Mahler Re-Composed

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Detailed Chapter Outline and Synopsis...........................ixIntroduction. The Case for Mahler the Czech.....................xxviiChapter One Mahler Sick and Lovesick...........................1Chapter Two Tell Me the Story..................................66Chapter Three Too Jewish.......................................137Chapter Four Strauss...........................................209Chapter Five Tell Me the Story.................................283Chapter Six Curriculum Vitae...................................364Conclusion......................................................447Bibliography....................................................459

Chapter One

Death

This is a story about the sicknesses and loves of a man generally well and vital throughout his life, a man of just one mature love, and that only in his last years. He had sicknesses and infatuations as everyone does, and I want to write about them and about his death as well, since its image pursued Gustav Mahler as relentlessly as did hemorrhoids and migraines. Death was a lifelong companion, indeed a visitation from before the cradle for Mahler, who discovered as a small child that he wasn't Bernhard and Marie Mahlers' firstborn after all, but that an older infant, brother Isidor, had died in an accident. Half of Marie Mahler's fourteen children did not survive infancy, and all of those who died very young were her sons. Ernst, a year younger than Gustav, died in adolescence, his adoring older brother's phantasmal fairy tales echoing in his ears during the last lingering weeks of his illness. Many years later the mature composer Gustav Mahler came upon a rambling volume of poems by Friedrich Rückert dedicated to the memory of his dead son, Ernst; the name worked magic on the superstitious genius, who could not put down the volume until he had conceived the idea of Kindertotenlieder, or "Dead Children Songs"; it was to become a seminal work. Out of death, new life. Of eleven sons of Marie and Bernhard Mahler, all died early save Gustav and Otto, who shot himself at twenty-one at a time when Gustav was beginning his drive to the Directorship of the Vienna Court Opera; there was a third who survived to live longer than Gustav, Alois, a dreamer and a Baron Münchhausen-style pathological liar, who died a baker in Chicago, representing Heller Candies of Vienna. Three sisters survived to adulthood, one of them his beloved Justine. This was Gustav's life-long companion and confidante until his unexpected marriage in 1902, when she was banished by Alma Schindler Mahler, the long-awaited love of his life, who immediately seized the Kommando in his house.

Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, "Songs for Dead Children", mentioned immediately above, were written before the last and most painful child death, that of his daughter Maria Anna in 1907 at not quite five years of age, his daughter, Alma used to say, with the same flashing dark eyes and flowing hair, with her father's capricious moods and passions and an unspoken closeness to her father. She used to visit him in his study on early winter mornings in Vienna as he wrote out and corrected the full scores of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies before going to work at the Opera, and she visited him in his Komponierhäusl ('little composing house') in the summers. This was a freestanding structure high above the house and deep in the woods, somewhat resembling a crypt. Mahler built three of them at three summer residences in Austria, with entrance strictly forbidden to all but Putzi, as they called her, relatives, salesmen, housekeepers, all forbidden but the little girl, who in her brief life came to know only Häusl number two, the one near his villa on the Wörthersee in Carinthia. After long whispered sessions with her father she would emerge smeared with marmalade and sticky with crumbs — her father loved good marmalade and good butter — and what had been said between the two was their secret.

The loss of this child to diphtheria and scarlet fever, or probably simply to scarlet fever and croup, drove him to distraction with grief if not to emotional collapse or to madness, even when this, the second hammer-blow of fate that he had predicted for himself in the Sixth Symphony, was followed by a third. Madness, or dementia, did claim friends and fellow musicians Rott, Wolf, Krisper and Heinrich Krzyzanowski, as well as Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a female companion with whom Mahler had no romantic attachment, and who died in grief, poverty and loneliness ten years after her beloved musical genius. That an alarmingly high percentage of very close companions fell victim to insanity did not escape Mahler's notice; as a young man he vowed to maintain clarity of mind while not forsaking his dreams, and by and large, despite terrible overwork and a late marriage to a difficult, younger woman, he was successful in this. We read in the sketches and scores for the incomplete Tenth Symphony interpolations addressed to Alma betraying such pain and anguish that we should judge him on the verge of breakdown or of madness, if the musical score containing them were not of such uncompromising creative logic and fecundity. Death and funeral marches, as though they were the celebrities of his private stage, made obligatory appearances in all of his works. In Mahler's life people tended to die in family groups, as in 1889, when both parents and a sister died and Mahler managed to miss all three funerals, ceremonies he feared, loathed and contrived to avoid at any cost. Death was the unwitting organizing principle of his life. In 1894 the passing of a brilliant conductor who disliked Mahler's compositions gave Gustav the afflatus for the long-stalled Second Symphony — to be called the Resurrection — at the late age of thirty-four (only sixteen years to go, I need to rush, he told himself).

The Ninth Symphony, written less than two years before his death, and which in the days of his symphonic programs might have been entitled What Death Tells Me, struck his admirer Arnold Schönberg as a dreamlike work with a concealed author using Mahler, the ostensible composer, merely as a mouthpiece. Was this concealed author 'death'? He hated funerals, as I have said, and specified that no music or speech be heard at his own, and that his monument bear no text other than "Gustav Mahler"; he did direct that his remains be laid with those of the daughter whose loss he bore so grievously. The Freudians were not slow to point out that that this request is ('represents,' 'symbolizes') a return to rest in the female, the Mater Gloriosa in his little daughter's form. He had so often spoken of the female as a 'haven', and in the Dead Children Songs there is a...