Justine Mahler’s Faust Notebook

This chapter examines a little-known item called ‘Justine Mahler’s Faust Notebook’ located in the Mahler-Rosé Room at the University of Western Ontario. This document, entirely in Justine’s hand, is a commentary on only the second part of Goethe’s Faust. There is persuasive evidence that the notebook is a copy of Siegfried Lipiner’s observations about Faust that were recorded by Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the early to mid-1880s. The most interesting entry in Justine’s Faust Notebook is the interpretation of ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche,’ which is remarkably similar to the commentary Mahler wrote to his wife Alma in a well-known letter from the summer of 1909, which has played a large role in interpretive discussions of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Mahler’s interpretation of Faust may well date back as far as the mid-1870s, to his earliest encounters with Lipiner in the Pernerstorfer circle.