Mahler and the Myth of the Total Symphony

French film critic Bazin takes the ‘myth of total cinema’ to reveal a picture of its real history and sketches phases of a dialectical history based on it. Bazin’s conceptual framework gives rise to a fruitful metaphorical world. This essay uses Bazin’s ‘total cinema’ as a productive analogy through which to understand Mahler’s well-known comment: ‘The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ With Bazin’s framework in mind, Mahler’s statement seems to express a will to the total symphony. By analogy, I ask what in Mahler’s art might correspond to the long take and deep-focus photography. I use this Bazinian ‘cinematic’ focus to reconsider crucial moments of the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, most notably the purported ‘sketch’ of Alma in the second subject, which I argue contains a complex set of mirror-like reflections that complicates any attempt to assimilate the Sixth to the plot of a ‘terrifying Symphony Domestica’.