Enescu includes a quotation from the second Mahler symphony in the end of Symphony no. 1, Shostakovich quotes the theme in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred in Symphony no. 8 (part III and IV), as well as the theme in Rossini’s Wilhelm Tell overture in his last symphony. Bartók uses, in Concerto, themes from J. Strauss, while Toduță quotes Schubert with the main 1 Paper presented at the Fourteenth Congress on Musical Signification of 11-15 May 2018, the “Gheorghe Dima” Academy of Music, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. 2 Ph.D. Professor, Theoretic Faculty, Musicology Department, „Gheorghe Dima” Music Academy, 25 Ion I.C. Brătianu Street, Cluj-Napoca. E-mail: kati_banciu@yahoo.com 3 Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler, The Symphonies, Amadeus Press, 1993, p.15.